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Mars Moreira 00:01Hello everybody and welcome to the Establish podcast. This podcast is hosted by Shake Up the Establishment, and today by me: Mars. Shake Up the Establishment is a youth-led registered national nonpartisan nonprofit organization that operates within the geographical confines of what is currently known as Canada, but what is referred to by its first peoples as Turtle Island. Indigenous peoples have inhabited Turtle Island for over 10,000 years, and were the sole inhabitants of this land less than 500 years ago.Mars Moreira 00:34Now, like I said, my name is Mars—like the planet—and you can find me at @sustainable_mars on Instagram, and I am a Brazilian able-bodied, neurotypical, cisgender, light-skinned, bisexual Black woman. Oh, sorry, that was a mouthful. But I feel like it's important to mention because my identity grants me a series of privileges. I am never misgendered in public, and I might receive preferential treatment over dark skinned Black women. My socioeconomic status is also a privilege: I have had the opportunity to attend post secondary education, which many people don't have. However, my lived experience has been impacted by systematic oppression. Growing up in a marginalized community, I felt that disproportionate impacts of climate injustice at a very young age, having to flee my home due to flooding. And as an immigrant here in Canada, I have faced significant barriers to employment, which is why today I bring you this podcast—The Untold Stories in the Circular Economy—where we will address climate mitigation and the importance of inclusive employment in the transition to a just and circular economy. Mars Moreira 01:54But before we get into it, I want to acknowledge that I currently live, work, and play in the unsurrendered lands of the Musqueam, Tsleil-waututh, and Squamish peoples. Now, if you're tuning in to this podcast, maybe you already know about the greenhouse gas effect and the climate emergency. But if you don't, the greenhouse effect is the way in which heat is trapped close to the Earth's surface by greenhouse gases, allowing mild temperatures to prevail on our planet, creating optimal conditions for life. But the issue is that in the last century, humans have been interfering with this process, mainly through burning fossil fuels and adding very high amounts of carbon dioxide to the air. And this is trapping extra heat near the Earth's surface, causing temperatures to rise at very fast rates, causing extreme weather events, rising sea levels, food supplies, disruptions, increased wildfires, and many other things. Now, given this current global situation, it is well understood that we need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, if we are to mitigate those negative impacts. Mars Moreira 03:00And this may come as a surprise to you but the fourth biggest source of global greenhouse gas emissions is waste, according to the European Commission. Just think about the thousands of landfills spread across the country. In what we today call Canada, these landfills are responsible for 23 percent—almost one-fourth—of national methane emissions, and methane's potential for global warming is 25 times higher than that of carbon dioxide. Now, think about all the resource inputs that have to go into making products that will end up in landfills. Consider food, clothes, appliances, toys, or otherwise. The inputs to make these products include resource extraction, transportation, manufacturing, assembly, retail; all of which are operations that require energy, and most likely burning fossil fuels, thus leading to greenhouse gas emissions. Mars Moreira 03:54So to summarize this idea and understand the impact of waste on climate change, I want you to think of the emissions generated when, one; a product is first created, and then two; the emissions generated when that same product is in a landfill. For an example, in the case of food and food only, the stats tell us that globally, one-third of all human made greenhouse gas emissions are caused by food production. But then 17 percent of all that food that is available to consumers is wasted annually, producing an additional amount of greenhouse gas emission, which actually accounts for 8 percent. Waste and overproduction causes a lot of greenhouse gas emissions, thus creating solutions that focus on waste prevention and waste management is key. Mars Moreira 04:37And to tackle this issue, new business models such as the circular economy are being developed. Circular models arose in opposition to our current take-make-consume-throwaway linear economy models. In our current business models, revenues come from selling as many products as possible. So the producers—the big corporations—have incentive to design products that have a relatively short lifespan; products that will break, products that won't work after a while, clothes that will rip faster, in order to continuously produce and sell new products and make more money. And the old products end up in landfills or are incinerated, quickly destroying the value that was created in the manufacturing process. Mars Moreira 05:19And in the circular economy, waste is designed out of the products' life cycle. Isn't that genius? After the consumer has used a product—after you have used a product, after I have used a product—it is either repaired, reused, refurbished, remanufactured or recycled at the end. Mars Moreira 05:38To explore this topic in depth, I wanted to invite a special guest to our podcast today. Her name is Tamara Schulman, she has consulted with and contributed to the success of over 50 organizations across public and business sectors for sustainability projects, including circular jobs development, zero