Original subtitles

2,000 years ago, London was a marsh.

The Romans built the first bridge here in 1850.

For century after century, this city grew.

And it's still growing.

It's incredible what we humans can build.

On the face of it, out of nothing.

But in reality, nothing comes from nothing.

Imagine all the materials, the hours and energy that we used to build

different versions of London over the past 2,000 years.

And imagine what resources are needed now to run London

for just one day.

The world we live in brings each of us so many incredible benefits,

but we often forget that it comes with a cost.

Waste.

We have become too comfortable in societies

that are immensely wasteful.

As a consequence, across the globe, the natural world about us is now

suffering from the waste we throw away.

We are fast learning that on this finite planet,

there is no such place as away.

This barge, and dozens like it, are part of the waste management

of London, helping to deal responsibly with one million tonnes

of waste each year.

This waste will be turned into energy.

But we should be asking ourselves why there is so much waste

in the first place.

Is it possible for us to keep what we have and continue to progress

without generating waste?

That's the hope of the fifth goal of the Earthshot Prize.

Every year, until 2030,

the prize will award £1 million to a project that can help us

build a waste free world.

This film will expose the root causes of our wastefulness...

..highlight people around the world working on incredible solutions.

And I'll introduce you to the new projects shortlisted

for this year's Earthshot Prize.

The people who built London over the centuries could not

have imagined what the city would become today.

If we are genuinely to become sustainable on Earth,

we must now start to build something that perhaps is hard for us

to imagine, and achieve the last of our five Earthshots.

Here to tell its story

are Sir David and another member of our Earthshot Prize Council.

A person with an invaluable perspective on our waste problem.

Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim.

If you do not increase finance for adaptation,

soon there will be no-one to adapt.

It's true that the natural world is, in essence, the most gigantic,

the most efficient

and the most spectacular recycling system imaginable.

Life established itself on this planet billions of years ago...

..when primitive species developed ways to build their bodies

from the raw materials of the Earth.

But these materials are difficult to secure.

And once in the living world, nature works to recycle them.

The grasslands of the Serengeti grow vigorously on soils

enriched by neighbouring volcanoes.

Some of the greatest herds on Earth tour these pastures,

gnawing to the ground to capture the precious nutrients.

The herds, in turn, sustain the greatest concentrations

of large predators found anywhere.

Others take their place in their nutrient cycle

by recycling materials indigestible to most.

There's no waste. Anything not needed by one

becomes food for the next.

These grand cycles of nutrients form a trading organisation

known as an ecosystem.

Every living thing on Earth plays its part.

The busy recycler,

capturing, borrowing,

using and passing on materials,

even after they've ceased to be living.

On the deep seabed a host of bizarre creatures spend decades

breaking down the remains of any living thing that falls from above.

If any minerals are missed, they will be buried in the sea floor,

but nothing is lost from the system.

Ultimately, even that has returned to the surface to feed

into the living world.

Nature is the very model of a waste free world.

It's far more productive, more complex and more diverse

than our human world.

And yet all the myriad structures and materials it's made of

are degradable, indeed biodegradable.

Its nutrients are on an endless circular journey,

perpetually being used and reused.

The human world is not like this.

We mine the raw materials. We build a product.

We use it for a limited period, and then we discard it

and we get another one.

This is known as a linear process.

It's the cause of our waste problem.

Where nature has circles, we have lines.

The consequence of a linear approach is that we end up with waste,

stuff we no longer find useful.

The most problematic waste is made of materials intentionally built

to resist the breakdown system of the natural world,

including products made of metal...

..glass...

..synthetic fibres

and the many types of plastic.

This is the non-biodegradable waste, and because it never rots

after being thrown away, it never truly goes away.

It just becomes someone else's problem.

Polluted waterways like this can be witnessed around the world.

The volume of non-biodegradable products that humanity generates

across the planet is remarkable.

Each year, we use over 300 million tons of plastic alone.

Most of it is not recycled.

In wealthier nations, non-biodegradable waste is removed

by organised collections.

But per person, these countries create more waste

than anywhere else.

Because it doesn't biodegrade, the volume inevitably accumulates.

Non-biodegradable waste is often exported to other nations,

once again to become someone else's problem.

The United States alone sends more than half a million tons

of plastic overseas every year.

Much of it ends up in countries with poor waste management systems.

