2023-11-04 02:00:42
She once gave up her lunches to save money to buy her first boat. At the age of 28, she completed the fastest sailing trip around the world in history (including men). Today, Ellen MacArthur is one of the most heard voices on the green transformation of the industry. “Why should we continue to make single-use packaging? Humanity can do better.”
In 2005, Ellen MacArthur (47 years old) became famous overnight by succeeding a solo sailing trip around the world in just 71 days, thus breaking the record for all genres combined. “I didn’t write much in my journal during that trip. But I distinctly remember writing down at one point: ‘This is all I have.’ If you run out of diesel or supplies in the middle of the ocean, you can’t stop somewhere to resupply. That’s the idea that stuck with me until I got back to dry land. And I realized that it did not only concern sailing, but our entire economy. We must make do with the resources we have.”
“I understood that I could use my notoriety for something.”
This awareness is like a new milestone for the British. “I couldn’t imagine leaving the world of professional sailing. But I understood that I could use my notoriety for something.” This is how the influential woman was born Ellen MacArthur Foundation, an NGO which has given itself on a mission to get rid of this throwaway economy, collaborating with businesses, scientists and policy makers to better use our resources. Ellen MacArthur engages in this fight with the same determination that inspired her to face the raging seas at the time of her solo nautical exploits.
A vocation as a sailor from the age of 4
Ellen MacArthur was born and raised in rural Derbyshire, England. “We grew our own vegetables. My favorite thing was walking with my dog in the fields, hills and woods.” The sea was far from these bucolic landscapes. But the call of the open sea struck her very young, at the age of four, when her aunt Thea took her on a sailboat. “It was a small boat, but I felt like it could take me anywhere. What a wonderful feeling of freedom! Suddenly, all doors opened to me.”
Ellen MacArthur sits at the table with the bosses of multinationals such as Gucci, Amazon, Philips and Morgan Stanley, and participates in discussions at the highest political level.
To buy her first sailboat, she saved the money she received for her lunch at school. Whenever she can, she goes to sea. When she is told, at the age of 17, that she is not “intelligent enough” to study veterinary medicine – even though she spent three years working as a veterinarian. prepare for it by working on Saturday at a local veterinarian – your choice is made. “I’m going to go sailing. I have no idea how I’m going to do it, but that’s the goal.”
Today, the Foundation has 200 employees. Ellen MacArthur sits at the table with the bosses of multinationals such as Gucci, Amazon, Philips and Morgan Stanley, and participates in discussions at the highest political level. The organization speaks in the ear of policy makers, informs the general public through podcasts and works closely with industry. Thus, it works in partnership with the chemical group Solvaythe utility company Veolia and the car manufacturer Renault to improve battery technology. Let us quote again the jeans redesign projectbringing together around a hundred brands, spinning mills and manufacturers, which seeks to develop sustainable jeans.
“Creating this whole organization was not my idea in the first place,” says Ellen MacArthur. “At the beginning, I told myself that I could perhaps raise awareness by going around the world with a message written in large letters on my sail. But with what message precisely? So I had to get it straight first. “
So the message to be transmitted was not yet clear to you?
I am a navigator, not an economist. At first, I intuitively felt that nothing was wrong, without being able to put my finger on the problem to be solved.
“When one resource runs out, do we just move on to another? How many times can we do that?”
After my trip around the world, I went to the South Atlantic in the winter of 2005 to make a documentary on albatrosses. I stayed on an island that had once housed a whaling station. Thousands of people once worked there. An entire town had been built around it, with a church, dining halls, dormitories and medical offices. Today it is a ghost town. Fishermen pulled 175,000 whales out of the sea and, after decimating this population, they left. Is this really how we want to continue operating? When one resource is exhausted, do we simply move on to another? How many times can we do this?
And how did you find the answer?
I didn’t think for myself. I went to factories and power plants, I talked to economists, to environmental experts, to CEOs. One day, I met the big boss of Castorama, the French chain of DIY stores, which was part of the Kingfisher group which had sponsored me for years. The big idea at the time was to do more with less. Use fewer raw materials to make products. Everywhere I went, the strategy was focused on sustainability. Less of everything. Let’s use fewer resources, travel less, buy less.
But how is this an objective in itself? Where does it stop? So what are we going to make cars with? Or is the goal to sell as few cars as possible? It’s not realistic. Always less is not a goal. This is the problem with sustainability. We don’t know where we want to go. In meetings, we said that we had to move towards sustainable products. But no one could say what a sustainable product might look like.
“Life on earth has functioned in a circular fashion for billions of years.”
