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In this episode, Catherine talks about plastics, a familiar circular economy topic, with someone from less familiar background…
Alice Mah is Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick, in the UK, and she’ll help us unpick the propaganda about plastics and their role in a circular economy
Catherine came across Alice’s work when IEMA’s Transform magazine interviewed her about her latest book, Plastic Unlimited: How Corporations are Fuelling the Ecological Crisis and What We Can Do About It. (IEMA is the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment.)
Alice unpacked some of the ways the plastics industry is trying to improve our perception of plastics, including how it tries to reframe the circular economy as a recycling issue. She highlighted other worrying aspects of how the petrochemicals industry is operating, and we’ll hear some of those.
Alice Mah holds a PhD in Sociology from the London School of Economics and was Principal Investigator of the large-scale European Research Council project “Toxic Expertise: Environmental Justice and the Global Petrochemical Industry” from 2015-2020. Her research focuses on environmental justice, corporate power, and the politics of green industrial transformations. Her next book the is Petrochemical Planet: Multiscalar Battles of Industrial Transformation.
In today’s conversation, Alice helps bust some myths around plastics and their potential role in a circular economy…
Myth #1 Plastics can support a Net Zero economy
Myth #2 Plastics are safe – in other words, it’s wrong to link plastics to health issues
Myth #3 Plastics are essential for our quality of life
Myth #4 Exporting plastic waste to low-income countries helps the country, and/or the local people, create value from that plastic
Myth #5 Plastic recycling can play an important role in the circular economy.
Podcast host Catherine Weetman is a circular economy business advisor, workshop facilitator, speaker and writer. Her award-winning book: A Circular Economy Handbook: How to Build a More Resilient, Competitive and Sustainable Business includes lots of practical examples and tips on getting started. Catherine founded Rethink Global in 2013, to help businesses use circular, sustainable approaches to build a better business (and a better world).
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Read on for a summary of the podcast and links to the people, organisations and other resources we mention.
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Links we mention in the episode:
- A Circular Economy Handbook: How to Build a More Resilient, Competitive and Sustainable Business – buy from any good bookseller, or direct from the publisher Kogan Page, which ships worldwide (free shipping to UK and US) and you can use discount code CIRCL20 to get 20% off. It’s available in paperback, ebook and Kindle. If you buy it from online sources, make sure you choose the new edition with an orange cover!
- Sign up to get the podcast player and shownotes for each new episode emailed to your inbox
- Alice Mah: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/sociology/staff/alice_mah
- Plastic Unlimited: How Corporations are Fuelling the Ecological Crisis and What We Can Do About It by Alice Mah, published by Polity Press (£14.99).
- Alice’s article in the Guardian: How the plastic industry turned the pandemic to its advantage https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/24/how-the-plastic-industry-turned-the-pandemic-to-its-advantage
- Alice’s interview for IEMA Transform magazine https://www.iema.net/articles/a-continuing-crisis-corporations-owning-the-circular-economy-narrative#sts=Alice%20Mah%20tells%20Chris%20Seekings%20how%20plastics%20and%20chemical%20companies%20are%20taking%20control%20of%20the%20circular%20economy%20narrative
- Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives https://www.no-burn.org/ and their Zero Waste resources https://www.no-burn.org/going-zero-waste/
- Break Free from Plastic – which publishes the annual brand plastic waste audits https://www.breakfreefromplastic.org/
- Report Plastic & Health: The Hidden Costs of a Plastic Planet with Earthworks, GAIA, Healthy Babies Bright Futures, IPEN, Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services (t.e.j.a.s.), University of Exeter, and UPSTREAM https://www.ciel.org/project-update/plastic-and-human-health-a-lifecycle-approach-to-plastic-pollution/
About Alice Mah
Alice Mah is Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the London School of Economics and was Principal Investigator of the large-scale European Research Council project “Toxic Expertise: Environmental Justice and the Global Petrochemical Industry” from 2015-2020.
Her research focuses on environmental justice, corporate power, and the politics of green industrial transformations, which are the subjects of her two most recent books: Plastic Unlimited: How Corporations are Fuelling the Ecological Crisis and What We Can Do About It (Polity, 2022) and Petrochemical Planet: Multiscalar Battles of Industrial Transformation (Duke University Press, forthcoming).
She is the author of Industrial Ruination, Community, and Place, winner of the 2013 BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize, Port Cities and Global Legacies, and (with Thom Davies) Toxic Truths: Environmental Justice and Citizen Science in a Post-Truth Age.
Interview Transcript
Click here to open the transcript…
Want to find out more about the circular economy?
If you’d like to learn more about the circular economy and how it could help your business, why not listen to Episode 1, or read our guide: What is the Circular Economy?
To go deeper, you could buy Catherine’s book, A Circular Economy Handbook: How to Build a More Resilient, Competitive and Sustainable Business. This comprehensive guide uses a bottom-up, practical approach, and includes hundreds of real examples from around the world, to help you really ‘get’ the circular economy. Even better, you’ll be inspired with ideas to make your own business more competitive, resilient and sustainable.
Please let us know what you think of the podcast – and we’d love it if you could leave us a review on iTunes, or wherever you find your podcasts. Or send us an email…
Podcast music
Thanks to Belinda O’Hooley and Heidi Tidow, otherwise known as the brilliant, inventive and generous folk duo, O’Hooley & Tidow for allowing me to use the instrumentals from the live version of Summat’s Brewin’ as music for the podcast. You can find the whole track (inspired by the Copper Family song “Oh Good Ale”) on their album, also called Summat’s Brewin’. Or, follow them on Twitter.
111 Sara Howard: symbiotic circular ceramics
110 Katie Beverley: designing a circular economy
109 Janina Nieper – Connecting new designs to leftover materials
108 Sian Sutherland – fixing plastics can fix so much else…
