A wealth of waste: how the UK is giving a new lease of life to everyday items

From slashing the amount of unwanted food at restaurants to facial scrubs that use coffee grounds and clothes made from plastic bottles, efforts to reduce, recycle or repurpose waste products are gaining momentum in Britain. One company looking to change the UK’s love affair with the throwaway economy is Winnow, which helps businesses to cut food waste and their carbon footprint. Set up in 2013 by Marc Zornes and Kevin Duffy, Winnow's systems help chefs in large businesses – such as hotels, contract caterers and cruise ships – in 45 countries, including the UAE, run more profitable and sustainable kitchens. Using Winnow Vision, an artificial intelligence-enabled system, chefs log and weigh any food discarded into a tech-enabled bin that houses a motion sensor camera and connected scale, automatically recognises more than 600 food types. Chefs receive daily, weekly and monthly reports on what meals are going to waste so that menus can be adapted, with businesses typically cutting waste by 50 per cent within 12 to 24 months, says David Jackson, head of public affairs at Winnow. Co-founder Mr Zornes came up with the concept after conducting food supply chain research in a previous role at McKinsey Global Institute, concluding that close to a third of all food grown globally ends up not being eaten – with the food wasted worth $1 trillion annually. “Simply put, Winnow believes food is too valuable to waste and that technology can help us solve the food waste problem,” Mr Jackson says. "Reducing food waste ... will be critical if we are to achieve our climate goals. It’s estimated that the potential value unlocked by AI in helping design out waste in a circular economy for food is up to $127 billion a year in 2030. "Eliminating waste leads to reductions in energy, labour and disposal costs related to food you're no longer wasting, the impact is even more compelling. Reducing food waste is one of the most important things you can do for the planet as it impacts deforestation, water scarcity, hunger and greenhouse gases." While reducing consumption is one route towards a circular economy, redesigning products to be more durable, reusable, repairable and recyclable, and therefore kept in circulation for as long as possible, is key, says Fiona Charnley, professor of Innovation at University of Exeter in the UK. As co-director at the Exeter Centre for the Circular Economy, Ms Charnley also leads the National Interdisciplinary Circular Economy Research programme (Nicer) – a £30 million government-funded initiative to accelerate the UK towards a circular economy. “The UK government sees the opportunity that the circular economy presents to industry to radically change our existing industrial system, to move away from the linear take-make-waste economy, towards an economy where we reuse or retain the value that's in our products, assets and resources,” Ms Charnley tells The National . “Ideally you want to mimic nature where the waste from one system feeds another so that things naturally flow between systems, as opposed to ultimately ending up in landfill where they can't be regenerated.” Russia's invasion of Ukraine only amplifies the need for a circular economy, Ms Charnley says, as it “emphasises our reliance on global supply chains”. "But if we moved to a circular economy, it would reduce our reliance because we would have a ready source of materials that we could circulate ourselves, relying on more localised manufacture and production. [The Ukraine war] really emphasises the link between the circular economy and resilience," she says. Our wasteful way of living right now has enormous impact on planet-warming emissions, according to research from organisation Circle Economy, which calculated more than half a trillion tonnes of virgin materials have been consumed since the 2015 Paris climate deal. From clothing to food, planes to buildings, the Circle Economy estimates that 70 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions are linked to the manufacturing and use of products. But in its annual report on the state of the world's use of materials, researchers said national climate pledges to reduce emissions focus narrowly on fossil fuel use and ignore the mounting global appetite for stuff. "What if we reimagine our relationship with stuff, what would that bring us? Actually, it is quite significant," says Matthew Fraser, head of research at Circle Economy. One company addressing this is skincare brand UpCircle. Every day a courier visits 25 cafes in London and collects about 100 kilograms of coffee grounds that would otherwise be thrown away. Set up six years ago by Anna Brightman and her brother Will Brightman, the company reuses the coffee grounds to make beauty products, adding ingredients such as camomile infusions or a powder made from olive stones. "It was my brother who had the initial inspiration when asking out of curiosity at the coffee shop where he was going every day what happened to the coffee grounds," says Ms Brightman, who used to work for a multinational. "He was shocked to learn the coffee was disposed of at a landfill and they had to pay on top for it." If the global economy were more circular, reducing resource extraction and consumption by 28 per cent, then the world could meet the Paris warming target of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, the Circle Economy report says. But only a third of nations' climate pledges mention the circular economy as part of their emissions goals, the report says, warning that humanity is consuming 70 per cent more virgin materials than the world can safely replenish. Looking at global material flows based on national import and export figures and translating them into estimates of materials used – and reused – annual resource use has grown from 89.8 billion tonnes in 2016 to more than 100 billion tonnes in 2019 and estimated it at 101.4 billion last year. Almost all of the materials extracted go to waste, with only 8.6 per cent of materials recycled in 2020, known as the circularity gap – a lower proportion than the 9.1 per cent in 2018 and a reflection of surge in global demand for more things. However, the reverse can also happen. Once UpCircle's coffee collections gained traction, "people started to contact us with all types of by-products”, such