It was then that I saw a drawing in a book: a straight line and, beneath it, a circle. I said to myself: this is it. Since the industrial revolution, we have been in a linear logic. We consume raw materials and fossil fuels, waste accumulates, we pollute and we cause climate change. The circular economy goes against this logic. This is how life on earth has worked for billions of years. In a forest, there is no waste, everything regenerates. This is what our economy can look like. Humanity is so inventive. Why on earth create packaging that we throw away after just one use and can no longer do anything with it? We can do better, don’t you think? From the design phase, we should tell ourselves: we are making something that will be reused later. It is a matter of common sense.
To promote this idea of a circular economy, you launched the Ellen MacArthur Foundation in 2010. Where did you start?
With the consultant McKinsey, we first wanted to calculate what was to be gained by adopting a different approach. The numbers stunned us. For the entire European economy, we generate $630 billion in savings by better using and reusing our raw materials. We looked at what could be done differently, for example, in terms of vans, washing machines, smartphones or cotton consumption.
In 2012, we presented this report at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Of course, many people were skeptical. But six months later, we spoke in the European Parliament, we spoke to industry figures. This made things happen.
Concretely, what could we change in a washing machine?
The current model is: the manufacturer buys raw materials, makes a washing machine and sells it. He only makes money if he can sell another machine. In other words, he wins when the machine no longer works. What do we see? A cheaper machine doesn’t last long. Therefore, the cost per wash is almost one and a half times higher than that of a more expensive machine. But shouldn’t we aim for the cost per wash to be as low as possible for everyone? Maybe we should move us towards a model in which the manufacturer also benefits from the lifespan of the machine and its maintenance? One could imagine that the machine remains the property of the manufacturer and that he can reuse the materials when it no longer works. We need to rethink the entire system.
For an SME faced with a multitude of daily challenges – after the pandemic, the energy crisis, geopolitical tensions, inflation – reinventing its entire business model is wishful thinking. She has neither the time nor the space.
Every time I hear this, I remember the climate summit in Glasgow two years ago. I was seated on stage alongside Emmanuel Faber, the former boss of Danone, and Philipp Hildebrand, the number two at BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world. A US moderator told us: “I understand this whole circularity thing, but it’s a complex transition that’s going to cost money.” Philipp Hildebrand turned to him and said: “If we do nothing to solve climate problems, our prosperity will be cut by a quarter. So the question is not what it will cost. ‘Business as usual’ simply doesn’t work anymore.”
“The way a business operates should help solve our biggest global problems.”
For me, that’s the whole point. If you don’t have time to think about it, you will soon cease to exist. Sustainability is not something that is developed in a separate report. Why should a farmer not strive to cultivate his land in such a way as to make it richer and not more barren? Why not ensure that driving a car does not harm the environment? The very way a business operates should help solve our biggest global problems.
What role can the circular economy play in our ecological ambitions?
If we want to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees, 55% of efforts will have to come from the energy transition. It is therefore about renewable energies and the reduction of CO2 emissions from fossil fuels. But 45% will have to come from how we make things differently, from food to clothing. This concerns our manufacturing industry, but also our agriculture. So this is crucial.
Do you consider yourself a climate activist?
No. I never was. I simply took a personal approach. The world population is increasing. Our resources are limited. This is not sustainable. I want to get this message across. That doesn’t make me an activist. I am a realist.
But how pragmatic are you? The clothing sector faces enormous challenges. A company like Primark, which faces a lot of criticism for the way it does business, is a member of your community. She therefore improves her image at a low cost.
We do not work outside of economic reality. There is every reason to talk to everyone, not just those who are already doing well. This is what we have done in the area of plastics. In speaking with many leaders in this sector, we found that no one has an overview of the plastic packaging chain. The situation is no different in the clothing sector. Everyone produces, but what does that mean on a global scale? There was never any question of bringing this down to one company.
©Contour by Getty Images
And on plastic packaging – a business worth hundreds of billions of dollars – we devoted a whole year of research to it. In 2017, we presented the results. The numbers were dramatic. Barely 2% of all packaging entering the market was recycled into an equivalent material, when we all felt that we had already achieved excellent results in recycling. Armed with these catastrophic figures, we could bring all stakeholders to the negotiating table. To define real goals. Ultimately, 20% of companies committed in 2019 to achieving ambitious objectives for 2025.
Since then, ambitious targets set to reduce disposable plastic have proven unachievable. You admitted it yourself. Worse still, in some areas we have even regressed.