waste planning and food waste prevention. Mars Moreira 06:00Hello Tamera, thank you so much for making the time to join me today and come to the Establish podcast. How are you doing?Tamara Schulman 06:06I'm well, thank you for having me.Mars Moreira 06:08When and how did you start working in a circular economy space and what is your motivation?Tamara Schulman 06:13When I was 15, I went away to outdoor school and caught the sustainability bug. We learned about global warming and the hole in the ozone and all of these different issues. And I just wanted to be part of the solution since then. Mars Moreira 06:29Wow, that's amazing. It 15 years old, starting early.Tamara Schulman 06:32It used to be a hunter-fisher camp. So on Thursdays, we went out and shot clay birds with .22, so it's a bit of a hybrid experience. But the messages around the importance of sustainability and how many people have been working on this front, you know, since the early Earth Days, and even before when you take it into broader cultural context, it's like this is an ongoing thing of how we steward the land and how we create healthy environments for for people and other sentient beings. So it caught hard.Mars Moreira 07:05Yeah, no, I'm glad we have people like you, like me, like our listeners, maybe that are interested in being part of that solution. Now, in your own words, can you maybe define what the circular economy is?Tamara Schulman 07:17I think of it as looking at the amount of resources that we have living on one finite planet, and how do we move materials around in a way that an output to one system is an input to another system, and we have those tighter loops. And that factors into how we design our products, how we extend the life of them, which we'll talk about more, and also how we deal with materials at end of life in making that loop continue forth.Mars Moreira 07:45Now in terms of how the circular economy can be like a solution to climate change and towards climate mitigation, what are your thoughts there on like, the role it plays?Tamara Schulman 07:55It plays a really central role. And just to go back a little bit, I started within a broader sustainability arena, and then got really involved in waste reduction and recycling; displacing those virgin inputs and having recycled content was the first part of some of the work that I did. And very quickly, when you start looking upstream, you realize we're not using materials and resources in a way that allows us to do that one planet living, right. If you look at Overshoot Day and some of the other resources out there in North America, we're using up four or five times more resources than what our planet can accommodate. We can do a lot around climate mitigation related to buildings and transportation. But 45 percent of our postconsumer carbon footprint is actually connected to the products that have raw ingredients, that have packaging that gets transported and used. And so that is a huge part of our carbon footprint that we need to manage by how we use our consumer goods and our other resources.Mars Moreira 08:56I was just reading a study and it said that 40 percent of net zero goals for industries of plastic, steel, aluminium could be reached if we switch to circular solutions.Tamara Schulman 09:10And this isn't new info, right? If you look at the work that has been done with Story of Stuff, and so many other different movements over the last 20, 30 years, they made it really clear that 90 percent of what we buy gets tossed within six months, right? We need to have those smarter consumer choices. We need to find a way to do it so that it's accessible and see it through an equity lens, as we're looking at how resources are distributed in our society. But ultimately, we need to figure out how to be smarter and there's a lot of places we can draw on from that, you know, across cultures and across you know, our different past practices while keeping our quality of life at a certain level and looking at things like a happiness indicator, which is another way of sort of measuring what gives us quality of life other than just what we go out and buy. Mars Moreira 09:55That is mind blowing. I had no idea—so 90 percent of all things we buy get tossed in six months?Tamara Schulman 10:02And if you think about the instant gratification that so many of us get, and no one's exempt from it, right, we're all continuing to reprogram and learn and unlearn how to move through differently. We all need certain basic items, but a lot of things we go in and get for that instant gratification. And there's just got to be more to it than that.Mars Moreira 10:22Would you mind telling our listeners about when you worked with the Zero Waste station at a festival featuring Sarah McLachlan, and how that was pivotal for you in terms of understanding what solutions you wanted to create with your career?Tamara Schulman 10:37Well, I spent the first decade of my career in the San Francisco Bay Area, I worked at an organization called StopWaste.org. And I got to develop programs and policies related to waste reduction. And so when I moved back up to the Vancouver region, some of the diversion efforts were just getting out of the gate around organics, diversion and management, around having zero waste stations at public events, etc. So I was working for public sector and an opportunity came up to host Lilith Fair, which is a pretty well known women's festival that ran and Sarah McLachlan is local and she was able to bring some big names in, like Alanis Morissette and Erykah Badu, and we had about two and a half weeks to get this together. And so we worked with other organizations, and we pulled together the Zero Waste stations, the signage, the volunteers, and the monitors. And this was what, 