The Circular Economy: Society's last chance? - Mark Esposito, at USI

Good morning. I hope you had at least a short coffee break, enough for you to rejoin this room, and thank you for choosing to be in this session. So today the The conversation is really about what is the circular economy. This conversation might be redundant for many of us, mainly because the circular economy has been around forever. In the ancient time, people did not really have access to resources, were finding a way to be ingenious and transferring what used to be something that we don't use anymore back into the productive cycle. But over time, we have got a little bit pampered and sugarcoated by the principle that we can basically extract. Use it and dispose. And this principle has been somehow bringing us to the current crisis of resources, which is something that we will talk about today. But the question starts on how did I get myself into this? So I'll start with a true story. About 1 year ago this time, if you had asked me, "What is a circular economy?" I would have given you an academic answer, which means an answer with really very little meaning but a lot of really cosmetic sentences. And that's because I had heard about this before, but I had never really understood what circular economy was all about. So in July 2015, a group of people from Vice President Katainen, which is the former Prime Minister of Finland and now is appointed Vice President of European Commission for Industry, Job Growth and Competitiveness, came to Harvard and visited me and my class. During that conversation, they were interested in working with me in the circular economy project. Why me? The story is very simple. The year before, I was working with Martin Schulz, who is the current president of the European Parliament. I had advised the Schulz presidency on the financial crisis, so I had a history of working with European institutions. And therefore I thought, here it is, here's another European politician coming to my class, it looks good. I will do some tweets about this, and maybe I'll be able to extract some value, which could be research, maybe being able to go to Brussels, visit, maybe meet interesting people. But the story was much deeper. My destiny was about to be changed forever. I started to study the circular economy, and the more I was studying the circular economy, the more I realized this was more than just a trend. It was something that was really a low-hanging fruit in something we consider to be an important moment in our history and how we're transitioning from an economy in which consumption is mainly derived from the extraction of resources and, of course, the disposal of resources, to something that maybe will have the chance to really regenerate our economy. The story starts with how I came across the circular economy, and it was matching part of the work I was doing. Right before I come into the event here in Paris, I was doing a TED Talk. On the DRIVE, which is a framework that I have developed with another colleague of mine. And in this framework, what we do, we try to really look at the future trends. So it is true that we cannot forecast the future. Whoever tells you that we can forecast the future might have an interest in selling that expertise for a short period of time. The reality is that nobody can really tell what the future looks like. I have never met anybody that really told me 100% what the future looks like, and that was really unfolding. I met very lucky people who told me what the future looks like, and they were actually lucky because it happened, but I don't find there is a scientific reason between what they forecast and what happens. But what we can definitely see is whether we have trends that are currently happening— so it's really the study of the todays— that might potentially have a trajectory into the future. And that is a different story. We can think that trajectory of the future are safe assumptions to make, especially when we're talking about megatrends. And when we're talking about megatrends, we're really thinking about what is currently happening that is potentially going to forecast linear progression, and that's what we can possibly forecast, that won't necessarily be disrupted by the technology, social drivers, or any of the things that you might have heard also yesterday when some of these very good advanced speakers were talking about what future is expecting us. Ahead of us. So Drive tries to figure out in which way these 5 possible megatrends are intertwining and they're creating access to what we consider to be a possible junction in which we are trying to figure out what will possibly happen if the trends continue the current, the current model. Now bear in mind, Drive is not meant to forecast the future. Drive is meant to correct the the present, to make sure that we're not getting to a point in which what we think is a safe assumption of the trajectory will actually happen. And if you see at this very easy model, DRIVE is simply an acronym, is a verb. It's actually a verb that defines some degree of action forward. It's really thinking about 5 major chains of ideas that are really intertwined. Demographics, how we are, a world made of people, is something that is inevitable so far. Thanks God. And how this population is really moving. Resources— how do we give access to these people when we are thinking about development and how we're matching our economic growth with their demographic changes? Inequality— you might have heard it a number of different ways. We are at a historical high in terms of the gap. The previous speaker, Professor Cohen, was talking about this inverted bell curve in which we are really thinking about the people at the bottom of that being to some extent excluded. And this is to some extent showing the polarization. So this