Yes. But we see that companies that have signed up to the targets are doing significantly better than their industry counterparts when it comes to tackling plastic waste. It makes a difference. But to put the entire sector on the right track, an international approach is necessary. It is currently being negotiated. Small, soft plastic containers are a disaster. The problem is only getting worse. They are neither collected nor recycled, especially in emerging countries where there is no collection system. It’s not just one company investing a lot of money and energy into innovation that’s going to change this. The failure is systemic. We have to start everything from scratch.
That’s to say?
We must realize that everything is linked. When sailing a boat around the world, you also have to consider multiple systems at once. You yourself are a system. You must stay alive. It’s easier said than done. You are not hungry and yet you must eat. You need to get enough sleep. Then there is the boat, which is also a system in itself. There are the sails, the electronics. If the batteries are not charged, the autopilot does not work and 20 seconds later you are sailing in the wrong direction. Sometimes I literally slept next to the bar. And then there is the third system: the weather. You monitor it using satellite images. We try to predict the wind, because it determines the speed at which we go.
“Solving a problem requires a different mindset than what we were taught in school. We weren’t taught to think in a circular manner.”
This interconnection is also found in our economy. It is a large system that encompasses the entire world, but at the same time concerns each individual. It targets each sector. It’s a difficult balance to find. On the one hand, the practical details of a problem must be sufficiently worked out. Such as setting up a collection system for a specific plastic. On the other hand, you have to have an overview. Can’t a waste stream from agriculture, for example, be converted into a better type of plastic? No problem can be solved alone. This requires a different mindset than what we were taught in school. We were not taught to think in a circular manner.
Consumers must also be involved. As long as they buy clothes from Primark and throw them away after wearing them twice, we won’t succeed.
The general public is needed to move the system. Through social media, people can force companies to change. But even that is not enough. After my sailing career, I changed my life completely. I started traveling less. I built a house that requires virtually no energy. But, I admit, I also had the means to do it. Not all people can say the same. And even if everyone could, it wouldn’t solve everything, precisely because the whole system must change. But it is true that the support of the general public is necessary. And today many people disagree.
And on the political side, some even say that we need to lower our ecological ambitions. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak walked his talk in this regard.
“Business as usual” no longer works. We will have to take the plunge eventually.
Which brings me back to Glasgow. “Business as usual” no longer works. We will have to take the plunge eventually. The question is simply to know How long will we hold on to our old ideas and dare to take the big leap?? Some people understood this well. Start-ups that focus on reselling or repairing clothing are now worth billions.
“Previously, companies wanted to change nothing. Today, they themselves want to move further and further forward.”
The political shift is regrettable in that companies have already invested to achieve these goals. They are therefore banging their fists on the table, demanding ambitious policies. The playing field must be level. That’s the least. This is the heart of the criticism leveled at Sunak. Previously, companies wanted to change nothing. Today, they themselves want to move further forward.
You are realistic, you say; are you also optimistic? Can we move fast enough to change things in time?
I am convinced that it is possible. Whether this can be done quickly enough is another matter. But we must not underestimate ourselves. During the pandemic, businesses did in four weeks what would have taken four years. Covid has been terrible, but we have shown, as human beings, what transformation we are capable of.
“If we really put our minds to it, things can go quickly. You still have to know where you want to go.”
My great-grandfather was a miner. He died when I was 11, so I remember him very well. He was born in 1894. At the time, there were barely a few cars on the streets, everyone still got around on horses and carts. The first computer was built when he was 45 years old. Twenty years later, the electronic chip was launched. When he died, the internet had just been invented. And today we have artificial intelligence. If we really put our minds to it, things can happen quickly. You still have to know where you want to go.
Bio express
Ellen MacArthur
- Born July 8, 1976.
- Grew up in a small hamlet in England. His parents were both teachers; she has two brothers.
- Became known as a professional sailor. In 2001, at age 24, she completed second in the Vendée Globea Dantesque ordeal consisting of traveling around the world solo and non-stop.
- I beat her the record for the fastest solo round the world trip in 2005in just 71 days.
- His nautical exploits earned him the title of Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE), the female equivalent of the knighthood.
- In 2010 I launched the Fondation Ellen MacArthur, which promotes the circular economy to combat climate change, biodiversity loss, waste and pollution.
- Wrote several books. In 2002, she published her first biography, “Taking on the World.” In 2005, she published “Race Against Time” and a second autobiography, “Full Circle”, was published in 2010.
- Is the founder and director of l’Ellen MacArthur Cancer Trustan organization that inspires young people recovering from cancer through sailing.
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