as water from making concentrated fruit juices, fading flowers and leftover chai spices, Ms Brightman says, with more than 15 now incorporated into its range. The company has now recycled 400 tonnes of coffee grounds since its inception, helping to stop the 500,000 tonnes typically discarded in the UK every year. The company sends the ingredients for repurposing at its factory in Bridport on the south-west coast of England, where a simple production process mixes coffee grounds with sugar and essential oils, then whipped shea butter and a natural preservative. The exfoliant is then poured into glass jars, with 3,000 distributed across the UK every week, with demand also growing in the US. While the burgeoning interest in repurposing food waste puts UpCircle in competition with bigger natural cosmetics brands such as the Body Shop, to shift to a fully circular economy the UK needs an army of businesses – big and small – to rethink their operations to enable change across the whole economy. “Even if one single business wants to do this, for example a high street retailer wants to embark on circular production, they cannot do it on their own,” says Ms Charnley. “Essentially, it needs other people working in logistics to bring back the stuff, an understanding of consumer behaviour and incentives to make sure that people are actually doing the right thing with that clothing at the end of its life and it needs to be able to work with recyclers and waste management experts to make sure we are retaining the value from those textiles once they come back. "So it really requires the whole value chain of any given material flow or sector to work together.” Collaboration is something on which Winnow has focused. When the company first expanded its operations to the Emirates in 2016, connected with the Ministry of Climate Change and Environment to jointly launch the UAE Food Waste Pledge, challenging hospitality companies to reduce food waste in their kitchens. Part of the UAE’s commitment to hit the global target to reduce food loss and wastage by 50 per cent by 2030 under the UN's Sustainable Development Goals, the partnership saves about 1 million meals a year in the Emirates. “Winnow has around 100 units deployed in the country’s kitchens, with the technology trusted by big brands such as Emaar, Majid Al Futtaim, IHG, AccorHotels and Hilton," says Mr Jackson. A further 50 sites are located in 10 other countries across the Middle East and North Africa region, including Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait and Oman. In total, Winnow saves 36 million meals across its 1,400 locations a year, resulting in $42 million saved already saved for the company’s clients. In turn, this prevents 61,000 tonnes of CO2 from entering the atmosphere, the equivalent of about 4,000 cars being taken off the road. With up to 20 per cent of all food purchased for commercial kitchens ending up in the bin, Winnow's ultimate ambition is to see every commercial kitchen fitted with an AI device to measure food waste. "In doing so we will solve the problem of avoidable food waste forever,” Mr Jackson says. The company aims to prevent $1bn of food waste a year by 2025. While Winnow reduces waste, entrepreneurs and designers are also looking to create value from waste with a recent exhibition at London's Design Museum called 'Waste Age' highlighting the use of agave, or sisal fibres, by Mexican designer Fernando Laposse, who studied at Central Saint Martins art school in London. Mr Laposse turns the natural fibres of the plant – traditionally used in beverages – into avant-garde furniture such as tables, benches and hammocks. He also uses colourful corncobs from his country of birth to make furniture and veneer, boosting the "circular economy" and creating jobs. The Design Museum exhibition also showcased chairs made from old fridges, creations by fashion designers, such as Stella McCartney and Phoebe English, who use recycling and furniture and building blocks made of takeaway coffee cups. In Britain alone, 2.5 billion coffee cups are thrown away each year, with their thin plastic coating making them impossible to recycle. Plastic is a global scourge with about 11 million metric tonnes of such waste ending up in bodies of water each year, and the UN expecting that volume to nearly triple by 2040. However, in the shadow of Russia’s war on Ukraine, a glimmer of hope came out of Nairobi in Kenya this month, when 175 countries agreed at the UN Environment Assembly to establish an intergovernmental committee to tackle the proliferation of plastic waste. The delegates resolved to cut such waste through recycling, sustainable package design and limiting production of virgin plastics in the first place. Further, they pledged to have a treaty in place by the end of 2024 – a fast timeline when you consider most global treaties take five to 10 years. Greenpeace describes the UN panel’s decision as a “big, bold step to end plastic pollution”. "This is a clear acknowledgement that the entire life cycle of plastic, from fossil fuel extraction to disposal, creates pollution that is harmful to people and the planet," says Graham Forbes, global plastic project lead at Greenpeace US. "This is a big step that will keep the pressure on big oil and big brands to reduce their plastic footprint and switch their business models to refill and reuse." An example of how this can be done can be found through a unique partnership between Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh and plastic protective equipment (PPE) maker Globus Group to reuse plastic waste created by the pandemic. Under the two-year project, Globus, which has produced 1 billion masks for healthcare trusts across the UK, 100 tonnes of used PPE will be transformed into pyrolysis oil, which can then be refined into new commercial products or fuel. Using a thermal heating technology at the company's Alpha Solway factory in Golborne, near Manchester, the machine heats and compacts the plastic polypropylene into large, reusable blocks. The machine "is a fundamental part of our process to repurpose and utilise waste material to achieve a circular economy", says Pete Lee, head of quality at Globus Group.

A wealth of waste: how the UK is giving a new lease of life to everyday items

Small companies are leading the charge to turn throwaway habits into a circular economy