The biggest lie about sustainability ♻️ Alice Casiraghi

We need businesses to do the right behavioral nudging, and we need us to start questioning as citizens and consumers everything. So start questioning, start asking yourself why, why, why. Behave like a kid, you know, kids always ask why because they want to learn. And we think that when we turn 30, we are grown up and there's nothing more to learn. Like, yeah, this is what I know, don't challenge me. That's also the mindset behind not wanting immigrants, not wanting things to change, because you're just like, this is the life I know, and I don't want to know that what I've known so far might be wrong. I I want to stick with what I know. And instead, it's not going to work. Like, this is just a path to destruction.

This week's Millennial Master is Alice Casiraghi. She's a designer in the circular economy and sustainable food systems, and an expert on how to rethink business for a greener future. Alice is redesigning the way we think about waste, business, and the world around us. Instead of fixing problems after they happen, she believes we need to stop creating them in the place. In this episode, we cover why recycling won't save us and what will, how businesses can go circular without losing money, and the mindset shift we all need to build a better future. This episode is brought to you by Offware. Gym memberships, gift cards, free coffee, and pizza Fridays. Well, these staff perks just don't cut it anymore. That's why OffWork gives your team something they already love— travel! They can book their own flights, pick their own hotels, and plan the perfect getaway, all with the travel fund you set up for them. It's super easy. Just set the contributions, and OffWork handles the rest. Better time off means less burnout, more motivation, and happier employees. Give your team a perk they'll actually love. Check out OffWork today on offwork.com. Millennial Masters is proudly sponsored by Jolt, the UK's top web hosting service. Whether you're launching a WordPress site or scaling up a custom app, every great project needs a reliable home. That's why Jolt has hosting plans starting at just £3.95 a month, with unbeatable deals on domain registrations too. Why Jolt? It's a no-brainer. There's no waiting around with support within 30 seconds on live chat, your site stays live no matter what with over 99.99% network uptime, and You can also pay with Bitcoin or American Express, so you can rack up those points too. How good is that? Sign up today and enjoy your first 3 months free. Head to jolt.co.uk to get started. Alice, welcome to Millennial Masters.

Hello, thank you so much, Daniel.

So what got you into design, user experience, sustainability, and how did you end up co-founding your own company?

Well, thank you for the question again. So I am a designer by training, so I started studying product design and then service design, which is the design of the experience in a product or a service between the company that is offering the product or service and the final user. Um, and it's such an interesting field of study, but at some point I started feeling like Yes, it's good to study the user experience of the, of the final user, of the client, uh, when you're offering a product or a service. But at the same time, as designers, we can do so much more by incorporating also, uh, the environmental aspects and, uh, the repercussions of that product or service on the ecosystem, on the local context. And so I started slowly transitioning into, uh, sustainability, circular economy, and in general, uh, climate solutions.

So what are the biggest challenges when it comes to sustainability in this world right now?

Okay, so that's a very broad question. One of the main challenges is that in many practices, in many design practices, sustainability was not the main field of study. It was not the main consideration. And so when I started investigating the circular economy, there were some experts since the '70s, the, like in the '70s, there, there were a lot of, uh, studies and considerations on environmental impact of what we do as human societies on the, on the ecosystem. But it kind of got lost in the decades. And so there was a resurgence of environmental considerations in the new millennia. And that's what I wanted to tackle with my practice. I wanted to investigate more of those and try to understand if as designers we can develop tools to analyze the environmental impact of everything we design from the design phase. So not afterwards, not when something, some product is already a product or a service is already a service, but really at the inception phase when we do the research, when we try to create something that needs to be offered to an audience, a crowd, uh, um, citizens or, or clients. And so based on that, if we can make it circular by design. So since the very beginning, we want to make something that will not end up into waste because the main misconception about circular economy is that we are dealing with waste. No, we're dealing with the full value chain. We're dealing with everything that comes before the object becomes waste. And so we're dealing with how we source the materials, how we put the materials together into something, how do we provide a service so that we don't force the final consumer to turn it into waste, that then traditionally the municipality usually, or, or some public service has to deal with afterwards. Um, and so it's about bridging the gaps in the value chain between production, consumption, and disposal, and sending back to resources for the ecosystem and for the, the economy as well, the human economy.

So you rightfully said that climate change is something that they've been talking about since the '70s, long before we were born, but at the same time, we don't seem to been able to slow it down. There's been a lot of talk about it, but not as much action. Why do you think that's the case?

Well, I think, um, so the economy, largely the economy in which we, uh, operate today was born after World War II. It developed, um, very fast after World War II. So we went from reconstruction and, you know, at the moment of reconstruction, you have a society that needs to rebuild. You have people that want to create something new and then they establish companies, they design new things. And that was the needs of reconstructing really after World War II of, of creating a new order of things with new societies. For example, in democracies, you know, the, the societal structure was very different from the empires and the, that we had before the two world wars. But the point is we kept going because we saw these system-generated profits and we kept going, but we didn't take into consideration beyond the profits, what were the downsides of this development. And so while you develop and you keep building new things, then there are already existing things that need to be replaced, that need to be upgraded. And instead of upgrading, we just kept building new. And, uh, as along the development of different nations, cuz we have the Global North that developed much faster than the rest of the, the world. Other nations came into this model of development and that added up to more services, more companies, more products, and an economy that is developing faster at an exponential rate. And that meant that, um, we now need to, now what we should have started the decades ago, but we need to tackle what is existing that doesn't work anymore and transform it back into input materials, into inputs to this economy that doesn't have to end in waste, but that needs to end back in a cycle like nature does, right? There's nothing that becomes waste in nature because largely anything that is waste for one species or one ecosystem becomes an input for something else. Because in nature, things develop at a rate that is sustainable. That's the definition of being sustainable for the ecosystem to be digested back into, into something else. In human economies, through improvements in technology and use of energy, we accelerated this process that don't occur naturally. Like you naturally, you cannot transform oil into plastic, for example. Uh, so we accelerated the process of transforming resources and materials, but that acceleration wasn't followed up with an acceleration on how to turn them back into, into the input material. So we're accelerating natural processes without accelerating the back process of like closing the circle. And so this is why, like, the more people become affluent, the more they want to buy, the more they want to build and, and create new needs. But at some point, we need to tackle the externalities. The externalities is a, a very economic definition of those things that don't concern me directly, but they will at some point. And if we follow the rules of nature and the rules of physics, nothing destroys, nothing creates, everything transforms. So whatever is transformed needs to be transformed back. Mm-hmm. Because those externalities, they will remain externalities, which means pollution, which means environmental degradation, which means waste until we do something with them.