is very true in a number of different fields. Inequality is growing. And then the speed in which we're currently experiencing, which is actually a digital revolution, the smart connected products, the internet of everything, the internet of things, or how you want to call it, is really thinking about this ongoing acceleration that is bypassing, outgrowing, outperforming outliving economic models. As an economist, I see myself— most of the things I've learned in school are becoming obsolete if I change the variable of speed. And in fact, one of the things that makes economic model possible is the fact that you can exclude the variables, study the variable, eventually exclude the outliers, define a norm, defining what is going to happen, define a frequency, and then put that frequency to work. So that you can have a pattern that you can study over time. But if the number of variables are changing to the point in which they're becoming hypothetical infinite, how do we model? How do we create sort of like an algorithm that will allow us to really forecast the future? So we are looking more and more at the end of forecasting through economic modeling in the way in which NPV, portfolio theory, are becoming great historical contributions that are going to be just in book of history, no longer applied in the way organizations or financial entities are going to define their risk. And finally, with this entire shift towards this progression, this linear progression towards these trends, a number of companies are getting on board in a way which we have never imagined before. It's really what we consider to be the business model of today, coming from a country that are not necessarily known for innovation. India, with the jugaad innovation, is showing the world that we can do everything with very little. In France, you call it "l'économie du peu." It's really thinking about, we don't need a large amount of capital, land, or people to create value. We do what we can with what we have, and by the way, it's a great product. Or China, that used to be blamed for copying our technology, Over time, they have improved the technology, and now they're coming into the world with products that are unique to the point in which we are looking at this product with envy. Can we ever have something like Alibaba in our system? It's a question that I've been hearing a lot of time when e-commerce in the West is important, but it's not so radically disruptive like it happened in China. So what I'm trying to say is that over a period of time, despite trends, were helping me to define the current trends, their linear progression, and how do I engage the conversation into changing the trends so we're not getting stuck. And that's the story behind Drive. I was studying Drive, and we were really talking about Drive as this hypothetical framework. And I started with the D of Drive. It's how we're changing. Our demographic is, of course, changing. The way we are is changing. Our life expectancy is also changing. Just to give an example, all it takes is access to clean water and primary healthcare, and life expectancy grows by 20 years. And the good news is that in the last 30 to 40 years, we really achieved to eradicate a lot of the mortality that happened because people had no access to water. Or no access to healthcare. So we have to say that the world has become, from a demographic perspective, much more converging than before. It's the first time in history, from the data we have, that no matter if you are in France, in Japan, or in Mali, we will experience aging. Now, in Japan, aging will go from 49 to 52 years, median. So, of course, it's an entirely different story than in Mali, where we're going to go from 15 years medium to maybe 16. But while the disparity is clear and while we have to understand that the lack of homogeneity is going to create issues, at the same time, we have to recognize that for the first time in history, we're hitting a plateau. We're getting to the point in which population is aging across the globe. So how do we change as population changes? Well, your pension system, my pension system, is defined on what is the life expectancy. In the United States, we used to call Social Security something that happened when the median age was 63. Now the life expectancy in America went close to 80 years old. Everywhere in the world, we have really improved our access to healthcare. And so have we really adjusted our model, our economic system, our social system and infrastructure to the fact that we now live longer, with the consequences that this brings? But the other issue, since you have been exposed to so many economists that have been talking about growth, is how do we become more productive when we work less? Well, the answer is we have to figure out a way for productivity not to be attached or coupled to incremental work. In other words, I don't need to work more for creating more. I have to find a way to live longer, work less because I get into school and I graduate until 25, 26, 27, I don't really have the 18-year-old entrance as I used to have 40, 50 years ago, and at the same time be able to support the welfare system. These are daunting questions that we need to ask ourselves because we're changing, because our entire infrastructure of the world, if we're thinking about the wiring, people, is changing. And at the same time, this is really showing you how across the scope No matter if you are an emerging economy or if you are an emerged economy, we are becoming older. The question is, how will we deal with access now that everybody is living a little bit longer? And yes, population growth continues to be a normal constant. We have forecasts coming from the institutional— international institutions that talk about growth up to 9 billion people. We should trust them. It makes sense