The unmaking of everything

This lecture was recorded on Tuesday, 17 September 2024 at the Jarvis Hall in London and is the third live instalment of the Talk 200 lecture and podcast series.

Professor Mike Shaver, Professor of Polymer Science and Director of Sustainable Futures at The University of Manchester, discusses the complex nature of our material world, with a particular focus on plastics. He examines our presumptions around plastic packaging waste, the complexity of these materials in essential objects – from credit cards to conveyor belts to cars – and the interrelationships between these materials and sustainability.

Professor Shaver explores how to recover value by unmaking these systems at end-of-life, and why unpicking this complexity is essential for a more sustainable future.

The event also included a question-and-answer session with members of the audience and those joining online, as well as a panel discussion led by Professor Colette Fagan, Vice-President for Research at Manchester, and including Dr Helen Holmes, Deputy Director of Sustainable Futures; Dr Rosa Cuéllar-Franca, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Chemical Engineering; and Dr Ciaran Lahive, a Research Fellow at the Sustainable Materials Innovation Hub.

Find out more about:

• Sustainable Futures research platform
• Sustainable Materials Innovation Hub
• Sustainable Consumption Institute
• The Tyndall Centre, Manchester
• Watch: Recycling waste in the beer industry

Hi everybody. Thanks so much for coming. And apologies for the slightly combative first slide.

It's not the end, but it is an end. And when we think about the challenges that our world faces, this is a lecture really about sustainability in its grandest sense.

We have to first understand that there is a deep interconnection between these different challenges, because climate change is not just about carbon or just about fuel.

It's also about all of those other challenges that we face. So the challenges of pollution, the challenges of the circular economy, the challenges of social justice, the challenges of war, all of these things are interconnected with each other.

And so this may seem like a pretty bad picture, but really the question that we have at The University of Manchester is: what way do we want this Earth to turn.

Do we want to turn towards our left side here and try and get the world which is genuinely, authentically sustainable?

Or do we want to just give up? And actually really what we need to do is to work together to collaborate and to build these relationships.

And today I'll talk a little bit about our work and our vision, but also how that connects so many different things that are happening around the world.

So the unmaking of everything, that sounds equally bad at the end.

But really what we have to do is to think more critically about how complex these materials are and how we can go and create value out of these systems.

So the first thing is that this is all unfortunately your fault because when you make decisions, those decisions have consequences.

So you might need a beverage, right? Early in the day that might be coffee. Late in the evening, it might be something else.

But you'll have a choice to make in the receptacle you're going to drink out of.

So you can choose this styrofoam cup here, or you could choose a ceramic mug.

So just checking with the in-personalities, how many people would choose the styrofoam
cup?

One, okay? That's good.

I mean who would choose the ceramic mug?

Lots of people. And by the way, the people that didn't raise their hand at either of those times, those are the robots, right?

They don't drink at all.

When did I raise my hand, though?

I raised my hand for the styrofoam cup.

Well that seems illogical, right?

But when we actually think about the energy embedded in these materials, we realise that we can make transport used and disposed of over 500 of these styrofoam cups for the energetic cost of a single ceramic mug.

Right? And when we think about that, that's because we have to dig up some clay from the ground.

We have to fire a kiln up to a high temperature. We have to make that mug.

We've got to transport it to, we're in London, so I'll say, Waitrose. You're on Waitrose crowd.

And then you've got to pick it up from Waitrose. You've got to then bring it back home, right?

And all of those steps have an energetic cost.

Now you may be saying: "Well, but there's a difference here. I would throw away my styrofoam cup and I would reuse my ceramic mug."

And the question really is: "Well, are you going to wash it afterwards?"

Because if we need to make some detergent, we need to heat some water up and we need to clean the detergent under that water afterwards.

That's the energetic cost of two styrofoam cups.

And so what is the sustainable solution? Well, actually, if you were to go into any professor's office at The University of Manchester, you would see an unwashed, gross mug that has had about 500 coffees in it, right?

And that is because we really care about sustainability.

But the reality is that these materials are so important to minimising our footprint.

When we think about packaging waste, packaging waste would quadruple if we don't have plastics.

Foods to spoilage would double if we don't have plastics.

Vehicles would be heavier and our petrol consumption would double if we don't have plastics light-mating these vehicles.

And of course, the insulation we used to previously keep our houses warm and now increasingly keep our houses cool.

It would increase energy costs by 1.5 times.

So this has been estimated to be 583 million giga-joules of energy per year.

That's a relatively meaningless number. But if we convert that into the barrel of oil, which we do have a concept of, it's 100 million barrels of oil each year, which are saved by plastics.

So why do we have this dependency on plastics? Why is this addiction so clear?

Well, the first thing we have to do is to recognise that in any system these materials are playing essential roles.

