Blue Solutions Summit

What are the solutions?

I was so happy to join yesterday's Blue Solutions Summit as part of the Ocean Lovers Festival (on all weekend at Bondi - get over there ????), here's my summary of the discussions.

We had a beautiful Welcome to Country from Brendon Kerin, thank you Brendon, I could have listened to you talk all day. I'd love to learn more about the eels and the songline from Parramatta to Sydney.

The venue was the Australian Maritime Museum, beautiful spot and a warm welcome from deputy director Michael Baldwin .

Then we heard about the Ocean Decade Initiative from Dr Dr Lucy Buxton - check out Ocean Decade Australia for all the locally relevant actions!

Panel 1 was about Ocean Innovation. To be honest, I usually get annoyed about the emphasis of innovation in solving the climate crisis, because honestly, all we need it to stop doing a bunch of destructive stuff! HOWEVER, this group of panelists changed my view and they had some very inspiring stuff to share.

One fun fact I heard was that China have a mandatory 20% investment required from companies that goes into research and development for climate solutions.

In Australia there's less than 1% invested and it's voluntary or government funded.

A big obstacle they face is that early solutions need research, time and WILL have failures, that's how we learn. If we had the solutions already existed we wouldn’t be in the mess we're in so so we need to be prepared for trial and error and fund those projects anyway! When I worked in digital we used to always talking about 'failing forwards', now that I'm an entrepreneur of sorts, we talk about needing the failures to get to the successful outcome - so why do we expect someone to come in with a perfect solution to a problem that never existed before???

Some of the projects were:

Pacific Bio waste water filtration and processing systems that use existing infrastructure - very interesting though curious to know more about how this differs from current systems - the problem with panels is the brevity and maybe later I'll look up their website for more info ??

CHARM (Coral Husbandry Automated Raceway Machine) - love this, it's informative and a bit fun and Stephen Rodan explains it's purpose clearly and it's very inspiring!

He says it's estimated that we need to replace around 36 million coral per year at the current loss rate. With CHARM, this is possible, the robots crop dust food and clean the coral which he likens to brushing your teeth. His vision also includes kids being able to own their own part of the coral like a tamagotchi pet ??

With CHARM cleaning and feeding the coral it will speed up growth and then, with support from the CSIRO, they'll be able to place the corals in places they're most needed.

I can't recall which panelist said this, but it's true: Innovation is sexy and risk is scary, so how can we educate politicians and decision makers?

What’s the result of no action? We're already seeing it, at least 2 coral bleaching mass events were mentioned on the various panels during the day. There's no option, we have to do something!

In conclusion it's agreed:

We need to support each other!

We need to ramp up communication!

We must discuss risk to understand the effect of inaction.

At the moment, Risk is looked at as risk to a company - they need to look at risk to humanity as well, let’s make the language broader.

Panel 2 was on Ocean Plastics - one i hope to contribute to in the future.

Grahame Lloyd from Sea Shepherd shared some great points, another person I'd love to have heard more from. One example he mentioned was collecting 25,000 bottles and lids in just 4 hours on one beach!

We also had Andrew from PACT Group, a plastic packaging manufacturer.

All of their packaging is recyclable and they're working toward 25% recycled content to meet demand of 200,000 tonnes per year and are currently working with Asahi and Coca Cola. He expressed that they need partners that can collect materials back.

At the moment they're able to get 75,000 tonnes collected per year including from yellow bins household, so there's still more to go to increase the content, they're currently at 13% and he said whilst it seems slow or small, they've already invested $150m in getting this far.

Currently 1.2 million tonnes of packaging is used in Australia and only 180,000 is collected, I think these are annual figures. I wrote a lot down but there were a lot of numbers. TLDR - too much plastic and can we talk about reducing yet??

Because a lot of the excuses I heard were that you can't eat chips from another kind of packaging, but what about lettuces, capsicums, and other fresh produce?? It's so hard to get plastic free produce in Australia - and the organic stuff is even worse with packaging. In addition, I think we need a conversation about health to go with our conversation about packaging, because highly processed foods are a huge contributor to the plastic waste issue. Just saying.

I absolutely loved hearing from Jason Graham-Nye from Circular Australia who was in Samoa and witnessed another coral bleaching event last week. When he spoke with his contacts there about circular economy, they were perplexed, because that's just how they live. I agree on this aspect from my time in Cambodia, it's the west that have made things linear when it comes to packaging, and we look at economically poorer countries in pity and it's so wrong, we should be looking to them for guidance on sustainability and especially our indigenous Australians, they managed to keep the environment in harmony for ~40,000 years... i reckon they might know what they're doing.

I digress! Some solid info from James DID touch on reducing unnecessary plastics, including at a hospital he worked with - I've also worked with a hospital on this - there's so much opportunity to reduce!

There was a lively debate between Andrew Smith and Dr Jason Graham-Nye about responsibility of packaging and the obvious answer is... the brand MUST be held accountable for their packaging waste.

From the audience the topic of ghost nets contributing to ocean plastics was raised, in particular salmon fishing and lack of environmental policies and transparency and allusions to corruption in that sector - so interesting. I haven't read it myself but there's a great book on the Tasmanian salmon industry and it's not pretty.

Loved this idea from Anirban Ghose : Wouldn’t it be great to have an expiry date on packaging?

He also raised the point that we need some immediate solutions (that might not be perfect but are better) while we work on longer term solutions!

I totally agree, there isn't going to be a singular solution, we need to apply a whole lot of different things and we need to simplify things massively. As I touched on earlier, we can't innovate our way out of this, it's that thinking that created plastic to begin with.

Another cool idea that came up (possibly from the audience?) Can we create a rating system??? More transparency?! For clothing, food, etc Like this tshirt is 2 stars out of 5 in terms of how much pollution it creates. I love the creative ideas that came out during this discussion.

I'm going to write a part 2: with the second two panels, so much to say on those - the future of the fishing industry and food and some diverse topics from the Youth Advisory Group. Coming soon :)