for us to trust that we'll go from 7 to 9. The question will be, how will we manage our resources when we're going to be more than what we have ever been? The question is not provocative. I'm not trying to tell you we should be less. The question is that we are struggling a little bit with our current model because we used to have abundance. If we didn't have, we had smart ways to go into countries that were emerging, extract those value, bring it back into their economy, into our economy, adding the value through our processes that were more sophisticated. One example, a company called Lipton would go to Congo, would take leaves from tea, we bring the leaf back to the UK, they will become tea Lipton, and they will sell them back to Congo for a commercial price. That's our model. That's how we have colonized the disparity between rich and poor, was really the fact that the poor have abundance of resources. We have the ability to extract the resources better than anybody else. We bring them back, we create in value, and then we can have a healthy middle class that has ambition to buy a house, own a car, and send kids over to a summer program to learn English. That was kind of the model we have. Nothing wrong with this. I am a product of that generation. The question is, can we continue with the same model? You have the answer already by the way I ask you the question. We can't. Simply because the model is based on the assumption that this extraction is forever. And as we argue that growth cannot be forever, extraction cannot be forever, especially when we're talking about the finite planet. But at the same time, we're getting closer to each other. We're moving into cities. Urbanization ratios in the world is really rising. Let me give you some numbers so that you— it can help you contextualize. We go from what we consider to be a ratio of 80 to 85% in the Western economies to a ratio of 50% in China, 40% in Nigeria, and 30% in India. So while the rich countries are already living in cities for 85% of the time, The most populous countries on Earth, mainly China, India, and soon Nigeria, that is expected to become between the 3rd or 4th most populous country on the planet, they still have ratio of urbanization that is not really so high. And guess what's happening? These countries are urbanizing. These countries are moving into cities. People are understanding that countryside is not offering the same opportunity. We kind of thought that farming is not attractive anymore, So if you are into the farming community, you want to move away from the farming, the question will be who will do the job afterward, but that's a different conversation. And we're getting into city. Cities have historically been this meeting point of this different culture in which the convergence, the proximity, the convexity allows all of this conversation to happen. We are much more productive in a city than if we are in the countryside, for sure. Is that really— the model that will be able to sustain our demands as we are rising our expectations in every single way. Well, that's where the problem comes. When we are getting closer to city, at the same time, we're also getting closer to need for resources that we need to procure. And that's where the conversation today is going to take us little by little. That access to the resources is what defines in cities this huge disparity between rich and poor. Let me give you numbers again. Manhattan, New York City. If you live in Manhattan, your GDP per capita is about $55,000, so it's really one of the highest in the world. But if you cross the bridge and you go into the greater New York area, it drops down to $35,000. And guess what we know now? That distance between $55,000 and $35,000 is what propels violence and crime, much more than very rich and very poor. One thing we learn more and more, and this is going to the conversation of the middle class being squeezed and all of that, rich and poor, unfortunately, they don't count, not in terms of economic statistics. They are their own category. They run on their own. They don't have a collective action power that would define the way we are, but middle class does. So disparity in city between neighborhood is still a very old model in which we're redefining and assigning real estate according to income. You still have in many cities areas where you know it's going to be affluent. In Paris, you have the arrondissements, and you clearly know that if you're in a certain type of arrondissement, it's matched to economic influence versus the other one, what you call la banlieue. It's very clear in the language. It's clear also in the United States. We have a clear understanding between downtown, which is only for work, residential, and then the red area, the area you don't want to drive at night. All of this is really a byproduct of how cities have really polarized inequality. So what I'm trying to say, so that you can see a little bit more about the conversation, as we're changing our demographic textures, as we change our demographic fabric, as we're changing our demographic chemistry, we're also changing the way we live together. We tend to move into cities, more now than ever before, and when I talk about we, I'm talking about globally as a community. We're continuing to move into city. We have expectation of cities coming from nowhere that will become new power hubs tomorrow. When you see the list of the city, half of them are in China, some of them are actually in the African continent, very few in Latin America, but we clear— and some in India. But you clearly see that the appearance of emerging of new city is really a trend that hardly will be stopped. Stop. But with that, higher level of inequality will come. And that's when the story of resources comes interesting. We're more unequal now than probably