So where do you start?

Wow. Okay. So ideally, I know where not to start. I know that we—

that's a good point to go into it as well. Where do you not start?

Exactly. You do not start only from waste. So the point is, okay, we have an economy that is largely built on disposable plastics. For many things. For, for example, if you think about these new models of food distribution with the deliveries, right? There's a lot of disposable plastic, disposable waste, and then that we need to transform it into something else. No, we need to design those deliveries in a way that the waste that they generate is not waste that is supposed to remain in the environment, but it's something that can be transformed back or that can be reused. That can be used with a deposit scheme so I can give it back. It can be reused more times, or I reduced the amount of waste. So there are many ways, like in the traditional practice of sustainable design, have a series of operations that you can, um, a series of operations you can follow to turn something into, uh, a more sustainable version of itself that is reduce. So first reduce the amount of waste to reuse, regenerate, and then the last level is recycle. So recycle is like the lowest possible option environmentally speaking, but then if you go up into the pyramid, you need to start from reuse and reduce as well. So yes, depending on the industry in which you're working, whether it's an industry of perishables, well, perishables you cannot reuse for as long as you want. And perishables is anything like food or, um, uh, consumables like, um, body care products. And then the non-perishables are plastic and metals and all the materials that can instead be continuously retrofitted and reconverted in the industrial system.

You mentioned recycling is at the bottom of the pyramid. Is recycling a con? Is us— most of the things that should be recycled actually recycled or end up in landfills in other parts of the developing world?

Well, let's say I wouldn't say that there isn't a solution that is not a solution, but solutions need to be used contextually. Yes, recycling can be a solution, a solution to certain things, but we know from science that, for example, plastic can be reused a certain amount of times. Cardboard, paper can be reused a certain amount of times. Aluminum is infinitely more durable. It can be reused virtually infinitely. But for example, aluminum cans, in order to contain gassy beverages, they need to have a layer of plastic inside that not many people are aware of. So. Even there, if you think that there's an infinitely reusable can of aluminum, then instead there is some plastic inside that goes to waste. Or even glass, you know, you use a bottle made of glass, then why in, like in Italy, it's the case, we put it in the bin and it breaks. Instead of breaking it, we should just reuse it as it is, you know, instead of break the bottle and then you have to remold it into a new bottle, but then you also need to change the color. So in every recycling process, there is bleaching involved. You need to decolor the plastic. Like, lots of plastics are non-recyclable by design because they are colored. And then when you put a pink plastic and a blue plastic and a black plastic and all these different colors all together, what you get is like dark gray or brown plastic that nobody wants. And then in order to turn it back into a transparent or white plastic, sometimes you cannot, but Even when you can, that involves a lot of chemicals that then are dispersed in the environment if not well treated. And we know again from statistics that only 9% of all the plastic that is created in the world is actually recycled. The rest of it is dispersed or is landfilled or it's burned. And this comes with a lot of associated pollution, whether it's plastic in the ocean or pollution in the air due to the way plastic is treated at the end of its life cycle. So. Yes, you can recycle certain things, but you'd rather not if there's a better option. And the better option again is like creating these systems so to incentivize people to give the packaging back or give the product back for it to be fixed, to be reused, to be redistributed. And so, yeah, like you prevent recycling by changing the value chain between the, the different actors of the value chain.

So is there a good example at the moment of any initiatives or products that help people reuse packaging or parts of it instead of just putting it in a landfill or trying to recycle it?

Yes, there are many different solutions. Most of them are small-scale solutions that allow you to give the packaging back to the producer. Well, there are more traditional options. There are systems of food distribution in India that traditionally use metal tins, and so they are The food is distributed as a lunchbox with a metal tin, and then it's collected back and then always refilled. But even in Germany or in other European countries, you see these, um, uh, schemes where you bring the bottles back and you get a deposit back so that you're incentivized to not put it in the bin, but actually to take some of the money back that you spent upfront. So usually it's a matter of economical incentive. I give you an incentive to bring something back. With a discount on use later. This applies also to, for example, the fashion industry. There are, there is a small company that leases jeans for a period of 1 year, and then you can re-lease them after 1 year, or you can give it back. And then you will be prompted to maybe choose another pair of jeans from the same company just because of the fact that you're going back to them and you're relinking with them. So circular economy in this sense, it, it needs economical incentive for changing the user experience, changing the behavior of the consumer. But it could also be beneficial for the company to retain customers because then the customer has to always go back and relate again with the company that provided the service in the first place. The point is, if you need to operate at scale with this kind of models, the whole industry has to move in that direction because if one of the big competitors in the world moves towards that direction, but for example, the supermarkets are not ready to implement it or the competitors still use the old model. That company risks to lose its customers because it's operating such a radical change in user behavior that the others are not operating. And then it would be just easier for people, for consumers, which is a bad term because I don't consider us consumers. I consider us citizens that have a choice in general. But the point is we're so used in our daily life to operate in a certain way, to have certain behaviors, that then we will lose affection to that brand just because it changes our cooperation, our daily operations so much. That it requires so much mental burden, you know, to enter this new system. So yeah, the whole industry needs to shift in that direction. So it's really important that there's like a coalition of brands and not just brands and, and, but, but all the distribution sector that supports this huge shift because it's really needed. Cause like, I don't know about you, but I don't remember the last time I've been to a beach and I haven't seen all the waste, uh, on the sand or in the water. And it's just going to increase. It's just going to get worse because the more people become affluent in emerging economies, the more these will expand, this model will expand. And lastly, even if we don't see as much of that waste in developed economies, that waste sometimes it's transported to the emerging economies that have, in which the citizens have less power of choice because they need, you know, some of these businesses to operate in their economies, to strengthen their economies. And so then you transport the waste somewhere else and it is just delaying the process of taking care of it because in 10 years, like China has done, China has stopped taking waste from European companies and American companies or companies from the UK, and then it shifted to Southeast Asia and then it will shift somewhere else. But then at some point it will turn back on us. It, it's already turning back on us. You know, plastic pollution causes climate change because the, the environmental degradation releasing harmful chemicals in the environment and, uh, that contribute to global warming. So as much as we don't see it, this is a process that is happening relentlessly, constantly, and it's been happening for the past 50 years at least.

