If you live in the UK you will be more than aware of the COP26 conference but did you watch Panorama this week? If not you should catch it on the BBC iPlayer. For those outside the UK, the program was entitled Coca-Cola’s 100 billion bottle problem. It is a huge problem, there are billions of single use plastic bottles created by the Coca-Cola company that are littering the world. But what can be done about it?
How do you keep in touch with reality? Recently I went to the National Mining Museum at the old Caphouse colliery near Wakefield. The highlight was of course going down the pit itself. Whilst in an enclosed gallery we were invited to experience working as some of the miners had done years ago, that is, in the dark.
If you live in the UK you will be more than aware of the COP26 conference but did you watch Panorama this week? If not you should catch it on the BBC iPlayer.
For those outside the UK, the program was entitled Coca-Cola’s 100 billion bottle problem. It is a huge problem, there are billions of single use plastic bottles created by the Coca-Cola company that are littering the world.
Tempting as it is, this is not a lambasting of the company, just an attempt to highlight the problem. To be fair they have said that they will recycle a bottle for each one they sell. But there is a catch, they cannot collect and recycle enough of them!
So what happens to them? Well, the banner picture for this article is just one example of the rubbish tips where single use plastic is found in huge piles (this is in Kampala, Uganda). Worse still, local people scavenge there to find these bottles and get paid a pittance to do so, 4 pence per kilo and they collect 3 kilos per day!
With no child care, the adults are forced to bring their children with them. And yes, they work too, barefoot in hot, smelly and sometimes dangerous conditions.
There are many factors in play here:
Coca Cola cannot collect enough bottles to recycle
Fossil fuels are used to produce new plastic
Cheap labour is used by middlemen to retrieve plastic
Everyone gets rich apart from the workers and their children
This is where a little bit of Systems Thinking (or as I like to call it, joining up the dots) comes in. How about this is a suggestion?
Someone designs a cart, maybe like a golf buggy or with tracks like a tank. It could be solar powered and be capable of traversing rubbish heaps. Such a vehicle, combined with better picking technology (not hands) would allow workers to retrieve much more waste in a day and hence earn more.
Companies such as Coca Cola would get more plastic back to recycle which would cut down on fossil fuel use and result in less plastic clogging up our environment.
But, I hear you say, this is still exploitation. Well, what tends to happen when sometimes tough and thankless tasks are carried out, we find that the workers are often very resourceful and will find ways to improve things. So whilst we might start off with my theoretical cart, we may finish up with something completely different. We might even be able to cut out the middleman too.
All we (or Coca Cola) has to do is provide some seed funding or maybe some tech to get the ball rolling.
I’m not saying that this is even a workable solution but we should be thinking about how we can connect different things in order to solve multiple related problems. In this case recycling, pollution, overuse of fossil fuels, cheap labour and poverty.
Looking at the post title you might be forgiven for thinking that I have gone mad. Please bear with me for a few minutes.
This week I attended an online lecture all about Smart Cities which also touched on technologies such as IoT (Internet of Things just in case you missed this acronym).
We have a tendency to fixate on technology because it apparently gives us something such as speed, connectivity, big data or simply control.
The main learning point for me was not the technology, although it can help. The main point was about the systemic nature of smart cities.
The technology is no good if we track the movement of people but don’t plug this into public transport or traffic management or if we generate lots of heat in manufacturing but fail to divert this for other uses such as heating houses.
Everything must be considered and be part of the system.
For a really good example use Google and lookup Copenhagen on the internet. But as someone said, a city is not a computer.
So far I have mentioned Systems Thinking and IoT, but what about Save The Planet?
Last night was the inaugural Earthshot Prize event where 5 projects each get £1 million to scale up their ideas to help save the planet. This is the first of 10 annual events that we all hope will help our planet.
As people get inspired, the applications each year will get more and more interesting. I was going to use the word ‘innovative’ but they need not be. Last night we had some great ideas from growing coral rapidly, producing clean hydrogen and helping protect and grow rain forests.
And one of the things that connected all of them, even though they did not know it whilst developing their ideas, was the fact that they were all part of a system!
These things do not compete, they all work together.
So apart from asking readers to take part in preserving the planet, what is the point?
Systems Thinking used to be fashionable, like DesignThinking or Innovation but it is important. Most of what we experience is part of a system, nothing works on its own.
To prove this think of something complex like a game of chess. Yes, you can play yourself but in a system, individual components tend to behave differently when they are all plugged together.
Hence the reason for the image at the top of this email. The first time you came across Monopoly you probably took it out of the box, read the instructions and created a strategy as to how you would win.
When you sat down to play with several others I am guessing that the game did not go according to plan. You might still have won but the other players (system components) had an effect.
As individuals, we are all part of a system (the planet) and as business owners, we might also be part of a system (consider where your business boundary really is) without realising it.
So give Systems Thinking a whirl and see if the whole can be made greater than the sum of the parts (and don’t forget to look up Copenhagen as a smart city example)!
As CEO, if you want people to be creative, you must be prepared to implement their viable ideas. You must encourage creativity. Employees will soon work out that your support of creativity is a sham and will hold back on the creativity. After all, what's the point in making the effort to develop and promote ideas if they just get ignored?