before. Wherever you see in this graph sort of like dark blue or bluish, we have one of the highest inequality measure ever captured by statistic. Just remember the Gini coefficient, which is very known everywhere starts to measure in 1820, and since then we have really become much more of an unequal society than ever before. Interesting, at the same time, we're the most democratized world ever had. There's more democracy today than ever in history. So I find it an interesting correlation if I had time and resources to study whether democracy is inadvertently creating inequality. It shouldn't. But somehow the number proves something else. But where the story starts really is that all of this convergence is tapping on resources. So the real issue of the model I just shared with you, from demographic to urbanization to inequality, is not the fact that we're getting closer to city. Because somehow, if we didn't have a problem with the resources, we could handle this. The problem is that we don't have the same level of resources that we used to have before. So what shall we do? This is a map that shows you how renewable our water supply is becoming. And the news is that it's not really great news. Some areas of the world, wherever you guys see something closer to blue, it's okay, there is enough renewable water. Whenever it gets into different colors that face towards the red, it means that the use of water is not happening with the same pace of the replenishment of the source. In other words, we leave our world in a way in which we're exceeding the ability of the planet to replenish itself. And today's conversation, by the way, is not about being environmental. I appreciate the environmentalists. I think they have really brought awareness to the conversation, but I'm an economist, and I have no intention to ever become an environmentalist, because I think It's in my field of work that I have to find a way for us to figure out why it's important to shift, not just because I have this innate sense of respect for the planet, which I have, but it's not what I do for a living. So the question we're having is that if we are living our life faster than our ability for the planet to replenish, can we think actively about this as a business problem, and can we address this with a business model? Because if we can, then what I said before about demographic and urbanization are only part of the next chapter of our revolution that we are definitely embracing. But if we aren't— do you remember "Drive," when I told you about this trajectory? Then unfortunately, what we're going to hit is this progression that will get to the point in which one day, somewhere, there won't be water. The same happens for energy. What is the energy consumption per person? We definitely have to understand energy is not forever, or at least not using the current model. Energy is a very speculative conversation. The same story applies to the conversation of water. We seem to have an intimate correlation between energy and water, and it looks like we haven't been really thinking about this hard enough. We take it for granted. I think it's a little bit of how we are feeling immediately gratified when we open the tap and the water comes out. It looks like the problem is not now, it might be tomorrow. So it's very difficult for us to really engage in an empathy level with the problem. We kind of think, "OK, well, it's still running." Well, it might still be running, but sometimes certain large-scale events don't really happen with a warning, they simply happen. But where the conversation really starts being around the circular economy is by saying, "Well, if energy is becoming an issue, if water is becoming an issue, Waste is becoming an issue. Well, can we think about this in a way in which we're going to move this set of issues towards a possible solution? And maybe the work that has been done for decades in the circular economy— I don't think the name is still right. I think the name is still implying some sort of recycling, but we have to see what the name really means. Maybe we might have a way for all of these issues to become part of the trigger, the propeller towards an entirely different definition of our society. So this is where "Drive" took me. This is where after the study of "Drive" I was looking, "Hmm, hold on a second." D and R, demographic and resource scarcity, and then I, inequality, they talk to each other. And by the way, they always point me into the same direction, that if we are doing business with the current operating system, we might hit structural crisis. And I was going into the research, and I'm going to show you now a little bit more about the research. Energy, I'm not too worried. I think you have seen from a lot of different speakers that we might really be able to transition to an energy abundance coming from different resources. So I'm less nervous about energy than anything else. Where I start getting more anxious is water. If you're looking at the evolution of water in the next few years, in very conservative projection, What we notice is that with the exception of the rich world, which is now the minority, everywhere else the need for water will rise. If you're looking at the very last part of that chart, on a global level in the world, we're going to have a demand for more than 37% of water supply. But I showed you in a previous map that maybe we're not really matching the demands with the availability. So that's where I start thinking maybe we have really to start rewiring the conversation. And this is where, from an interesting forecast, some of the megacities might hit a structural crisis if we're not addressing the water crisis now. Which means tomorrow, after tomorrow, 6 months from now, cities that you see behind me are the most vulnerable ones. And what do they have in common? With