2009? So it was still pretty new for this region, it was quite the journey, right? We had over 70 people involved with different shifts, we were working with the hauler, and getting all the materials moved. And, you know, it was incredibly rewarding to see all the diversion happen. But that and some of the other recycling efforts, we were starting to be more aware that creating less in the first place—even of any material generated—including the recycling and the compostables, was actually the more important goal to have. From the carbon footprint reduction all the way through, you know, materials management overall. Tamara Schulman 12:11And then from there things like, you know, the UN Sustainable Development Goals came out in late 2015, a handful of years later and looked at, you know, one-third of our food being wasted globally. And we started to look big picture at how important it is—even groups like World Wildlife Fund got involved in that, and said, "Oh, my gosh, we're losing biodiversity globally, because of how much agriculture we need, and food we need." So let's actually look at the food waste in the first place, right? There were a lot of things that have continued to evolve, since those days where we were trying to just recycle as much as we could and try to add organics. Mars Moreira 12:48Yeah, of course. So what I'm hearing is that like waste prevention is the first step, is what we should be thinking about, before recycling even. Tamara Schulman 12:56Yeah, and that's where there's the cost savings, right? If you're smart about how you use the resources that you do have, you actually can save money over time. And that's where whether it's buying something in bulk—you know, you do need some upfront, right, if somebody's buying like the bigger bags of beans and rice and knows how to cook them—and you know, and then adds in flavors and special things from there, right that can actually have value financially as well as for health and other things just as one example. And then for businesses, right, there's a looking at how we can have reusable and more durable goods and goods that can be disassembled and repaired more easily and shared. These are some of the things that give the the more active financial cost savings and that have a community building element and can, you know, ultimately help to reduce our carbon footprint and help us with the the one planet living.Mars Moreira 13:45I love that you're already speaking to what sort of circular business models are, like some examples of them. And it's great segue for my next question. But before we go there, I want to quote one of your articles here that you were a co-author in, actually: 59 percent of all the waste in B.C. currently is recycled, but the rest of it—which is great, right? It's great that we're recycling so much—but then the rest of it is either going to landfills, or according to your article, 260,000 tons are being incinerated.Tamara Schulman 14:20Across Canada, in other locations, we are having disposal crises, right? If you look at Vancouver Island, you look at city of Toronto, you look at different places where there's limited space available. It's hard to cite a new landfill or any kind of disposal facility, right? So that's moving us towards the push to figure out how to make waste prevention and diversion happen in a more comprehensive way. Never waste a good crisis, right? In Nova Scotia in the late 90s, they had a landfill that had some leachate issues into clean water and drinking water and when they redesigned the landfill and figured out what they were going to do first disposal, they banned organics, they banned certain hazardous materials, and they required processing of everything before it went into the landfill. And so that's where you have these more developed programs as a result of something big like that happening, right? So it can be challenging to figure out how to get the resources for these things. But when you have something like a disposal facility, it's a legacy that has a financial tie to it. And we don't tend to factor those costs in when we're just looking at the dollar, the amount per ton that goes to a landfill or to an incinerator, right? We're thinking more short term now. Mars Moreira 15:39Okay, that's a really good example about Nova Scotia. Now, maybe we can move on and talk about the types of circular business models. And you know, you spoke to reuse and recycling and repair models. Can we define a circular business as any business that sort of incorporates, share, reuse, repair into their operations? Or is there more to it?Tamara Schulman 16:02And I think the conversation around that's really evolving as more people get familiar with the idea of having a circular economy or having a circular approach. There are core circular businesses, right, that are either really focused on changing product design, extending the life through the sharing, economy, reuse, repair, anything that extends the life. Those would be the core circular businesses, because it's very clear to show how they fit into those pieces. There are more businesses that have circular jobs or circular approaches within an aspect of their business. And we want to encourage that, as everybody is looking at how to close that loop more efficiently. There's many ways that any business can approach how they do their work, and help to make those shifts. There's a caution, which is to not have it be leveraged for greenwashing. There needs to be the right qualifiers in place, especially when the circular jobs aren't core but they're more enabling. And they're, you know, there's an aspect of circularity, but there's still work to be done. That said, we want to have these larger businesses get on board, and start making those shift