So you mentioned something quite important. In today's environment, you can't be an outlier and take radical sustainability solutions because you would be at a disadvantage to other companies who are not doing so and are more consumer-friendly in a way because they don't disrupt the consumer's behavior that they've been used to. So besides coalitions and industry-wide change, do you think there is a need for legislation that would steer businesses into that direction if they can't agree between each other to all make a more positive impact?

So yes, there is definitely a need for legislation, and that legislation is happening. There is global consensus on this. We just saw the end a month ago of the UNFCCC COP 2029 in Baku. Let's say because of shifting geopolitical situations and in general a world that is becoming more conflictual in many ways, some of these environmental policies are rolling back compared to their ambitious, uh, their ambitions of like just 5 years ago. You know, I think there was a big push for sustainability in the years of COVID uh, big acceleration because we were in a moment of reset. But then when we reset the world, we ended up in a very conflictual world, as I said. So then we're rolling back because we see that the priority now is managing those conflicts, managing those changes that are happening, but nothing lives in a silo. Everything is connected. This conflict happened also because of climate change, because some agricultural systems are failing, because the pollution is affecting business operations, because we need this global competition for, uh, the environment, the, the sustainable transition, uh, it's also causing a shift in the supply chains of the raw materials, raw materials that are needed for electrification rather than the fuel economy and the oil economy. So everything is connected in a way or so. I, I would say that it's a big mistake to roll back those environmental policies. And by environmental policies, I mean the Green Deal in Europe, a Circular Economy Action Plan in Europe, but at the same time, the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act in the US. The Inflation Reduction Act sounds like an economic legislation, but in the end, it's designed to support the sustainable transition towards producing those components that are required for the electrification in the US market. So it's giving a lot of incentives for green companies, green projects. And so it's supporting the transition, although it's called Inflation Reduction Act. And we see the same happening in China. China was the first country to introduce circular economy. In their legislation at the beginning of the new millennium in the, in 2000, because China has a huge population compared on the size of land that, uh, they, that is part of their state. And so they don't have enough resources to waste them with such a high frequency, especially while the economy is, it was growing much faster. Now it's slowing down, but it's still growing. So while people are becoming more affluent, you cannot afford in a country that, uh, has such a, a huge population. To, uh, create so much waste. And so yeah, there are legislations. The legislations need to be more ambitious. I would say the, the missing link is we need humanistic sciences. We need people that work in other fields like design, but, um, it can be anthropology, history, sociology. It can be philosophy. These people need to be involved to rethink and give an ambitious push to the industry because The industry will see in the framework of the, they will see the future in the framework of their operations. So it's not their immediate task to see alternative futures. You need inspirations from others to see alternative futures. We had a great example in Italy of Olivetti, the company that used to produce typewriters.

Mm-hmm.

Where every year Adriano Olivetti would invite experts from all over the world to join a think tank to talk about future technologies, future developments, to to inspire his operations. And that's what we need to see much more. And we haven't seen enough of in latest years. We've seen like a lot of talks on regulations, on, uh, how to transition, how to invest the money, how to finance the transition. But we need to see the ambition coming from all levels of society, even the workers. Uh, recently there has been a protest inside a factory that produces components for the automotive, uh, industry in Italy that, uh, was threatened with a shutdown. And the workers of the company, of the union within the company, they are trying to to support the transition of the company towards the industry of electric, uh, personal vehicles rather than producing for the automotive industry because the automotive industry is declining. So the automotive industry is of course declining in Europe because the policies in the cities are reduce the cars in the city to reduce the pollution. If you reduce the car in the city, of course you will sell less cars, but you need to be ready to imagine an alternative. And we've seen that Union of Workers being way more ambitious than every big automotive company in Europe. And being more down to earth, like seeing the problems of the, the working class and trying to guide a transition with more imagination, with more vision. So yeah, we need, we need the regulation, we need the vision, we need the workers involved. We need a lot of different, all society to rethink this framework.

And just as we were saying that businesses cannot make radical changes on their own and they need a, a wider environment in which they operate sustainably. Isn't it the same with countries? And for example, if Europe decides to cut its emissions, it's still a small part of the worldwide emissions. And here we're talking about China, India, Africa. Whatever we would be able to reduce in Europe would easily be compensated by other emissions in other parts of the world. And at the end of the day, we are still on this on the same planet.

