Simplifying Sustainability

Amidst the flurry of Blue Earth Summit and countless People Planet Pint meet-ups, Melissa Fretwell, our founder grabbed a craft ale and a packet of scampi fries with fellow founder Adam Bastock of Small99; the advisory service for small businesses in their transition to net zero and the UK's largest sustainability meet-ups People Planet Pint and People Planet Pastry. Drink in where he’s at with his journey and how we can all play a part in climate solutions. All doom and gloom it ain't. 

We kicked off with one of Melissa’s favourite questions. Tell us about the People Planet Pint story: are you at the beginning, the middle or at the end?  

Adam; “I'd like to say the start of the middle. People planet Pint came from this idea when I was at COP26 in Glasgow. I was very bored after a long day of going to different sorts of talks, sessions and panels where you never got to talk to anybody. Everyone from everywhere in the world was in town yet we weren’t able to hobnob with them. So I booked a pub that had just reopened after COVID and they were very keen just to get people back in. I posted on LinkedIn thinking People Planet Pint is a fun name and wondered if anyone would bother to come along. 

About a week later over forty people turned up in that pub. It really just nailed that we were all feeling the same thing. A genuine need to just to sit down and chat to someone with no real agenda beyond sharing ideas, learnings and points of view. Covid then had a resurgence in Scotland so we had to pause it for six months and start again in May 2022.  Three and half years later,  we have 80 events a month at around 140 locations, 15 countries worldwide including, of course, Valencia. People hand over or take the event with them if they move county or country which is a bit mad. In a good way. 

The ethos has remained consistent. It’s about conversations. Going into the pub, getting a drink, and then talking to people. And it's strange how much people think that's genius or really kind of clever. And they're like, " my god, it's amazing what you've done." People are just really keen to find people like them in a world where they might be working in sustainability and they're overwhelmed by trying to justify why they're working on climate change, talking about difficult topics. Or they know a little about the subject but want to understand more. When they come to our events the vibe we’re going for is cozy and welcoming. Imagine a pint in an English country pub, at the centre of the community, that's been there for several hundred years. This has helped make it successful."

Looking ahead to COP30, what do you think is the most important theme for small businesses? Adam continues...

"Yeah, I think COP30 is a really difficult one because it's quite alienating. It's quite far away and grandiose.The policy decisions there can of course have ramifications, but for small businesses, economic crises have detracted from people acting on sustainability.

"You want us to worry about the end of the world when we're worried about the end of the week."

Source https://youtu.be/slbfAfEvnQ0?si=LCcx0Hkonns2KNVc

That can make it feel like sustainability is a nice-to-have tickbox, a luxury thing to have when in reality I think a lot of the sustainability actions are ones that address those short-term pains that businesses will be having. We must position solutions as a gain to individual problems and then the arguments against inaction become much harder to ignore. 

There's a great report called the Willow Review, designed to provide small business owners with the tools, insights, and evidence they need to integrate sustainability into their operations while boosting profitability. I'm not saying that small businesses have the entire responsibility of COP30 on them but they shouldn’t cop out (sorry) due to scale. 

Businesses that are saying that they know they can't afford sustainability, are really saying we have a fixed mindset. We don’t want or know how to shift. For example, a waste audit to look at how much food waste a small cafe is generating or how many cups are being thrown away are small considerations that can add up. Spending several hundred pounds every week on paper towels for the  bathroom when a hand dryer for a couple of grand that would then pay itself back in six months. Or the low flow taps are a great one, there's some reports out there at the minute showing carbon cuts and a return on investment in three months."

The new global circularity protocol for business is being launched at COP30. We'd love to hear your thoughts about this whole kind of reframing of moving off net zero into this circular business economy. 

Adam; “I think it's always been there. Whenever I have done workshops and training over the last six years,  circularity has always been woven in. A sort of Trojan horse into the net zero conversation. It's quite nice to see it now almost being flipped. The name is again quite alienating, I think circular economy sounds quite technical and out of reach. It's all just policy makers jargon. 

