Arthur Potts Dawson: A vision for sustainable restaurants

86,711 views ・ 2010-12-03

TED


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00:16
Restaurants and the food industry in general
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are pretty much the most wasteful industry
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in the world.
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For every calorie of food that we consume here in Britain today,
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10 calories are taken to produce it.
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That's a lot.
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I want to take something rather humble
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to discuss.
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I found this in the farmers' market today,
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and if anybody wants to take it home and mash it later, you're very welcome to.
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The humble potato --
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and I've spent a long time, 25 years, preparing these.
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And it pretty much goes through
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eight different forms in its lifetime.
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First of all, it's planted, and that takes energy.
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It grows and is nurtured.
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It's then harvested.
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It's then distributed,
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and distribution is a massive issue.
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It's then sold and bought,
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and it's then delivered to me.
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I basically take it, prepare it,
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and then people consume it -- hopefully they enjoy it.
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The last stage is basically waste,
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and this is is pretty much where everybody disregards it.
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There are different types of waste.
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01:16
There's a waste of time; there's a waste of space; there's a waste of energy;
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and there's a waste of waste.
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And every business I've been working on
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over the past five years,
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I'm trying to lower each one of these elements.
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01:28
Okay, so you ask what a sustainable restaurant looks like.
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Basically a restaurant just like any other.
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This is the restaurant, Acorn House.
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Front and back.
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So let me run you through a few ideas.
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Floor: sustainable, recyclable.
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Chairs: recycled and recyclable.
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Tables: Forestry Commission.
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This is Norwegian Forestry Commission wood.
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This bench, although it was uncomfortable for my mom --
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she didn't like sitting on it,
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so she went and bought these cushions for me from a local jumble sale --
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reusing, a job that was pretty good.
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I hate waste, especially walls.
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If they're not working, put a shelf on it, which I did,
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and that shows all the customers my products.
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The whole business is run on sustainable energy.
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This is powered by wind. All of the lights are daylight bulbs.
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Paint is all low-volume chemical,
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which is very important when you're working in the room all the time.
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02:16
I was experimenting with these -- I don't know if you can see it --
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but there's a work surface there.
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And that's a plastic polymer.
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And I was thinking, well I'm trying to think nature, nature, nature.
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But I thought, no, no, experiment with resins,
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experiment with polymers.
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Will they outlive me? They probably might.
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02:30
Right, here's a reconditioned coffee machine.
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It actually looks better than a brand new one -- so looking good there.
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Now reusing is vital.
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And we filter our own water.
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We put them in bottles, refrigerate them,
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and then we reuse that bottle again and again and again.
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02:44
Here's a great little example.
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If you can see this orange tree, it's actually growing in a car tire,
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which has been turned inside out and sewn up.
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It's got my compost in it, which is growing an orange tree, which is great.
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02:53
This is the kitchen, which is in the same room.
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I basically created a menu that allowed people
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to choose the amount and volume of food
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that they wanted to consume.
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Rather than me putting a dish down,
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they were allowed to help themselves to as much or as little as they wanted.
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Okay, it's a small kitchen. It's about five square meters.
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It serves 220 people a day.
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We generate quite a lot of waste.
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This is the waste room.
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You can't get rid of waste.
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But this story's not about eliminating it, it's about minimizing it.
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In here, I have produce and boxes
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that are unavoidable.
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I put my food waste into this dehydrating, desiccating macerator --
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turns food into an inner material,
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which I can store and then compost later.
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I compost it in this garden.
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All of the soil you can see there is basically my food,
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which is generated by the restaurant,
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and it's growing in these tubs, which I made out of storm-felled trees
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and wine casks and all kinds of things.
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Three compost bins --
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go through about 70 kilos of raw vegetable waste a week --
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really good, makes fantastic compost.
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A couple of wormeries in there too.
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And actually one of the wormeries
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was a big wormery. I had a lot of worms in it.
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And I tried taking the dried food waste,
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putting it to the worms, going, "There you go, dinner."
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It was like vegetable jerky,
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and killed all of them.
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I don't know how many worms [were] in there,
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but I've got some heavy karma coming, I tell you.
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04:11
(Laughter)
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What you're seeing here is a water filtration system.
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This takes the water out of the restaurant,
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runs it through these stone beds -- this is going to be mint in there --
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and I sort of water the garden with it.
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And I ultimately want to recycle that, put it back into the loos,