Yes. Yeah. That's a very interesting input for conversation. I would say I lived in China for 5 and a half years and I've seen, I've witnessed the electrification push and the transition towards producing for an electrified market. And so I've witnessed also designers that used to work in digital services transitioning to design for this new automotive sector. That requires autonomous driving, electrified engines, um, and just kind of following, you know, like following this push towards the electrification of the automotive sector. But then the biggest innovation in that area came from some smaller companies or OEMs, the original equipment manufacturers, that instead of competing with Tesla on the same type of car that Tesla was producing for the US, that is a specific context with specific type of roads and lower population, bigger roads, so they can produce this huge cars and trucks, but then you see these competitors in China, the small companies that didn't have a reputation yet. They were daring to risk a bit more in, in a developing economy. I'm talking about 5, 6 years ago, 8 years ago. And they started producing these very tiny cars. I, I would call them like electric tuk-tuks basically. It's a tiny car that is used by the middle class in the lower tier cities. So not in Shanghai, not in Beijing, but in the other cities where people don't have such a disposable income. Such a high disposable income, but still they want to buy the electric car because it costs them much less than a fuel car, a traditional fuel car, especially because the government rolled out a series of incentives for people that would register plates for electric cars rather than traditional cars. And in that case, you've seen like this small company, you know, not small company, it's not, it's never small in China, but you've seen this, uh, unknown competitor rolling out this new idea of a car that is a small electric car that fits the lower upcoming middle class. And in Europe, we should collaborate with that mindset instead of saying, okay, no, now we need sanctions because we need to stop that inflowing of market coming to Europe. Yeah, we've been trying to stop the electrification for so many years in Europe, guided by the traditional automotive industry that didn't want to change. And now we need to sanction the new cars that have been developed already 5, 6 years ago in China because we are afraid that they will take our market. We should instead align with what are the new needs. So run really a design research on what are the needs, what are the competitors doing, what is happening in the world, and try to see how we can collaborate with that to redevelop our automotive sector, uh, according to the needs of today. So instead of making huge electric SUVs that will not find any space in the, in the cities in the future, in European cities in the future, then how can we change the industry so that we really serve this new needs of the cities. Like if we talk about the cities of the future, everybody imagines this electrified city where everything is connected, where the car becomes a battery for your home and the solar panels and this and that. But there's a mismatch between what the industry is producing or what the industry and what they are requesting to sanction to the European Union with what we envision for our cities in the future. Mm-hmm. There's a mismatch between city level and government level. So Even before collaborating between different countries or different global institutions, we need to collaborate between city and national and above national level. Um, and then we, yeah, we need, we need to, every, uh, value chain is now globalized. Like even the small sensors that allow me to push my window up and down, they come from places all over the world. So there's no point in competing against each other. We just should Yes, we want to retain talent. We want to attract new talent, but at the same time, we need to operate on a global scale and collaborate on a global scale. I think there's much more opportunity there if we keep in line with the vision. But if we lose track of that and we just think of like, my industry cannot fail, I cannot compete with them, so we should stop them. That is, I think, the wrong way forward. So yeah, we, we need collaboration over competition on every level, I would I would say.

Moving on from cars to food, you've done a lot of work in this industry and area. Is meat really a problem? Do we all need to become vegans, or is there another solution?

Okay, great question. Again, I'm not speaking for the whole world and saying the whole world should go vegan, but data shows that most of the agricultural land— we know exactly thanks to satellites And we'll talk about it later, I think. But thanks to satellites, thanks to our interconnected digitalized economies, we know that most of the agricultural land is used for pasture, especially cows and goats. Um, and those animals require, require a huge amount of feed. Like pig can eat any type of food, but ruminants, so ruminants is the cows and the goats, the, the ruminant type of mammals, they require a specific type of feed. And in order to grow that food, we need a lot of land. Of all the soy that is grown in the world, most of it goes for feeding the animals that then we use to make the meat to feed us. So if we just cut that intermediate step of the goats and the cows that are fed with the soy and we eat that soy, we would reduce the, the global agricultural land by half or even more, you know, so yes, this fight Whatever people say, and Elon Musk has been recently talking about it and saying, yeah, no, no, there's, if we stop eating meat, there would be zero change. Like they would change nothing. I completely disagree with that. We know for a fact that the agricultural land will decrease. And by decreasing agricultural land, we also reduce the risk of new diseases spreading because the more we grow, the more we take land for agricultural purposes, the more we are taking it away from other animals, from other species, from biodiversity, that cannot thrive because we're using the land for human purposes. We're also getting closer and closer to, uh, wild species that carry certain diseases that traditionally don't attack humans, but could because they could jump from one species to the other as we've seen with COVID Um, yes, reducing the meats that we eat in general, whether you want to become a vegetarian, a vegan, or you just want to reduce meat and fish as well. Fish is another big problem. That will be a huge favor for the whole economy on one hand and, and the environmental transition. Another thing is we need to reduce food waste. If we go and consult the website of Project Drawdown, among the most, the top solutions to curb climate change is reducing food waste and more plant-based diet. Because again, plant-based means relying less on animals. We slaughter hundreds of millions of animals every year to eat. Like if we slaughtered all, if we ate Humans, and we slaughter all the humans that we eat instead of the animals, humanity will be gone in less than a month. So that's the amount of animals that we kill to feed ourselves. And that's too much. It's way too much. I've seen, I've seen this changing in emerging economies. When I was living in China, the traditional, um, food industry uses tiny amounts of meat on a largely plant-based diet to just give flavor to a meal. But then recently, like consider the, the Japanese ramen.

Mm-hmm.