Anything that can be used is used, but the volume

of material is overwhelming.

It's been reported that the African nation of Ghana alone receives

millions of items of clothing from the West each week.

And that some of it is of such low quality that it can't be sold.

Since much of it contains non-biodegradable fibres, like nylon

and polyester, it inevitably joins

the plastic waste on landfill sites.

This is the fallout of our wasteful societies, our fast fashion,

our single use plastic, our linear approach to life.

Ultimately, the non-biodegradable waste that doesn't end up

in a landfill may find its way to the sea, the world's sink.

In recent years, more than eight million tons of plastic

have been reaching our oceans annually.

Here it floats about, driven by the currents.

Some of it will sink to the sea floor.

The rest is worn by wave action, salt and sunshine

into microplastic fragments small enough to be eaten

by wildlife and enter the food chain.

Today, we know plastic may be damaging our ocean creatures.

And when we eat seafood, it's possible we are eating

microplastics, although at levels that don't seem

to be harmful as yet.

But materials that will not break down are only part

of our waste problem.

We also create biodegradable waste - wood products...

..natural fibres...

..paper...

..and unused food.

Worldwide, we waste more than a third of the food we produce,

which in turn wastes millions of tons of fertiliser,

and trillions of litres of water.

The food that is wasted will have added billions of tonnes

of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere during its production.

The wastage of food occurs at every stage of the journey,

from field to plate.

This is the story of just one of those journeys.

The grapes that are up to standard are cleaned, sorted,

weighed and packed. Once they've left the farm,

they must be refrigerated as quickly as possible.

Stacked in containers, the grapes join other products

from across the continent to begin their epic one way voyage

around the world.

Every year, container ships, some of the biggest moving objects

ever made, help transport around four million tonnes of grapes

for international sale.

South America is the leading exporter with more than a quarter

of the business.

The journey from Chile to Europe can take up to a month.

The race is on to get the grapes to their next destination.

So once they come here, containers discharged from the vessel,

we truck it to the warehouse. We open it up and that's the moment

of the surprise, whether it came in well or not.

My name is Jon Marc Schulz of SFI Rotterdam.

We source fruit from all over the world.

We have to do a QC check to see what it has arrived in the condition

that our customers will require.

I think in the packing stations easily, you can face something like

20% of food that's going to be thrown away.

And this is completely edible.

There's nothing wrong with it. It just doesn't look as nice.

Let's assume you were having a bunch of grapes, or an apple

from the garden of your grandmother,

and there's one rotten berry in there.

You'd just pick it out and that's it, and the rest

of the product is perfect.

Nowadays, this one brown berry

will cause a complete reject of one pallet of fruit.

That's one ton of fruit rejected.

But if it doesn't look nice, it does not get sold in the supermarket.

Even once the grapes reach their destination,

they may not be eaten.

One study found that 4.5 million tonnes of household food

is thrown away each year within the UK alone.

We humans have accepted that we are wasteful.

It's difficult to estimate the volume of waste we produce,

but one study suggests it could be seven to ten billion tonnes

globally per year.

Of our municipal waste, we recycle less than 20%.

And with each passing year, this waste we produce increases.

Estimates suggest that by 2050,

we may produce more than one and a half times the volume

we produce today.

We are turning our Earth into something uniquely human.

A world of waste.

How can we turn this situation around?

There is a simple solution to this complex problem.

We need to take a page out of nature's book and find a use

for everything we now throw away.

As the people who deal with the daily supply of waste

in Ghana have discovered.

Ibrahim is one of thousands of people working alongside

the landfill site at Agbogbloshie.

This workforce embody the right way to think about waste.

Not as waste...

..but as scrap.

Whether aluminium comes from computer parts or car parts,

it doesn't matter to Ibrahim.

It's all materials moving within a cycle,

just as nutrients cycle in nature.

To build a waste-free world

we must reimagine what we mean by waste

and start behaving like the natural world.

Designing a system in which the waste of one process

is the food for the next.

Finding ways to break down every product

so that its building blocks

can be handed on to its next use.

Our materials will then become like nature's nutrients,

cycling through the system.

All our production lines will turn into circles.

In a world built of circles,

there is no end of the line

and therefore no waste.

Is this a dream or can it be reality?

The fact is, this kind of circular thinking is not new.

It's been part of human existence throughout our history.