If you start looking at a small business it makes so much sense because it drives efficiency. Taking the secondhand furniture market as a relatable example, where people are taking something and then putting it back into the system so someone else can use it. Extending its lifespan. People don't necessarily think about that and it's just a question of reframing and communicating the positives of what they're doing. Circularity feeds the resilience small businesses need to tackle short-term pains from supply chain pressures like the rising cost of materials. It’s compelling if you're suddenly talking about it in the same way that solar panels are energy security, circular economy is materials security.

If you look at electric vehicles for example, there’s a lack of forward thinking from Europe/ America/The West. China now owns 80% of the supply chains for those materials required to create things like solar panels and electric vehicle batteries and therefore there's an energy security threat to a certain extent.  However, it's also a circularity opportunity if you've got recycling factories that can pull apart electric batteries at their end of life and put those back into either another battery pack for a vehicle or grid or domestic energy storage. You're suddenly in a position where you can import materials from someone else. Then making it circular means that you can use those materials for the next 70 years. 

So the really exciting opportunity to bake into the process is not only a lower carbon way of living but also one that is going to make materials cheaper and more accessible because we already have so much material around us. All that waste becomes treasure. 

Make it convenient for people to actually adopt the circular economy. I know there was a startup out of the Netherlands that began doing this. The build for rent sort of models of high rise housing are also home to repair cafes and tool libraries.. If you've got a building of 2,000 people, how many of them are going to actually need a hammer at the same time? It's going to be two people maybe and therefore having a tool library that is free to access or very cheap just makes a lot of sense. And there's some stats around how a drill is used on average 20 minutes in its lifetime. 

The UK is the second biggest producer of E-Waste per capita, beaten only by Norway. The Royal Mint has started up an Urban mining facility taking the gold from old circuit boards and creating jewellery and commemorative coins. It's a great example of where we could go with this, however at just 4000 tons a year it’s minuscule compared to the 62 billion kgs of waste we generate, according to the Global E-Waste Monitor 2024. 

My single answer would be carbon pricing. That doesn't mean that the prices of things necessary go up but there's ways to then use that money to subsidise all the alternatives, but ultimately we need to put a price on pollution. We're seeing that come in already with the extended producer responsibility standards. So where a ton of plastic is being charged at 400 quid, a ton of cardboard is being charged at 200 quid. This is already shifting packaging choices. You're already seeing some supermarkets changing their packaging just in preparation for that. So, it demonstrates that once you start putting a price on these things, it works and people really do start to change behaviours because of it. 

Unfortunately, purely market forces they're not enough. The reason why Apple put in their USBC into their iPhone was not because consumers were demanding it. It was because the EU told them to. So, sometimes you do need policy and regulation to nudge those systemic effects. 

Extending the thinking to the consumer, if you're taking a flight from London to Glasgow, it’s about 350 kilos of carbon. So you're putting about 30 quid on a return flight from London to Glasgow, 15 quid each way, it's hefty, but it's not insane. Whereas a train price it's about 180 pounds on a return journey generating roughly 60 kilos of carbon (it's probably less because it's electrified), suddenly the train price doesn't change at all. You could take the money from the flight and take that off the train ticket and so the plane gets more expensive by 30 quid. And the train gets cheaper by 30 quid.

We think we know the answer to this one. Over to Adam; "well, we've got a community of 25,000 members, which sounds like a lot but if you take the UK and go, how many people are concerned or care about climate change? Our total addressable market to put it in startup terms is around 60 to 70 million people. So even if you took 1% of that we've got several hundred thousand people as an audience that we need to start reaching and to do that we need money. 

Currently we're working with Krystal. They've been fantastic. They're an ultra-fast, secure green web hosting powered by 100% renewable energy. They do everything from WordPress hosting to domains to various hosting services and technical things which I don't fully understand but they've been very kind, loyal and supportive. 

I think there's a real opportunity here to partner too with slightly more boring companies that are doing great things, sharing their knowledge and driving their awareness from the grass roots up. 

If you want to sponsor the People Planet Pint, drop Adam a line: adam@small99.co.uk 

If you need a hand telling your story in ways nine to ninety year olds understand, book a call with Melissa: here.