It was maybe one slice of meat on top of a bowl of soup and noodles. And now you have 3 slices of meat. That's already tripling the amount of meat that you use for the same dish. This is a huge problem. This is a design problem again, because we think, yeah, our economy is getting stronger, so the people have more disposable income, so they need to spend more money on more expensive meals. And the most sought after should be meat. And we've seen this problem in, in mindset in many things. Like the more the industry grows, the more we want to drink coffee, we want to eat chocolate, we want to eat premium fish. Like, how is it possible that, for example, salmon and tuna are two fishes that are available everywhere, every season, in the whole world, in every city, in every poke bowl, in every sushi restaurant? How is it possible? How, how, like, whoever didn't grow in our generation, but just one generation prior, they did not eat these types of meats everywhere in the world and not in every season. For sure, we need to respect the seasons and the, the times in which animals feed or they, they grow and they reproduce. And this is, this is valid for like every animal. Like cows don't always have milk. They have milk when they have, um, a veal. So when they have a baby, they have milk, but not all the time. And we're forcing this. And this is also just to add more to this mix. It's a feminist issue because in farming, traditionally, the animals that we farm and we exploit in, in the more intensive types of farming, they're all female animals. We're, we're just disposing of bodies of other species, traditionally more female than, uh, than male. And we think we can do it because we have this mindset that we are like managing the other species. We're managing the world. We are the species that manages everything else. Well, we are, we have become very bad managers if we even want to grant our own survival. Cuz we're bringing disease and we're killing other species and we're decreasing biodiversity. It's a compound issue. And just to close, fishes are the same problem because the fish that we want to eat, like salmon and tuna, mm-hmm, or any type of big fish that we eat is generally, uh, a carnivorous fish. So they eat other fish. So we are like going out at sea with large trawlers that collect as much as they can and they destroy the bottom of the ocean. Just to take as much different species of fish that we can just to grind them to create feed for those fishes that we want to eat, like salmon and tuna, et cetera, et cetera, or sea bass or like all those other species. I, sorry, I don't remember all the names in English, but that's the point. Like maybe if you want to reduce, start with eating sardines instead of, um, of salmon because the environmental impact is much lower. And, and, and it becomes a problem. It's not just an environmental problem, but it becomes a health problem. Because in order for all this farming, intensive farming to survive, we feed them with a lot of medicine that will create antibiotic resistance in our own bodies. So everything is connected again. Like, I don't know how to stress this further. It's, it's really, when you start investigating this problem, you see the full picture and it makes you panic.

So food, if you can't change, you realistically can't ban meat. So maybe the solution would be, as you indicate, eating less meat, and then it becomes a consumer problem. But at the same time, industry conditions us to consume more and more. And it's not just a food issue. For example, let's talk about electronics and planned obsolescence. The producers are making these products in order for them to not be useful 2, 3 years down the line. Your iPhone or your smartphone is built in such a way that your battery starts degrading after 2 years and you can't replace it yourself. So you need to go and get a new one. We are conditioned by the entire industry around us to consume more and more often for the sake of profit. What's your take on this or a possible solution that you envision?

Yes. So there is traditionally this game of three hats and you have the citizens, you have the governments, and you have the businesses. Let's start by saying that every citizen is also somebody that can run for government and can run a business or can impact a business as an employee of that business. So I have a choice. I, first, I have the duty to inform myself, especially if I live in democracies where my opinion is constantly asked to develop our society. Like I'm listened to. Ideally by the government. That's what democracy should look like. Then I have the duty to inform myself about how the society runs, about what are the compound problems and how can I help fix them instead of just floating there. Because many times we complain that there's no solution or there is a conspiracy theory. Well, every person that has a specific amount of power will do their interest to preserve that power. And it's not about relinquishing your power, but you need to contrast that power with other power so that they rebalance. There is no power in a vacuum, you know, like if you relinquish all the power in the hands of others, they will take more, but it's up to you to reclaim part of it as an active, engaged citizen, as a, as a person that consumes, purchases, and as a worker. So government, yes, governments need to be supporting a certain type of industry. Industries, they need to compete in a healthy way, supporting, uh, better consumer decisions rather than deceiving the consumers with greenwashing, and consumers have the duty to inform themselves. It's a trifecta, basically. Change can come from many different directions. We spoke before about businesses not being able to be the outsider and, and not carrying the transition on their own. There are businesses that can be an outsider, but those businesses are the ones that are strong enough to not succumb to change. So we've seen Patagonia, we've seen similar businesses, we, we've seen like smaller or medium-sized companies that are leaders in the industry for specifically the transition, the environmental transition. And so those ones, they are the ones that will be braver than others, but the others can follow, right? And so you have some outliers, you have some other businesses that have to work together to then, like the, the most widespread ones, they must work together because they operate on lower margins. Another thing that I forgot to mention before is that I understand, like I've visited huge factories that produce 24 hours a day, uh, 365 days a year. I've seen those machineries panning out products like within matters of milliseconds. And so those companies, yeah, it will cost a lot for them to change. Like just change one material in the packaging, just change one size of one product. It will cost them money, but we're seeing these companies, for example, reducing the amount of produce or, or the box. And keeping it for the same price, what we call the shrinkflation, because they need to tackle higher, uh, cost of, uh, virgin resources.

Mm-hmm.

So they can change if they're pushed to change. So yeah, it's a matter of like the power lays in these three actors that condition each other. And so I don't have a solution for everything, but the problem is that we need to know that this triangle happens and we can act in a way or another. And as individuals, I think it's a moral duty. To do your part instead of, again, relinquishing it to others and then complaining that nothing happens. We've seen that example of the workers of the union not surrendering to the fact that their company would close, but then trying to propose a new vision. I've seen the area where I come from is north of Milan. It used to be one of the most productive areas in the world, not just in Italy, not just in Europe. We produce everything, you know, from silk, garments, furniture, anything like books, paper. Anything you can think of.

Fashion, of course.