the exception of very few cases, they have millions of people living. But their infrastructure might be old, their water supply might be inadequate for the amount of pressure. And by the way, a lot of these cities, they happen to be in emerging economies. And guess what's the interesting story? When you are emerging as an economy, the first thing you do, you consume more water. Why? Because you manufacture more. Manufacturing, water, electricity, they're all related to each other. So if we have emerging economy— they changed name, we used to call them BRICS, then they became BRICS with double I, so I for Indonesia. Then they became MINT: Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Turkey. Then they became NEXT 11. And every year, if you look at the emerging economy, they change names, but the principle is the same. Country that organize themselves, they break into the global market. They might be cheap in people, in terms of the labor, might be cheap in land, they might be cheap in access to the capital, they might have governmental support to accelerate, but all they do is to Boost manufacturing. And manufacturing and water are related. And by the way, when manufacturing and water are related, and we're having more consumption because we now have this rising middle class, what do we have with it? We have more pressure on agriculture and food. Why? Because when people emerge from poverty to middle class, they eat more meat. It's a normal evolution. We think about consuming more meat as a normal ticket to the membership to middle class. Also comes with the way we eat. And so as we consume more meat, we have to raise cattle, and cattle, they consume more water, as you see from this graph, than a kilogram of pulse or cereals. You see how they're connected to each other. So it's in this discovery that things are connected. They're connected both in a statistical way, they are connected through a regression, they're connected to a correlation, they're connected in a way which can visibly see the relationship. We also have to figure out that addressing the issue has to happen in the same way, by addressing them systemically rather than addressing them as stand-alone. Here's the example of consumers that will also have to pay more because if you start having stress in agriculture, food prices will go up. Food prices going up, consumption will have to spend part of their income into prices. So it's interesting, as we are emerging, we're really not emerging by having people acquire acquiring new purchasing power, they might need to spend more money into buying food. And what if all of this is really getting 4 degrees warmer? Because, by the way, on top of this, we're warming ourselves. That's a representation from Parakana, which is a researcher that's been doing work on maps. What would happen if we get it to 4 degrees warmer? We're getting close to 2 degrees now than what we consider to be the norm, well, the planet will definitely get used to it. The planet is a biological system that will be able to adapt itself. Will we be able to use our economic geography to adapt ourselves? Not really, not as business as usual. What you see in this map, which is scary, is that everything that looks yellowish or brown will not become habitable anymore. Land won't be able to be arable. We won't be able to grow food. And in civilization, historically, where we can grow food, we have people. We settle people down. Interesting, we're going to have more and more people that might be moving to the north or discovering that part of the land might be flooded. Now, this is not where I want this conversation to end. This is maybe a far-fetched scenario that I would never like to see for myself or for my family, but it's important to consider that all of this is related to each other. So do we have a problem? We do. And now is where maybe, by showing you these two following slides, we might find the low-hanging fruit, where we can start. Maybe waste, which now is the end of the capital which is not used, might become where we start. Because we have to start from somewhere, After all this conversation with you, the question is, "So what, Mark?" And the answer is, maybe we start from waste. We waste too much because "why not?" was the principle behind. If I can afford it and if it's okay for me to waste because I can buy new, then why not? That's how our consumption has been modeled in the last years, at least in the last decades. And waste is not only in the artificial stuff, but also in agriculture. Because these carrots don't look very nice, we don't buy them. They get thrown away even before they get into the supermarket. So waste as a mindset is an issue. So how wasteful are we? So that you guys see, I have numbers about this. I'm going to give you the example of Europe. I'm going to run a few ideas here. I'm going to ask you in your mind to give a number. Make sure you have a clue of what you think is our food waste in the value chain. So how much food do we waste from production to consumption? How many fruits and vegetables that we can eat, they're edible, we waste? What is the value still that we waste after the first recycle? So we recycle still once, and what happened the second time? And the same question for PET cardboard. These are very popular behaviors we have. Containers and bins where we can recycle a lot of this stuff. So yes, after having drunk our bottle of water, we throw it away. The question is, what happened to it? Well, it will be recycled once, for sure. Will it be recycled twice? And that's the question I'm going to ask you to look into. How many cars are parked and not used right now as we speak? And how many people are working and office space during working hours is not used? So I'll ask you to run these ideas in your head, give numbers, and here is basically the