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maybe wash hands with it, I don't know.
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So, water is a very important aspect.
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I started meditating on that
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and created a restaurant called Waterhouse.
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If I could get Waterhouse to be a no-carbon restaurant
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that is consuming no gas to start with, that would be great.
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I managed to do it.
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This restaurant looks a little bit like Acorn House --
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same chairs, same tables.
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They're all English and a little bit more sustainable.
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But this is an electrical restaurant.
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The whole thing is electric, the restaurant and the kitchen.
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And it's run on hydroelectricity,
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so I've gone from air to water.
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Now it's important to understand
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that this room
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is cooled by water, heated by water,
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filters its own water,
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and it's powered by water.
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It literally is Waterhouse.
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The air handling system inside it --
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I got rid of air-conditioning
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because I thought there was too much consumption going on there.
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This is basically air-handling.
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I'm taking the temperature of the canal outside,
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pumping it through the heat exchange mechanism,
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it's turning through these amazing sails on the roof,
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and that, in turn, is falling softly onto the people in the restaurant,
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cooling them, or heating them, as the need may be.
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And this is an English willow air diffuser,
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and that's softly moving
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that air current through the room.
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Very advanced, no air-conditioning -- I love it.
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In the canal, which is just outside the restaurant,
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there is hundreds of meters of coil piping.
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This takes the temperature of the canal
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and turns it into this four-degrees of heat exchange.
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I have no idea how it works, but I paid a lot of money for it.
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05:51
(Laughter)
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And what's great is one of the chefs who works in that restaurant
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lives on this boat -- it's off-grid; it generates all its own power.
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He's growing all his own fruit, and that's fantastic.
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There's no accident in names of these restaurants.
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Acorn House is the element of wood; Waterhouse is the element of water;
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and I'm thinking, well, I'm going to be making
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five restaurants based
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on the five Chinese medicine acupuncture specialities.
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I've got water and wood. I'm just about to do fire.
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I've got metal and earth to come.
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So you've got to watch your space for that.
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Okay. So this is my next project.
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Five weeks old,
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it's my baby, and it's hurting real bad.
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The People's Supermarket.
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So basically, the restaurants only really hit
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people who believed in what I was doing anyway.
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What I needed to do was get food out
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to a broader spectrum of people.
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So people -- i.e., perhaps, more working-class --
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or perhaps people who actually believe in a cooperative.
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This is a social enterprise,
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not-for-profit cooperative supermarket.
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It really is about the social disconnect
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between food, communities
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in urban settings
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and their relationship to rural growers --
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connecting communities in London to rural growers.
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Really important.
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So I'm committing to potatoes; I'm committing to milk;
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I'm committing to leeks and broccoli -- all very important stuff.
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I've kept the tiles; I've kept the floors;
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I've kept the trunking; I've got in some recycled fridges;
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I've got some recycled tills; I've got some recycled trolleys.
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I mean, the whole thing is is super-sustainable.
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In fact, I'm trying and I'm going to make this
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the most sustainable supermarket in the world.
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That's zero food waste.
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And no one's doing that just yet.
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In fact, Sainsbury's, if you're watching,
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let's have a go. Try it on.
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I'm going to get there before you.
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So nature doesn't create waste
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doesn't create waste as such.
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Everything in nature is used up in a closed continuous cycle
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with waste being the end of the beginning,
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and that's been something that's been nurturing me for some time,
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and it's an important statement to understand.
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If we don't stand up
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and make a difference
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and think about sustainable food,
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think about the sustainable nature of it,
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then we may fail.
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But, I wanted to get up and show you
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that we can do it if we're more responsible.
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Environmentally conscious businesses are doable.
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They're here. You can see I've done three so far;
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I've got a few more to go.
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The idea is embryonic.
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I think it's important.
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I think that if we reduce, reuse, refuse
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and recycle -- right at the end there --
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recycling is the last point I want to make;
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but it's the four R's, rather than the three R's --
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then I think we're going to be on our way.
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So these three are not perfect -- they're ideas.
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I think that there are many problems to come,
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but with help, I'm sure I'm going to find solutions.
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And I hope you all take part.
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08:40
Thank you very much. (Applause)
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