And fashion, yes. And in that area, most of the companies have been closing because they are traditionally small, medium companies and the business shifted with the delocalization towards Asian countries. And I've seen people from my hometown, people that are close to me complaining that things are changing. The job is shifting somewhere else. We're losing competitiveness for like the countries of East Europe or, uh, of Asia. And they're there just waiting for somebody to save them. There will be nobody to save you, you know, like, yes, the business is decreasing. What can I do about it? Well, how can I proactively do something rather than complaining and then voting for some populist governments that will just support conspiracy theories, you know, or fake solutions, like simple messages, fake solutions. Nothing is simple, especially in such a complicated environment and ecosystem in which we live today.

So with this trifecta. And all starting from citizens. Would you say that there's a gap in education for sustainability? And maybe do we need to nurture it from a younger age rather than something that you educate yourself on?

Yes. Okay. Yes, for sure. First thing first, this is something that even the IPCC raised. What are we missing to support the transition? Reskilling, reeducation of everybody, of the workers, of the youth, of We have, we have seen youth protests, but they come from a smaller share of all youth. Largely, uh, I've seen like larger chunks of youth and not really caring because they feel so defeated from the get-go. They see so many compound problems happening in their face when they don't even have a say in the economy. They're just entering the working world and they see so many compound problems that they just give up. So yes, we need education. We need education from very young age, but we also need to reskill the ones that do not have the inner strength to reskill themselves because life is difficult because every day you have to take care for your family. You need to provide, you need to earn enough money to pay for your medical bills and everything. So there are so many problems and we need both us to be more proactive, but also organizations to reskill us. Yes. Okay. We're transitioning to electric or to zero packaging or to this and that. We need to change the way we think. We need to change the laws. We need to change how we do things. Like, and going back to the automotive industry, the electrified vehicles have a much simpler engine than a combustion engine. And so the workers that used to produce the combustion engine, how are they ready to produce for this new industry? How are they ready to work with the batteries, for example? Some of us cannot even reimagine what it means to refuel your car with a plug instead of going to, to the gas refilling station. What are we doing with those gas refilling stations? What, what can we turn them into? What can be done about it? There's so many things that can be retrofitted with some imagination. But then we talk about these electric cars, but we don't talk about the whole ecosystem, all the refilling stations across the cities and on, along the highways. What are we doing about them? There's people stopping there to sleep, to take a shower. I, I talk about the, the truck, uh, drivers, for example. There's a whole ecosystem of, that's a whole food industry that revolves around them. And that has interest for that places to remain what they are today. Okay, let's keep those places but give them a new function. So yes, there needs to be reskilling and reimagination, a lot of that, because it, it needs to come from just training the workers to again, rethinking the world under a new light. And this is a new vision that sees humans as cooperating with nature, with the other species, with the forest, with the mushroom, with the grass, with everything else.

So rethinking the world under a new light, how can businesses become circular and build that into their business model? What are the first steps that a business owner can take to think of their business making a positive contribution, whether that's a service or a product?

I can give you two answers to this. I've been working with private companies as, as well as cities and their public food policies. So first, uh, the, the emissions of a business, they are divided in the direct emissions of anything that is owned by the business. That is traditionally called the Scope 1 emissions. Scope 2 is all the energy you use, for example, for your, uh, lighting system, but also the fuel for your trucks and everything. And the third one is the supply chain. All the materials that you gather to produce what you produce and all that is needed to sell what you are selling. Even the website, the energy that is used by the website to sell what you're selling, or for example, IKEA is considering in their scope 3, the energy that the users will use in their kitchens once they install an IKEA kitchen. So if you, um, put in your home a new kitchen with electrified appliances rather than a gas stove, that's part of scope 3 of the company. So that's like what IKEA is making you do by selling you the gas stove or the electrified one. The induction stove, for example. So usually businesses start from changing the energy provider. That's the easiest. Then you change things that you can control directly in your company. So for example, you retrofit your, um, your building, uh, or you, um, do some nudging, uh, um, in towards your, uh, your workers to, um, use, uh, more sustainable transportation or work from home or these kind of things. Third comes the whole value chain that has the biggest impact. 90% of the impact is the value chain. My scope 3 as, as a business is the scope 1 of my supplier or of my distributor. So you need to cooperate, you know, you, you need to work together. The other way I can answer this question, uh, working with, uh, the food policies, working with, um, larger systems, it's like you give yourself a rule, you give yourself like an objective, you start measuring all your, you measure everything that comes in and goes out and you measure the impacts of that. And you give yourself like a North Star or where you want to get based, for example, on, um, um, global environmental regulations on objectives on the IPCC and Paris Agreement. There are environmental standards for every type of industry. So you give yourself a North Star and you backcast from there and you just start implementing. What we call pilots. You start from one small operation, like you change the material of one of your products, but then you just don't stop there. Like lots of companies change the, the, I don't know, for example, you produce a chair and you make one chair in bioplastic rather than plastic, maybe just one version of that one model of chair and that's it. You become sustainable. No, then you just, you know, you roll back to every other product. You just try to change every other product starting from that pilot that you've run. If it works, then you go back and you do it for everything else. Last consideration is if a business, for example, changes the packaging of their product, that is a perishable product that they sell at the supermarket, the supermarket will treat that product differently, um, according to, uh, if, for example, that packaging will affect the expiry date of that product. With a different packaging, maybe the product inside can preserve for less months. So then the company is scared to change because they're scared to lose the priority they have with the contract with the supermarket, with the distributor. So again, you need to have kind of a council of all the players in, in the supply chain so that you do not change alone. You need to change within the ecosystem.

One question I typically ask Millennial Masters is what habits drive their success and productivity. But I'm gonna change this question for you and I'm gonna ask you, what habits do you think people need to change to drive a more sustainable world?