We just need to be reminded of this.

The first step to eliminate waste

is to eliminate the word from the language,

because that makes us think differently about waste.

Instead of waste water, we have resource water

because the water is still full of resources like, for instance,

heat and phosphorous.

Waste is really only waste if you can't find a use for it.

My name is Lisbeth Randers.

I'm the symbiosis coordinator of Kalundborg Symbiosis,

a unique industrial site

with a group of 12 companies working together to share resources.

The waste from one company

becomes the raw material for another company.

In nature, symbiosis is when two species work together

to benefit each other.

We can apply this thinking to our approach to industry.

And I think it's a beautiful description

of what is actually happening

because we are living closely together for mutual benefit.

Across the cooperative, we have biotech,

energy and manufacturing companies.

Each of them has waste products

that can be used by the next in the chain -

excess energy, water or materials.

Just one chain of resources, for example,

we collect water from a nearby lake.

This is piped to a biotech company.

Here we produce many enzymes that are used in detergents,

animal feed, food production.

We also produce half of the world's insulin here.

When you make these wonderful products like enzymes and insulin,

you're left with a by-product, sludge.

This sludge can actually be used to make fertiliser for agriculture.

But it can also be used as a raw material for energy production

at the nearby biogas station.

Here, biogas is upgraded

to natural gas and provides local industry with energy.

So this is an example of how the system

where one production results in waste

is changed into a circular loop where you can actually see

that waste being the raw material of the energy production.

At the end, any excess water is cleaned and returned to nature.

The ambition is that nothing is wasted.

The companies get the benefit from making a saving

of $28 million a year.

We are not only doing this for the benefit of environment,

it's also good business.

Zero waste is a goal, and I think that being able to completely

eliminate waste will take hard work in the coming years,

but I'm absolutely sure that we will manage to reach that goal,

but we're not there yet. We have to work still.

My name is Keiran Whitaker and I farm black soldier flies.

Their larvae convert food waste and other agricultural side streams

into high quality protein that we can then use to feed animals,

pets and humans in the long term.

We're able to utilise these huge volumes of food waste

to feed our insects. Our black soldier flies are not fussy.

They will eat almost any organic waste material.

We use local brewery wastes at the end of the brewing process,

coffee waste and, lastly, we use fruit and vegetable offcuts

and, you know, stuff that's not sold at the end of the day,

and we then create that into a perfect blend to feed the insects.

Fundamentally, there are two different processes

to farming insects. On the one hand,

you have the creation of the next generation

and then separately you have the fattening of the insects

that are going to become animal feed.

In the space of just 9 to 12 days,

they will grow from almost the size of a grain of sand

into about an inch long protein bar.

So they can grow up to 5,000 times their body mass

in that period of time.

The insect larvae are then ground down and turn into a protein feed,

supplying industries with high-protein demand

such as meat production and fish farming.

The most efficient part of this is it's 24 hours a day,

365 days of a year production.

These insects will continue to eat this product and grow and convert

into the sustainable protein all day, all night,

no matter where they are.

Which means that we can implement this anywhere in the world.

And now we need to do it on a truly massive scale.

Our next facility should be able to process more than 30,000 tonnes

of food waste every year.

So plastic has a bad reputation. I think we need to remember

that plastic has transformed our society.

Synthetic plastics are an incredible material.

These long polymer chains give them incredible durability,

they make them lightweight and you can mould them

into just about any shape.

And this makes them so ubiquitous in the manufacturing industry.

So my name is John McGeehan and I'm a professor of structural biology

and director of the Centre for Enzyme Innovation

at the University of Portsmouth.

When we designed synthetic plastics,

we kind of took our inspiration from nature.

Nature uses polymers all the time. It takes these building blocks

and links them together to form these long chains.

If you look at a plastic like PET,

the stuff that makes plastic bottles,

and most of our clothes, actually, as well,

that's held together by the same bond called an ester bond.

So nature has developed over millions of years

to break that bond, and we can use those enzymes

to break that bond in synthetic plastics, too.

So in 2016 a group in Japan

had actually discovered a bacterium

that was growing in a recycling dump.

This bacterium was actually living off the plastic itself.

It was eating PET plastic and using it as a food and an energy source,

and that's really quite incredible.

What this meant was that evolution was actually in action.

