First Mile's Climate Heroes

This extra episode of Zero 50 is released for Glasgow’s Cop26 and we are joined by Professor Mark Maslin, who is Professor of Earth System Science at UCL and says “The challenge of the 21st century is that we must learn to think and act as a global species so that we can take care of all individuals, our global species and our planet, that we rely on for everything”.

This episode of Zero50 meets the CEO of British BIDs to explore the importance of place in building sustainable futures. Our towns and cities have a huge environmental impact and greening these places will be key to meeting our future carbon goals.

The use of compostable plastic packaging has exploded in recent years, but do they actually compost at home, or in our current industrial composting infrastructure? In this episode we meet Danielle Purkiss who runs The Big Compost Experiment at UCL and we find out if compostables are a the perfect substitute for plastics or not as simple as they seem.

Recycleye, the artificial intelligence & robotics recycling company, is on a mission to codify waste identification and use machines to pick pure materials from a mixed waste stream.

We think we are using less paper, but the inkjet printer market is growing at 6% per year and we throw away billions of used cartridges per year and 80% of them are landfilled. In this episode we hear how the Ink Bin is on a mission to change the ink industry to be more sustainable and environmentally conscious.  

We put the record straight on sand extraction in this episode with author and sand activist Kiran Pereira. Sand is in everything from computers to paint and we learn how our insatiable demand for sand has huge and unseen social, biodiversity and environmental impacts.

In this episode we hear how Vancouver based Recycle-Smart use technology, waste audits and computer algorithms to make recycling more efficient.

Waste and recycling is not included in council tax for Irish householders and so companies like CityBin collect on a pay-as-you-throw basis. In this episode we learn from Gene Browne and how has persuaded homes across Ireland to recycle more by putting service first as a core value.

This episode of Wasted is on the Circular Economy and how we shift from our current linear system of Take – Make and Waste and moving to a circular economic system of production. Our guest, Dr David Greenfield is a Circular Economy Specialist and explains the state of play and future roadmap for a circular economy.