Okay. I would say start from what you care most about or what's more immediate to you. For most people, the first thing is your food, then it's like your clothes or like what you buy, what you— because, because food is a choice that you make 3 or 4 times a day. Clothes is a choice you make maybe once a week or like anything you purchase. And then the rest of it is like your home, your, um, even your, your bank provider. If you have a bank account with a bank that supports fairer practices for environmental transition rather than a company, a bank that supports fossil fuels and the war industry, that's already a huge change because you put your money where your ideals are. So change starts from, yeah, smaller decisions and then it grows bigger and bigger. And I want to answer this also by saying what should be done in terms of like companies to provide a better range of options to people, because you can change your daily practices to become more sustainable, but each and every of us, we live in a range of options that are provided by the context around us. If I cannot find a supermarket that sells rice in bulk, but they all sell it in plastic packaging, there would be no way that I can buy rice without packaging, right? So there is this practice called behavioral nudging. So I nudge my consumers to buy one thing rather than another by, for example, changing the display. So this is especially true in food choices. If I go to the supermarket or a restaurant and the first option I see in front of me on the shelf or in the menu is a meat option and the last one is a vegan or vegetarian option. And there's only one vegetarian option. And usually it's like grilled zucchini and eggplant. That one sucks. You know, I will not buy that because I went to the restaurant to have an experience. If the only experience is a sandwich with grilled eggplant, I'm sorry, but I can do that at home.

Or if like among many choices, maybe in Italy, less so in the UK, but I get the analogy.

But you know, like, okay, in the UK, you go out for lunch, you don't sit at the restaurant, you just get a sandwich from the store. If you have 8 different options for meat or fish, and then you have one horrible option with hummus that contains garlic, and then you have to, uh, speak with your, with your coworkers for the whole afternoon, you will not choose the vegan one because it has hummus with garlic. That's the point. Like, you need to make those more attractive. You need to make those more popular, like as many meat options, as many vegan options, for example, so that, that's equal. Or in a buffet, I will see first the options that contain less impactful choices in terms of, uh, ingredients, and then more hidden the ones that are more impactful. That is already a huge change. And of course, if we then go to the, the, uh, government side, we should stop allocating money to support businesses that are environmentally harmful because we subsidize the meat industry and the milk industry a lot, especially in Northern Europe. We subsidize planes fuel because we want to unify Europe and make exchanges faster and, uh, seamless, but then subsidize trains, railways, you know, subsidize traveling by train at night, uh, rather than taking planes all the time. So we need to subsidize the right thing. We need businesses to do the right behavioral nudging, and we need us to start questioning as, as, um, citizens and consumers, everything, because we know, like, you can read everywhere, even in the most conservative newspaper, that is a time of crisis, of polycrisis, that there's conflict. So start questioning, start asking yourself why, why, why. Behave like a kid, you know, kids always ask why, because they want to learn. And we think that we, when we turn 30, we are grownups and there's nothing more to learn. Like, yeah, this is what I know, don't challenge me. That's also the mindset behind not wanting immigrants, not wanting things to change because you're just like, this is the life I know. And I don't want to know that what I've known so far might be wrong. I just want to stick with what I know. And instead it's not gonna work. Like this is just a, a path to destruction.

Speaking of a new path, we met in Lisbon at the Space Economy Summit and Beyond Earth, Space and Sustainability in Orbit and Beyond. Were the big topics of conversation. As humanity in a way looks at leaving Earth behind, what do you think will be the key considerations businesses on the planet need to keep in mind when moving into space?

Yes, I was invited to the conference because of the work that I do in circular economy, and I thought it was a great idea to step out of my comfort zone and the traditional, uh, conferences I go to that are usually on sustainability and try to see another industry, another perspective. And I was very satisfied with what I saw because think of the, um, uh, spaceship as closed system where the more waste you produce, the less space you have to breathe, to live, to move. And it's already very confined. It's already very hostile for life. It's the same for Earth. It's the same for a ship. It's the same for like, uh, Ellen MacArthur that's founded the foundation that popularizes the circular economy model everywhere in the world. She used to be a sailor, a solo sailor. So she knew that what she had to do on a boat to preserve herself for many days out at sea is what we need to do on the Earth to preserve the life we have on Earth. What I've learned is that yes, it's inspiring to see people talking about creating, um, uh, molecules for medicine in space or growing grapes in space or like visions of, uh, an alternative future, but it's so costly. It's so expensive. That I don't understand why we're not re-questioning everything else in the meanwhile. I'm not saying let's not talk about space, let's just do things on Earth, because the things we explore for space are also helping us on Earth because we are using satellites to read what we do on the Earth. Like, we use satellites to know more about environmental degradation, we— to know more about how the atmosphere is heating. You know, it's heating. Like, when you want to debunk conspiracies about global warming that it's the sun just getting warmer. Now, thanks to space research, we know that the higher part of the atmosphere is not warming. It's just the, the, uh, lower part that is closer to the ground. So that means those emissions, those heating emissions, they come from the ground, they come from us, they don't come from the sun. This is something that we know from space, that we learned about the Earth from space. But also, uh, when the Apollo missions photographed the Earth from the moon in 68, 69, I don't remember, but that's when we learned that we were just like in a blue marbley space floating and there's nothing around us. There's blue and darkness. There's black, pitch black and darkness. And so we need to preserve what we have. That's what fueled the environmental movement. This is why space is so important because you need to zoom out, like everything, you know, when you're running your business and you need to change, you need to zoom out and see it from the outside and say, oh wait, what can I do differently? This is the same reason that we travel. We travel, we go to a different place. We see how they do things differently there, and then we can start questioning what we do. That's what made me question a lot of things that I consider normal in the working environment in Italy, especially the way sometimes, sometimes women are treated. I traveled, I worked abroad, then I came back and I was like, wait, wait a second, let's change the way we relate to women in the business because I've worked with international settings where this doesn't happen just because people come from many different walks of life and you think you tend to respect diversity more, you tend to equalize more. So then when you zoom out, you're able to see what's the problem within. Um, and so yeah, it was really inspiring to, to hear all these businesses talking about what you can do in space, but also what you can do on Earth thanks to space. There is this amazing tool that, uh, Al Gore developed that is called Climate Trace, and they're trying to use environmental data, datasets from, different countries, but also satellite vision to see where the methane emissions are happening and what is causing the emissions, whether it's a landfill where the products are degrading or whether it's a power plant, whether it's a, a very common shipping route that, uh, emits a lot. Like another thing would be to make shipping circular, like a, a ship, a boat. It's like, it's like another allegory of like something that is confining space instead of ships polluting, why can't we make them circular or even having a good impact on the environment? Why should ships pollute with like just wasting at sea, whatever they consume? Why can't you transform it into something that is beneficial for nature? So I think, yeah, looking at space helps us having, uh, a more systemic perspective of what we have on Earth. And so also, uh, provide inspiration. I think in the environmental sector, lots of times we're very rational. And what we miss is the fascination, uh, the spirituality sometimes, just the emotional side of the inspirational side of change. And so we're just like, yeah, these are the numbers and we need to change because this is what's gonna happen. And it's all doom and gloom. But then, yes, it is like that, but then you're not changing people's minds with fear, you know, or yes, I mean, you can, but it's not very effective. You, you, you'd rather change them with a new inspiration, with a new vision, with new imagination.