So breaking down the bottles is actually quite a simple process.

You take the bottles, you put them in liquid nitrogen,

that makes them super cold,

and that's important because when you then grind them down,

they don't remelt. They actually form these small fragments.

We then take it a stage further and actually mill them down

into fine powder, and that increases the surface area and makes them

really accessible for enzymes.

Literally at that point, we take a jar of this material

and we pour in the powdered enzymes and we just mix it.

And over time the enzyme will start to act on the plastic and you'll see

this solution just go clear

as the enzyme breaks the polymer into its building blocks.

And this is a massive opportunity for design of future materials

where you can use these recycled waste streams to make the monomers,

turn them into composites, but composites that can be recycled

at the end of life. And this is a huge opportunity for industry.

New York has a really rich history when it comes to waste.

Early days, like late 1800s,

waste primarily went into the rivers,

and that's actually why you see that big parts of Lower Manhattan

are built on landfill - it was literally the waste piling up.

About a third of what ends up in landfill in New York City

is food waste. So that is the biggest portion of the waste

that could be diverted.

If you have food scraps, you can compost them.

And that's great because it's essentially taking something

that would have been wasted and turning it into...

..almost like a fertiliser. It's actually very valuable,

and around New York City,

we have both small-scale community composting sites

as well as our commercial, large-scale composting site.

And we're actually able to sell it to landscapers and use some of that

revenue to go back into the zero-waste education.

It's just really rewarding and exciting

to see all the different, creative ways that New Yorkers

and our institutions are coming together around waste.

I think New York, being a place where doing your own thing

is really celebrated, and that has been one of the keys

for unlocking the idea of zero waste to a larger audience.

My name is Daniel.

I'm the founder of a company called Zero Waste Daniel.

The idea is that we take leftovers

from the fashion and apparel industries production

and rejoin them together to create new textiles.

One afternoon I saw all the bits and ends that had been cut off

in our production, and I thought, well, I'm not doing anything today.

I may as well make myself a shirt.

Lord knows I didn't have the money to shop.

I sat at my sewing machine and I took the time to piece all these

little scraps together, and I created this sweatshirt

for myself and I had this aha moment that this was it.

It was about making something I really wanted to wear

out of things that nobody else wanted.

And I thought, I know where I can get more scraps.

The root cause of waste is disposability,

using things for an incredibly short period of time.

My name is Tom Szaky

and I'm the founder and CEO of TerraCycle and Loop.

Before the 1950s, we cobbled our shoes.

We mended our clothes. We bought milk from the milkman.

The only difference between Loop and really a milkman model

is that Loop tries to expand that concept for everything,

from your shampoo to your motor oil,

from your orange juice to your favourite spread.

Our job here is shifting packaging from being your property at the end

to property of the manufacturer at the end.

By making the package property of the manufacturer in the end

through a deposit mechanism, the manufacturer is going to be

motivated selfishly to make that package last a long time,

to make it durable, to make it refillable.

I think in New York and globally,

it's very possible to achieve zero waste.

It's about a total mind shift in the way we work.

In a place like this, the beating heart of capitalism and consumerism,

I think we can shift and become much more in tune with nature

and consuming and thriving in a sustainable way.

I do think it's achievable to send zero waste to landfills,

but it's going to take a lot of work.

60 years ago, the River Thames was biologically dead.

Today, it is one of the cleanest city rivers in the world.

We can clean up our act and the Earthshot Prize

is here to recognise, reward

and support those with the best solutions to do so.

It is an honour for me to introduce you to the three finalists

for this, the first-ever Earthshot Prize

to build a waste-free world.

Our first idea, WOTA BOX,

is the world's first portable water recycling plant,

reusing domestic waste water from appliances like showers and sinks.

In many countries, poor infrastructure wastes huge amounts

of water due to leaky pipes and inadequate treatment facilities.

Within five years, two thirds of the world's population

may face shortages of this precious resource.

Yosuke Maeda and the WOTA BOX team's solution

is to recycle the water at its point of use.

The device starts with a reservoir of water. As the water is used,

it goes through a series of filters.

AI sensors ensure that the water isn't released until it's clean.

This way, the same water can safely be used again and again.

Since it doesn't require an external water supply or drainage,

it is portable. It could be used anywhere, in any situation.

This technology is scalable and extremely efficient.

But it is expensive.