And so if we think about where plastics are most demonised, right, the grocery store, we go in, we're like, oh my gosh, waste conundrum.

But that material has absolutely transformed our system for food provision.

It increases food shelf life, therefore decreasing food waste, it improves food safety.

So any time we think about an alternative material, we must ensure that whatever provision we're doing, whatever we're packaging this in, has to keep that same function.

So plastics are these diverse materials that have these important functions.

But of course, many of the things that we have done with plastic are not good.

So we might want to keep all of those things recycling, right? So you're going to go home and you're going to try and have a package which is recyclable.

But at some point in time, a marketing person, and apologies if there is a marketing person in the audience. But that tray up at the top left, that meat is demonstrably sexier.

And a marketing person figured out that when you take meat and you put it on a black background, well, you can actually sell it for more money.

But that has a consequence because that black package is less recyclable than the white package, right?

And we have a consequence both in terms of sorting in the system and in terms of keeping that material in its highest value condition.

And so that's something we need to stop doing.

But the challenge with that is that these materials, which might look like a plastic package, are exceptionally complex.

And we think of them as simple, but actually they're exceptionally well tuned.

Because this is not just one thing. This is a plastic tray, a plastic reinforced paper tray, perhaps, if you're looking at a modern material.

A plastic laminated film, which looks like just a plastic sheet, but actually it's five microns in layers of different materials with different functions.

We have adhesives and heat seals that are keeping that all together.

And then maybe that paper label, which actually to keep it waterproof, has a bit of plastic on it as well.

And of course underneath that meat is that adsorbent plastic mesh, right?

And so what do we want?

Well we want these things to be kept in our highest value condition.

We want these materials to be recycled.

And of course we can get someone in their home to rinse out that tray and put it into the recycling bin.

No one is rinsing meat juice.

That's about an adsorbent mesh.

And so when we as scientists, as academics, but also in industry, think about how these materials need to be designed.

We have to design them around social papers, not around wishful thinking.

And that is the key to unlocking change within that system.

And so we might go and step back and say, well okay, sure, that's all fine and good.

Well why don't we just start using different materials?

And so maybe instead of that styrofoam cup, we wanted to use a paper cup instead.

And actually that paper cup has a higher carbon footprint than that styrofoam cup.

But when we think about carbon footprint, we actually have to think about the whole use case scenario.

So let's say I wanted to run a lemonade stand.

And if you're at one of our events in Manchester, then you can actually maybe come to a lemonade stand that we run.

You can see that we've got 100, 1.84 kilograms of CO2 per kilogram of lemonade compared to about 6.2 kilograms of CO2 per kilogram of paper cups.

Which is about three times higher than the styrofoam cups.

Okay, so that all seems like we really have to get the packaging right.

But none of us drink lemonade.

I know what I'm addicted to and that's this.

And if I think about coffee instead, actually I have 17.5 kilograms of CO2 in a similar espresso shop.

And I have 85.4 kilograms of CO2 in the latte.

If carbon is everything, then we really have to understand how that integrates with the system that it exists in.

Integrate with those materials instead of treating those things in a solution.

And when we think beyond the grocery store, we suddenly realise that we have a huge challenge on our hands.

So this is a group called Extinction Rebellion.

I talked to the Mavo plastic and not these guys, they were busy.

But one of the things of this group is that in the past they were sort of a zero plastic group.

An advocacy group that wanted us to have zero plastic in the world.

But of course what they didn't realise is that these plastics were in their textiles and their PPE and their footwear and their electronics and even in the adhesive that is attaching this gentleman's hand to the London Stock Exchange.

And the complexity of our plastic world and these polymers that we depend upon go much further than our addiction to plastic packaging.

So our integration of these and the things that we value, well that doesn't mean that these are materials sent from heaven and we need to keep this addiction.

I'm not a plastic apologist.

We actually have huge problems with this plastic system, but we have to equally recognise the importance of it.

And so when we think about where these are really challenging, well we have large objects which are littered.

We have the breakdown of these materials forming micro and nano plastics in our environment.

We have plastic producers often deflecting criticism and not taking ownership of their part of the problem.

All of these things coming together in a situation where we really have inadequate waste management facilities for these materials.

And that's because we often have this priority of economy over environment.

And so what does this actually mean for the broader system?

Well the reality is that this view that we need a more sustainable material or we need something which is going to be a penisé or a silver bullet.

Well that simply is not true. There is no such thing as a sustainable material.

When we think about the future, what we have to first recognise is that these plastics hold massive societal benefit.

And if we don't recognise that societal benefit, we're going to have severe unintended consequences.

We also have to recognise that alternatives often have a higher carbon footprint.

And we can't try and address a waste problem by introducing a problem in another bit of our sustainable system.

We have to recognise that plastics are diverse and this problem goes well beyond grocery stores.

And that we need solutions which are integrated together that are tuned towards those different states of material.