answer to those numbers. Do you remember the first one? 31% of the food chain goes. Why? Because. Overstock. Have you ever seen a supermarket that wants to keep the yogurt that is due the following day there forever? Of course not. It will be removed. We buy a yogurt that is expiring in 7 days. We don't buy a yogurt that is expiring tomorrow. The question is, what happened to that yogurt that has not been purchased? The answer is we waste it. 46% is the amount of fruit and vegetables that we waste because we don't like it. They don't look good, they're not attractive, they're not the Brad Pitt of vegetables. So they look ugly, is really the inglorious fruit and vegetables that because they don't have a cosmetic a peel, that get wasted. They simply don't look very good. 30%— I don't remember what was the— 30% is the amount of steel that we lose after the first recycle. So we recycle the first time, and then the second time, 30% is basically lost. Why? Recycling twice, three times, four times is more expensive than buying new steel. 60 to 70% is what happens to your plastic bottles. We waste— we recycle them once, and then most of the time, 6 to 7 times out of 10, they will never see the light of a second recycling. And we park cars 92% of the time, and we don't use. And when we work, 60% of the office space is underutilized or nonutilized. So here is the low-hanging fruit that I said before. This stuff already happens. It doesn't require new capital. I don't need to have the venture capitalists coming from Silicon Valley. This is not extra money that I need to find to figure out what to do with it. This is already wasted. The question is, "Hold on a second. Can I take this number and turn it into positive capital?" Because if I can, guess what? I have found what we hardly have with some of these really good ideas: an economic incentive. What moves society is that suddenly, Self-interest, no matter if it's individual or collective, they coincide. The issue is that when my self-interest is actually dissonant from yours, we might have a polarized behavior. But when my self-interest and your self-interest, even if I don't know you, happen to coincide, guess what? Economic incentive is what defines why I would do something, the principle of agency. So, we lose a lot of value— this is to summarize even more— Before we get into some of the story, we lose a lot of value in how we are using products. A lot of this is really the amount of value that we're losing from manufacturing all the way down to the use. Why? It's called planned obsolescence. We plan for it. We want products not to last very long so we can renew them. It was really introduced in the '50s when, after World War II, we were trying to figure out how do we grow our society from scratch. We go into idling. This graph shows you that a car will spend most of its life not being utilized. In the example of the engine loss, if you see the middle one, about 86% of the gas will never reach the wheels. We design products without considering their full utilization. It looks like we intentionally designed them to be idle, something that we can easily replace. And as I mentioned before, fruits and vegetables, we constantly continue to consume this. In general, in the built environment, in construction, in any sort of infrastructural work, we have hidden waste that is part of the story. So the circular economy starts from this conversation, moving from what we consider a model that has been defined, the cradle to grave, Because we are producing waste, can we think about shifting to cradle to cradle? And somehow, if you are looking at this short video that we're going to run now, and I'll be talking over the video, it's really thinking about the biological system of our society in the way in which it's really working. You know, in nature, nothing really is waste. There is a food chain, there is a value chain, which is a biological one, Everything that happens in nature is to some extent being reintegrated back into the world. So we have a biological response to what we consider to be a normal process for waste. In other words, if you ask the planet, "What is waste?" it would never be able to differentiate waste from resources. So why shouldn't we? Aren't we biological in the end? Just because we're rational and we have philosophy and we can think about God doesn't mean that we cannot think in terms of biological wiring. So the circular economy builds on this assumption that everything that we waste might possibly become a resource. And I invite you, as you are processing this conversation with me today, to apply this to your own experience. How many times have we really wasted something that might have had a use? And the question is, if you recognize that use, can you bring it back into the value chain? And if you can, what do you think will be the input of this? Well, clearly, if you're able to bring it back into the value chain, you're increasing productivity. The first thing you do, you're taking this number I showed you before, ranging from 30% all the way to 92%, whatever was the story, and instead of considering that a sunk cost, to talk like the accountants do, you bring it back into the value chain. And by bringing it back to the value chain, you need to have people mobilizing goods from one side of the story to the other one. And guess what? Every time in history we have hired people to do something we weren't doing before, employment boosted, because we are upgrading the economic infrastructure. We're taking from materials, from stuff that we produce, we're recognizing where do we have some degree of reusable stuff. And it's not just the whole item, it might be something inside. One example is that your mobile phone, if I collect them all, they can become gold because I can extract precious metal. Or they can be