Coming back to our blue marble, then you've traveled in so many places across the world and seen changes there. What would you say is the most forward-thinking place or the country where a lot of the exciting things are happening now? And we should certainly keep a close eye on.

Okay. Everything I was saying now can be controversial.

Go for it.

I wouldn't say that there is one specific place that is better than anything else or is more inspiring, but for example, in China, I've seen how they change from zero recycling or like very limited informal recycling done by the less affluent on the road, the, like, the people that just collect scraps to resell them for some small amounts of money, to a system where, like, from one month to the other, my international ex- But France, they were afraid of throwing a bottle of glass with a slice of lemon inside just because they would be fine because one is a perishable and the other one is glass, you know, they created a system and they roll it out. And with this, with this model of like piloting in one area and then expanding and then like rolling it out far and wide. But that was so sudden that it happened and they were able to train all the people that work with the big compounds to be there and be the guard for this process and and like they rolled out even leaflets to, uh, guide everybody in this change. So they made it work in such a short time. You know, in Europe we have a different political system. We debate things a lot and this debate is very healthy, but then it can also be polluted by lobbying. And so it can slow down progress even in the fields where it's needed the most. It slows it down so much. And we're seeing the lobbying again now, going back to the automotive industry against this big change, because we've been very ambitious with our final objectives a few years ago, and now we're like, No, but we cannot electrify so fast. Like we need to rethink the system. That's lobbying basically. Then I've seen, for example, in Singapore, how society is designed to prevent people from giving into their, some instinct that we naturally have to defend our people, our community. So people are like divided into districts so that you cannot create just one community of one people. In one area and like these communities are competing with each other, but you need to be spread out and mixed because then from the mix, uh, innovation happens from inspiring each other. So there's always like a nice thinking behind, or it's like, it's a city that is using a digital twin to understand how the flow of pollution coming from burning forest goes through the city and how you can prevent it, how you can change it. So using technology to guide the right type of progress. But I've seen other things that are more traditional. Like recently I've been to Georgia in the Caucasus.

Mm-hmm.

And there I've seen like how animals roam in places, like not in the biggest cities, but you see animals that roam in like common spaces without fences. And then they go back every evening to their farm. And I thought like, it's just so much more natural. I've seen dogs, I've seen dogs outside every restaurant, like stray dogs in Turkey and in, in Georgia. And for me, that's like maybe a model that can inspire us back because now everything needs an ownership. Like, that's my dog, it's only mine. The way I educate my dog is mine. That's my, my child. I educate my child in my way. All of this is like creating a lot of pressure on us on always be the best, but we do not rely on communities anymore on like kids being all together somewhere or like your animals being all together somewhere else. And then they go back and. Yes, maybe it's not so performative, but in the end, the community gives a huge support and relieves a lot of problems. And sometimes we, we become stubborn in, we need the social support from, we need the social support by, by the state. Yes, we need it for women in the workforce that cannot care for children as much as they did back in the days where they were not working, blah, blah, blah. We need all of that, but we also need to rethink the model maybe. Yes, we don't have large families anymore. So what we do with these, uh, uh, single children everywhere, like maybe they can just be together more in communities. So there's a, like anywhere you travel, you, and maybe what I'm saying is wrong. Maybe we then test it and it's wrong and it doesn't work. And then I'm happy to change my mind. But the point is like travel to get an inspiration on different things is to be receptive, be curious. Like the first thing is being curious and wanting to learn because otherwise you just like left aside because Everybody's moving somewhere, please moving places in the era of exponential acceleration and polycrisis, these buzzwords that we keep telling each other. This is true. We're like, the only constant is change. Things are changing fast. And so yeah, I, I guess the only solution is to stay curious. And then this inspiration, you can find it from everywhere you travel, not just one specific place.

Be curious and stay curious. That's a great thought to end this episode of Millennial Masters. Alicia, thank you so much for sharing your insights and your vision, and hopefully we'll catch up soon and see how things evolve.

Thank you for being curious in the first place yourself and inviting me, although I'm not maybe in the same line of business as a lot of your guests, but it was a really great conversation and thank you for your questions that have been super inspiring. They have allowed me to open up the conversation, um, in many, in multiple directions. I hope it was inspiring.

It certainly was. Thank you. Thanks for sticking till the end for another great episode of Millennial Masters. But don't keep this to yourself. Please share the wisdom with someone else, and it will also help me spread the word. Don't miss out on my book club and extra features. Get them in your inbox every week. Simply subscribe on millennialmasters.net. Catch you next week.