So we need to reuse things, we need to recycle things, we need to deconstruct things.

And if we can't do anything else then we might be able to pyrolyse those things.

But the thing we must not do is to release that material into the environment.

And so when we think about our plastic free world, it's actually that there are grave consequences about trying to imagine a future without this material.

But if we don't deal with the problems that we have with its environmental consequences, we have equally grave consequences in terms of this extraction and pollution.

So what do we do?

Well the reality is what we need is some sort of a sustainable system.

So a sustainable material only exists in a sustainable system which can recover its value, which can control its release and where we can recover that value from all plastic to go through the system.

And of course our work, my research is focused on plastics, but the same concept could be and should be applied to all materials with flow throughout lives.

And that is the concept of the unmaking of everything.

If you're going to remember one thing from this chat, it's this.

It does not matter if something is reusable or recyclable or compostable, if it is not reused, recycled or composted.

So the first thing we have to do is think about that system using past tense terminology and stop wishfully thinking about what might happen to a material and assuring that that faith is realised.

So what are we going to do about this? It's a really hard problem.

But luckily, you know, six years ago I joined The University of Manchester and lots of brilliant colleagues and together we're trying to address some of these challenges.

And so I'm going to pick up just a few of the things that we're doing to try and pick up solutions to subsets of these challenges just to give you a bit of a story about how we're working on this.

So the first project of I just go back. So this is this central thing, which is a project which we started four years ago called 'one bid to rule them all'.

And so this that started as a Lord of the Rings joke is now going to be something which ends up on my grave stuff.

But really what this is is an integration of social science and economics and material science is looking at what happens in household waste management.

During the pandemic, we got the fun task of actually getting outside our homes and going to sort through other people's waste.

So when I say our team is garbage, this is actually a positive view.

But really this is a remarkable community of people who are working together to try and solve these challenges.

And what's great about the people we get to work with, the students at The University of Manchester, is they literally fight with each other for the privilege to go to advance to sort through other people's waste.

It's quite a remarkable thing.

But what was really important about this is the ability to integrate on understanding of material flows.

So quantify all of the different materials which were in the homes of the bins in the homes of the people who were part of this trial.

But also the fascinating decisions which were being made about these materials, right?

This picture in the bottom right here where someone has chopped off the top of a tetra- pack curtain because obviously that bit is plastic for the rest of the time.

And what we have is a deep and detailed map on both social practice and material flow.

So what does that actually allow us to do?

Well, it actually allows us to look at the supply chain at these materials in a very different way.

And so in the past when we think about plastic waste management, we demonise three groups, right?

We say, okay, I put this in my bin, it goes to a waste management company, and that waste management company probably does something dumb with it.

And they send it to landfill, they send it to a recycler, and that's the bit of the system.

But actually the things that are happening are a result of decisions which are made across the supply chain.

And so by looking across the supply chain, we suddenly see lots of different opportunities to make design decisions which are improving sustainability.

And one of the simplest that I just walked through is in the bottom right-hand corner here.

So what if you don't mandate sort of all of these systems being the same, but you mandate material segregation?

And so one of the thought experiments I guess we did was on looking at segregating food grade bottles to being either made of PET or HDPE.

So that's C or no.

Non-food bottles are only PP or other, but we don't put PET or HDPE in those systems.

Food grade pots, tubs, and trays are only PET or PP, and the non-food pots, tubs, and trays are only HDPE.

The decisions that a waste management company can now make increases that value dramatically.

So the waste management company instead of losing money by recycling can make money by recycling.

You tie an environmental outcome to an economic outcome, and then you incite change across the system.

The second thing that I wanted to look at was instead of thinking about those packages to think about another material flow.

So some years ago now we were approached by MasterCard, and their CEO had got up on stage and announced the world's first biodegradable credit card.

When it biodegraded it released the barium from the magnetic strip and the 18 metals in the chip set into the environment causing grave toxicological damage.

It was an atrocious idea.

They figured this out after the CEO had got up on stage and then approached us to say, "Well, what would a sustainable card actually look like?"

And actually the key is they were degrading something and they were releasing metals into the environment.

Because if we switch the resin from something which is called PVCs, since it's the same material that would be in your windows at home, and switch it to a material which is called TechGee, well that actually unlocks a new fate.

We can now do a deconstruction of that card. We call that process depolymerisation.

And that depolymerisation actually allows us to create a circular card.

And so this is just an example of one of our scale up processes.

So we did about 300 credit cards in a single batch here.

And you get all of these different materials.

And what's really interesting is I can go and create a bunch of monomers and these are materials which I can use to make a brand new credit card that has the exact same properties as the first credit card.

But this is not driven by the economics of doing that polymer recycling.

It's actually all the bits on the right.

So if we don't actually do anything in that reactor, we can recover a full chip.