With extra support, the designers will work on bringing down the price

of production, so countries all over the globe,

particularly those with poor infrastructure, can benefit.

Next, we head to East Africa with Sanergy,

a project that builds lavatories for communities without sewage systems

and in doing so has found a circular solution for human waste.

My name is David Auerbach and I've lived here in Nairobi, Kenya,

for the last ten years.

We're helping to clean up fast growing cities

with our waste collection services.

We're providing vital services for hundreds of thousands of people.

It matters to me that people have access to clean toilets

because I think everyone

deserves to live in a safe, clean environment.

Sanergy collects around 13,000 tonnes of waste each year

from the slums. With this much waste,

they had to find a circular solution for what to do with it.

If we could create something from the waste,

we knew that we would have a solution that would be sustainable

and could grow.

They began with a process which heats up the waste,

killing any bacteria and making it safe for use as fertiliser.

This fertiliser has helped local farmers increase yields.

Initially, we would get four kilos or five kilos.

Now we are up to 9 or sometimes even 12 kilos per plant.

It's enabled me to kind of lower my production cost.

We have also improved our grade and quality of the fruit,

better shelf life, bigger sizes and better presentation for the market.

I think the round economy style of doing it is really creative,

helps us clean the city, at the same time using the same waste material

that we use to be able to grow

and feed the same city again. It's just amazing.

Everything about Sanergy is circular.

We collect waste, we process it,

we produce fertiliser, which grows crops and people feed from that,

and then we collect waste again.

If we don't manage waste in the future,

it's going to be catastrophic.

We're going to destroy our environment, destroy our rivers

and our oceans, and we're going to make each other sick.

We've come up with a system that will help solve that problem.

The project is still developing.

It's now turning to our friend the black soldier fly

to scale up its production.

The soldier flies feed on the waste

that can be turned into a protein-rich,

affordable animal feed, an organic fertiliser.

Sanergy's work can be done anywhere.

We have got a great solution and it needs to go global.

And I just want to go faster.

Sanergy is an inspiring example of a circular solution

to a huge waste problem.

With more support and investment, the project wants to expand

production across seven other African nations

and treat one million tonnes of human waste a year,

helping millions of people in the process.

The city of Milan is our third finalist.

It leads the world in tackling the problem of food waste

with a citywide system that rewards markets, shops, restaurants

and canteens for passing on unused, edible food

to those who need it via local food hubs run by volunteers.

The food hubs can redistribute over 100 tonnes of food per year

to people that need it,

equivalent to almost a quarter of a million meals.

The city offers tax breaks to businesses that donate food

and in fact saves money because there is less biodegradable waste

for them to treat. But what's happening in Milan

isn't about just money.

Milan believes it can reduce its food waste by half by 2030,

and it wants to help other cities to do so, too.

Milan's approach to food waste

works for the economy, society and the environment.

The city next hopes to share its blueprint with more cities

across the world.

In this series, we've discovered the five Earthshots we have

to undertake in the next decade.

But is it all too much?

Can we pull this off?

If there's one thing we can be sure of,

it is that we humans have the capacity to change the world.

The issue is - the way our modern world operates at present

is simply not sustainable.

Which means that those of us alive today

have been handed the momentous task of deciding the future of humankind.

We stand at a fork in the road.

If we continue on our current path,

the natural world will decline around us and with it

potentially everything we now take for granted.

But if we take the other path,

if we strive to find solutions to our biggest problems,

we can create a different future for our children and grandchildren.

A better future.

One in which both humanity and nature thrive.

In which the way we live our lives works in harmony with the climate.

A future with flourishing, productive oceans.

One that is free of the burden of our waste.

And that offers each of us clean air with every breath.

It is within our reach.

But only if we reach for it now.

Over the next ten years...

..the Earthshot Prize will celebrate...

..champion...

..and scale 50 innovative solutions

to the biggest environmental challenges facing our planet.

But in truth, it'll take a lot more than 50 solutions.

It will take every one of us as individuals,

as schools..

..as communities...

..as businesses...

..and as leaders to do our bit...

What do we want? Climate justice!

And when do we want it? Now, now!

..to change our choices and our habits

to set and achieve our own personal Earthshots.

We can change the world again. Today, every one of us

may - unintentionally - be part of the problem.

But from today, working together,

we can all become part of the solution.