refurbished. That's what companies like Apple are currently doing. They are refurbishing phones, which are new phones created by existing materials. So they're not extracting materials elsewhere to create this. The flow of material is where I invite you to start looking at this opportunity. There is no company on the planet that does not have waste. No matter if you are in France, as a rich country, or if you are a farming community in Rwanda, You know what? Because waste is somehow inadvertently what we do. So interesting about the circular economy is that it's not an elitist movement. It's not about being rich, advanced, and very inspirational, and therefore I can do it. Everywhere, the work we're currently doing— because this is really part of the research that we're doing at the University of Cambridge— is going around the world and saying, "Do you have any waste? Have you ever imagined that this waste can be reutilized?" And it doesn't matter what the waste is— physical resources, infrastructure, assets. It's reflecting what we have learned from running organizations and applying the principle of reusability. Not really recycling, but it's really thinking about, can we build an ecosystem in which all of this really becomes a much more cohesive process? If we do, clearly, we're going to have people employed. That now don't have a job. I'm going to give you one quick example. Imagine if we could find a way for the post office to collect some of the items we have. These guys come and deliver mail every day to your house. Imagine if we're using their infrastructure as a point of collection that goes back into the value chain. Well, they cannot do it with the current capacity. They need to hire more. So imagine if we could do this to a number of different cycles, no matter whether we do this consumer or we do this as individuals. We would immediately have an impact to a degree of employability we currently don't have. But it's more than this. That's where the circular economy really thinks about circularity. As I said to you before, I'm not really too hot on the name. I think they are matched too much with the sense of recycling. It's a much more economic paradigm shift than what we can imagine. It's thinking, "Can I detect and recognize waste and reutilize it?" in a way in which we might really have to dissect the value chain of what we do and understand where the opportunity is really coming. These are some of the companies that are leading the story. Some are in France. You will recognize some of these companies in France. They are maybe leasing their assets. They might be leasing the use. They might be producing something that will be shared with somebody else. They might have really invented what Tapscott called yesterday the aggregate, somebody called it the sharing economy, but really this principle that private property is not really that interesting anymore. Or they might simply refurbish your furniture, like Ripe Office, or lease you a pair of jeans, like Mud Jeans. These are companies that are already doing it. What we don't have yet is this infrastructure and the mindset that will allow us to think, can we as society move and migrate towards a circular economy? And why circular economy? Mainly because of the waste, mainly because of the fact that only technology will not be enough, and mainly because it generates new economic opportunity. So as we're moving towards the end of this conversation, as I'm looking forward to the question that will be coming from your way, what I'm trying to share with you here is an opportunity that we have to think about the linearity of our model. It's a historical legacy. We have inherited this from a time in which we could afford to do that, because we could go to countries, extract value, bring it back. And by the way, when you're not really very numerous, you are a few millions of people, the planet is going to replenish faster than your use. And by the way, if you are just at the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and yes, you're expropriating some resources, the entirety of the planet will be bigger than your needs, to the point in which you never have to worry whether water will run, energy will be provided, or whether coal or copper or aluminum will be found. So historically, we recognized that we did what was best for us to do as we were trying to evolve our society. The responsibility we have today is to recognize where we're going, how we're currently changing our image as we're becoming different people, how we are living together, how we're no longer by ourselves, but we have this converging world made of emerging and emerged economies that sometimes cannot really be differentiated so clearly. And as this is a new identity for our planet, as we are embracing this, the question is, is my operating system still working? What I'm sharing with you today is not really working anymore. It might potentially lead us into a structural problem, but We don't need a lot of money to rewire the story. We can reframe the conversation on development by simply asking ourselves the question, "Are we too wasteful? And how can we possibly make it happen?" I want to finish today by showing you— skipping some slides— into this one. So the wolf in Yellowstone, small in numbers, they were able, little by little, to regenerate an ecosystem They were able little by little to prosper a new fauna and flora because they were operating by making radical changes into the environment. The wolf in Yellowstone Park, they changed the behavior of the rivers because now the river was following how prey and predators were behaving into the park, and over time they changed the geography, just in a few years. So if a group small of wolves could make this happen, don't tell me we cannot make the Serengeti Common an opportunity. Thank you very much.