and keeping up with what a lot of the leading consumers and conscientious folks are wanting from the marketplace, as they find ways to add a local economy element, more resilience, and get the best use out of the products and materials that we're using.Mars Moreira 17:29Could you give us an example of a circular initiative or circular business that you have worked with? Maybe give us two examples, one of them more like a core circular business and another one that you might think that has circular approaches in their operations. I can start—I can mention Solarium. Solarium is a carpet company, and they lease carpet tiles instead of selling carpet for your whole home. And so whenever you have tiles that are worn out—so stuff that isn't under furniture—they only replace the worn out tiles, and they recycle it to create new Solarium. So it's more efficient, less waste.Tamara Schulman 18:08No, I think that's a really great example. And I've often been in support roles in organizations for different types of businesses. So I'll speak to it from that perspective. And I'm gonna go really simple on you. For the core businesses, it's the ones that we all try to use when something weird breaks, and you're not sure what else to do and how to repair it. There's a shoe repair place down the street that also repairs zippers on other products. I give them my business because I try to buy better quality items, and I want them to last, right? And then we chat. They don't realize they're a circular business, not everybody, right? They're just in there doing what they know how to do, being worried about people using the service or who from the next generation is going to be carrying it forth. A lot of those types of businesses are small and independent, and owned by newcomers and first generation folks in this Canadian context, and are making this really substantial contribution to extending the life of our products without necessarily being, you know, circular and being within the environmental world in a specific way. And I think that's really important to point out because we all have a role to play and how we are participating. And it doesn't have to be just because you've got these blinders on and you're an "environmentalist," right? We're all interested in having a viable place to live that goes on for humans for several generations. And so I wanted to bring us into that bigger picture. Mars Moreira 19:37That is the perfect example you could have given us, like being circular is simple. Like it doesn't have to come with all this greenwashing and environmentalist agenda attached to it. It's just about having goods and services that last a long time and enable life for future generations.Tamara Schulman 19:55And there's ways that we can leverage that that through policy and legislation. You know, there's a right to repair movement, which is really saying, "Hey, we can't really just rely on planned obsolescence as our default for how we deal with our products where if something breaks, it's glued and not screwed in, we can't fix it, we can't get into the back end of a computer or a cell phone, or even a vehicle in ways that people are used to being able to go in and repair things." So we need those supports to really reinforce being able to have a circular approach within businesses and also within how we manage our products.Mars Moreira 20:32Now it sounds to me like there's a lot of opportunity in the circular economy space to develop businesses, you know, there's so much we could be doing. And that segues into generating jobs. And like, given that world, unemployment rates are at an all time high of 5.8 percent. And just in Canada, they're at 5.2 percent, according to the World Bank. I'm wondering like, what is, where are the jobs in the circular economy? What is a circular job? How can people find them?Tamara Schulman 21:01We're dealing with labour shortages, at the same time, we're dealing with unemployment. So we've got a bit of a conundrum around that. And we need to figure out how we tackle it. And, you know, there was also a drop off in a lot of service job, people being part of those that hasn't really come back post COVID. So we've got some dynamics up front to handle as part of that, as part of the response. In terms of circular jobs, it can look a lot of different ways. And again, just like the, you know, the shoe repairs really specific, I'm gonna take us the other direction and go really broad, because there's ways in just about any job that you can find a circular approach. Tamara Schulman 21:39It comes back to those three principles around, you know, looking at product design, and what you purchase and why and how that plays out, how you extend the life and then what you do to get the best value at the end. And so there's jobs all along that chain to be able to be involved, right? There's eco-industrial design, and folks that are really doing a deep dive in on product design. But even just how we design our systems, right? For the more technically inclined folks, there's jobs within industry, as some of the recycled battery needs come up from electric vehicles and other things, there's going to be a need to have the understanding of what those materials are, and the best practices for how to process those and get the metals out, right? And so that's a pretty industrial piece that needs to be handled. Tamara Schulman 22:28And then from there, you're into all of extend-the-life type initiatives, we've seen a lot of different initiatives around everything from tool libraries to a place called The Thingery, and there's online trading and sharing platforms that need to figure out you know, how to maintain over time, right, the profit margins can be fairly low, but the the local nature of it and the