We can actually reuse that chip, or if we want to just do that really quickly, we can recover all of those different materials and reuse those materials.

And by thinking about that card as a system, we suddenly can unlock economic value which goes well beyond the plastic recycling.

And so by considering not only just the plastic recycling system and extending that to a multi-material, we unlock economic value and we drive that forward.

So what's next? Well, next really, we have to go to an even more complex system.

And by a more complex system, we're really looking at a sense of scale.

And so in terms of bottles, there's 580 billion plastic bottles which are put on the market each year.

That's about 8.2 million tons.

And each one of those is going through tiny roots.

So if you put your, if you want some good news, right, if you put your bottle in the recycling bin in the UK, it will be recycled.

Have confidence in it.

Okay?

If we look at the credit cards, well, we actually have 6 billion credit cards, not just credit cards, but also hotel cards or any of those limited cards put on the market each year.

That's 30,000 tons.

So actually, even though that's a more complex material flow, it's actually not that much material compared to the box.

And then we look at cars.

Cars have 92 million vehicles put on the market each year.

That's 173 million tons of material, and that's 15% polymers by weight.

So we actually have more plastic material in the cars than we do with the bottles.

And so I was fortunate enough to get awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering Chair to work with an ambitious electric vehicle company called PULSE there.

And if we think about, you know, I pitched to them, oh, okay, we can do this for a credit card.

Oh, cars are really hard, right?

So if we think about this car as a multi-material, we suddenly realise that we have a huge range of different materials.

We need to be able to separate those out.

Each of them is going to have a different fate.

And I have co-mingled with that glass and metal and so many different components that it becomes exceptionally difficult to recover value.

Not only that, this is a company because, you know, if we want to go and recycle a milk bottle and put it into a milk bottle, well, that's a technical challenge, but to recycle a milk bottle and to put it into a car, well, I have a higher spec.

I need to make sure that that is safe. I need to ensure that that still maintains the integrity of that car and that's still going to be good to use for the entire lifetime of that vehicle.

And so this is an exceptional challenge that we're working on now to try and make this as low-carbon footprint and as circular a vehicle as possible.

Now, I presented this as we are developing solutions. But what's really important to remember is that we are constrained by the laws of physics.

And the laws of physics say that we always will have lots.

And so the reduction of consumption is still going to be very important for a sustainable future. But we have to recognise that the limitation in infinite recycling, infinite reuse, infinite composting, and those things which simply will not happen, that breaks the laws of physics.

And so we have to have a solution where we think about those transitions in as sustainable a way possible.

So I talked about that sustainable system. But in fact, what we need to unmake everything is interconnected systems which work together with each other.

And so we imagine this circular economy as an ideal. We want to be able to take that bottle and turn it into another bottle.

But actually what we need to be thinking about is what we're calling a spiral economy.

And so how does that bottle turn into our car? And how does that car turn into a chair? And how does that chair turn into, let's say, ID Manchester?

So if we want to go to that point, we basically can have different intersectional transitions which allow us to keep those materials in their highest value condition.

And when we get to the built environment, when we go and sequester that carbon in something like ID Manchester, which is going to be a harbinger for innovation for the next 200 years, we can then take those materials and deep memorise those, take those back to a molecular form so that we can go and put those back into new systems.

That spiral economy is about transitioning in the most sustainable way possible. Those materials flow across those systems.

Now, that means we have new words, right? And so I talked about the importance of past tense terminology.

And so what do we need? Well, we need to ensure that all materials which come through our lives are valued.

We need to ensure that all materials that come through our lives can be unmade. And that's so important from a design perspective.

And the key out of both of those is we reduce, if not remove, our addiction to extracting urgent resources from our planet. And that is the key.

And that's the key to unmaking of everything is when walking that economic value and preventing extraction.

So the next 200 years, where are we going? Well, so many of you in the audience will have come and travelled here today.

You probably were like, this is going to be a cool lecture, so I want to wear my best jeans. I did that.

And then you're looking for your best jeans and you realise that they're dirty, right? And so you've got to put them in the washing machine and then maybe the dryer or maybe you've hung them outside.

And you realise that you don't even know where this place is. So you grab your phone and you're saying, well, I need to look on Google Maps where I'm going.

And so you contact the server farm where the information is stored and you connect and try and figure out what's going to go on at the server farm so you know where you're going.

And of course, because it's a sustainability event, you're taking public transportation. Yeah, maybe.

And so you're taking that public transportation all to come to this place here that we're sitting in.

If we think about the complexity of the car and that we look at the complexity of the multi materials which are on the screen here, we realise how grand a challenge that we have.

But that is the vision for the next 200 years. We remove our addiction to extraction. We recover value from all of these material flows.

And we retain value in some of these objects, some of them as components, some of them as materials, and some of them as molecules, by unmaking the things that create our world.

Thank you.