community resilience it offers and those additional social and environmental components to go with the economic are really important as part of those. And we need to figure out how to keep strengthening those. Tamara Schulman 23:01And then in terms of other jobs, there's more and more that's happening on the on the recycling side, in B.C. and also other provinces in Canada, we have legislation that mandates that the brand owners and manufacturers actually need to be responsible for end of life management of products, or so extended producer responsibility, your product stewardship, was what that's called. And there's more products that are coming online all the time, for example, in B.C. mattresses is one. So there are some manual jobs, where there can be some satisfaction to getting that all ripped apart, if people understand why it's happening and where the materials are going, there's more motivation to be engaged and having that understanding and that ownership of the work is part of what can help support staff retention and keeping people on board over time.Mars Moreira 23:52Yeah, thank you so much for clarifying that Tamara. You know, we've been talking about what all jobs and so maybe you can speak to really quickly about how inclusive employment is important in the circular economy.Tamara Schulman 24:05The term inclusive employment is quite broad, we've continued to look at it from a few different angles. Really, at the at the end of the day, it's anybody who's experiencing barriers to entering the job market, right? So there can be folks with cognitive or physical challenges that may need extra accommodations and access to get into a job and to have it be tailored appropriately and then can make a contribution, right. We all tailor and adapt in our jobs to a certain extent. And I've heard many employers say, "Hey, you know, being involved in this type of network and increasing access actually helps for staff overall, because it just opens up a way of thinking about how to make jobs more accessible and how to keep people on board."Tamara Schulman 24:52There's also newcomers to Canada and folks with technical background that need to get that Canadian experience to be able to get into the job market. And then there's all these different points of intersectionality, where there have been structural and systemic barriers to entering the job market, whether it's around, you know, race, sex, all all the isms and figuring out how to overcome that and create openings and shift work cultures, so that hiring expands and it goes beyond any kind of tokenism, and it's actually a welcoming and inclusive workplace. Another example, is when there's a group of folks that are underrepresented, like women in the trades, there needs to be, you know, the right, multiple porta-potties and the attitudes and what gets talked about needs to shift a little bit in the workplace. So those are some different examples.Mars Moreira 25:45And I think my favorite quote from the space of like circular inclusive employment is like, we're trying to create a just transition to the circular economy where no one gets left behind, like, a lot of people got behind in the linear economy models.Tamara Schulman 25:58One thing that I would add about that is, as we move, you know, post COVID, we've had build back better and just transition and all of these terms. Now we're to the point where we're looking at what is a just your economy to have over time? And that means that we're making that fundamental shift so that we're not just having something that's on the fringes, but we're actually mainstreaming, how we're making these shifts happen so that the systemic change happens. And we get those broader cultural shifts. Mars Moreira 26:29And so if there's one takeaway from this talk that you want people to know, or what would it be? Or from this conversation that we had.Tamara Schulman 26:36There is always something that you can do to take action. And taking action is probably one of the best ways to overcome some of the challenges that we feel around the climate shifts that are happening, around what we perceive as apathy from folks. It's just about finding it, and then connecting to folks that are interested in making those shifts as well and really building community around it.Mars Moreira 27:04Amazing. Thank you so much. I really appreciated all the time you took to talk to me today. And yeah, hope to see you next time.Tamara Schulman 27:13Thank you. I'd also like to mention that our connection is in part from working together at the Share Reuse Repair Initiative, where we bring businesses and communities together in government as well to foster circular economy. And we're working on this network for inclusive circular employment, which has been great to do and great to have the chance to work with you in that capacity as well. Mars Moreira 27:37Yeah, thank you, Tamara. It's a pleasure working together on the Nice Project and it's a pleasure to have you here on the podcast and I hope we can together create more change in the world and inspire youth listening to this one to do so as well.Mars Moreira 27:58Thank you again to to Tamara Schulman for letting me pick your brain on all matters regarding circular and inclusive employment. To get in touch with our guest speaker please visit sharereuserepair.org or find her on LinkedIn. To learn more about SUTE and stay up to date on Establish you can follow @shakeuptheestab on Instagram and Twitter or visit shakeuptheestab.org. Establish is supported through funds from the Jane Goodall Institute of Canada. The music you hear on this podcast today was created by Greg Markov, follow @gregmarkov on Instagram. This podcast was produced by me, Mars Moreira and Asha Swann. Thank you all for listening.