We like cirque lar economy because we feel the circular economy is a different economic what were seeing is that the economy is starting to bump up against its limits. We have 3 billion middle class consumers in the next two decades. Weve seen a century of price declines so actually whats the option . What were doing is were being more efficient with that linear economy. Were using less. Being careful with the resources we have. But were still going to run out at some stage. Thats a huge issue for the Global Economy. A circular economy looks at from the outset, designing systems, designing products so you can recover materials so it is aligning Business Innovation with the design of products, materials and components which, through that Business Model innovation, allow those products to go back so that the materials can be recovered and thus create a restorative economy that can thrive in the long term and it globally. First of all, when you have a panel and a beer maker on your panel, it is always good to get into the good books early so im going to go to you. The stated goal as ellen talks about is in large part to decouple Economic Growth which we all believe we need. With resource consumption of the assumption has been if you grow, that you have to suck up resources. Will you use more resources. I think of one example where that hasnt been the case. I look at oil in the United States. The United States has always been a disproportionate consumer of oil and yet as the United States grows economically and in terms of population, they are consuming less oil. So do you believe thats the starting point that we can decouple consumption from resources . I think you can do and we are doing it for many, many years already but that needs technology. As technology is progressing, it uses less and less resources. So Energy Efficiency raised over the last 15 years. If i look forward, well continue to do that in industrial processes using energy. So im fairly optimistic but you will always need energy and you will continue to find new sources of energy and you will start to work with alternative sources of energy which are renewable. We do that at the heineken, also. It is a journey. But i think that as the horizon progresses, you have more and more opportunities. And to your point about the circular economy, it is just that everybody in its own process looks at what is waste and can you reuse that waste in a valuable way in your process. Draw the line for me because why you do some of those things because you should and because it is Good Business and because people will protest if you dont or theyll go to your competitors, versus where it actually becomes costeffective. What are the things do you like wow, we really make money off of that . It is a good question. It started somewhere 20 years ago by activists pushing on us. It has been a discovery of how we can integrate it in your Business Model. At the end of the day, if you price resources, most of the resources are priced in this world, you find out very quickly that you can make money off of it. I would argue to say that perhaps water is one of the least wellpriced resources that we have today in the world. But otherwise than that and was referring to that, the rise of the commodities and materials because the world is going. Thats good news. Pushes us to all the time put it more and more into our economic mold. So i would say that the whole sustainability agenda is a business agenda. Let me ask the other Major Companies ceo, franz. Do you feel theyre more costeffective or less costeffective today than they have been or will be. Where do you fall in that paradigm . We see the circular economy as a way to make a giant step forward. And indeed, it will make us more profitable. It will help us get more growth. It will help us design new Business Models. I would like to give you an example of that. We are the world leader in Energy Efficient l. E. D. Lighting. It saves you 60 , 70 on your electricity bill. So you would assume everybody lines up to buy it. Municipalities in europe are cashstrapped and they spent little of their budget on electricity. You would think they would line up to buy it. However, l. E. D. Lighting is a little bit more expensive from an initial procurement point of view. So we have a mismatch. So they need to design whole new Business Model where we cellulite as a service. Now, we continue to own the product. And we sell the benefit. And since we know that we are selling the benefit, we can design the product for longer lifetime. Which are you talking about renting out a light bulb . It is a Business Model. We give opportunity to the municipalities to pay us as they go from their energy savings. So now we have designed a new Business Model. We have continued to own the product. Where we take back the old product at the end of its life ask. Which is good because nobody recycles a light bulb on their own. Thats right. We can discard materials and the municipality only pace for the benefit of the light. So this is an example of a circular economy Business Model. And it helps us generate growth in an economy that is down. So it is absolutely a winwin, more growth, more profitability and more benefit to society. It is interesting though. How much of a light bulb can you recoup when somebody gives it back to you . How much can you recycle out of that . We can recycle many parts of it. We can recycle the the ewaste is enormous in this world. Theres more gold coming out of ewaste than actually out of the mines. Bill, lets talk about the infrastructure that is needed to create this circular economy and how much of that is underway. Im asking you about two things. One is physical infrastructure. Youre an architect by training. You know a lot about physical infrastructure. And the production infrastructure. Whats the infrastructure needed to meet the vision that ellen so eloquently laid out for us . Well, i think the infrastructure needs to be seen on a very broad basis. That the whole world is part of this. We grew up for thousands of years thinking the world was too big for us to effect and that it was all there for our use. So really the whole world is this place that we can engage as the infrastructure. The way we talk about sustainability, i dont use the word sustainable that often, even though i wrote principles for design for sustainability in a book called cradle the cradle which is about this issue. It is really about design and the human intention. If our intention, as a dominant species is to destroy the planet, were doing great. But if thats not our intention, well then whats the plan . If our de facto plan is the plan to destroy let me stop you there for a second. Fascinating train of thought. The issue is what you just said, if our intention is to destroy the planet, were doing a great job. Simply where i live in the United States, there is a very large part of the population who will tell you thats just not correct. Yeah. Well, we can look at most Living Systems that are actually in decline. We have some fundamental science that is of concern for us. Certainly the climate issues are vigorously debated. But when Nuclear Radioactive material washes onshore in north america from japan, when the air in tokyo becomes awkward because of things going on in china, et cetera, these things all connect. People start to realize, you know, is life Getting Better . Perhaps there are other ways we can think about this. The thing that concerns me about the argument of people saying well, wait a minute, everythings fine, is that sustainability sounds like may not maintenance. If i asked you about what is your relationship with your wife and you said sustainable i would say im sorry. [ laughter ] this isnt maintenance. I dont know that i get a lot further by saying it is circular. What im getting at is i think there is a great joy in the hope of innovation and the Human Experience and when the irony is it is the people who are actually worrying about all of these things that are creating the technologies that will give all of the people the hope not to worry about it because the people who care about it are doing it for them so they can sit back and say it is not a problem. Arent we clever . Ali neil is on a panel of a couple of crazy scientists. Hes the really crazy scientist. When you walk around the worlds economic forum, you see something called a fab lab which, by the way, is the hot thing or things like it are the hot thing at technoconferences and thinky places. And theyre becoming so common that they will soon be at weddings and bar mitzvahs. In this particular case, its got to do with 3d printing. Is 3d printing the next big thing and what has it got to contribute to this discussion . 3d printing is a strange mean in the media that has nothing to do with the next thing. Let me tell you what comes after it. Trash is an analog concept. Digitization ali im an analog guy. I have no idea what youre talking about. Thats what im going to explain. Phones were analog. The call got worse with distance. Digital communication was invented. What digitizing communication did was let you detect and correct errors and now our conversation goes out to the planet. You understand that. The reason 3d printing is a detail, it is a distraction, is the design is digital. It is one of 20 different ways you smush stuff around. You can cut, deposit but no information in the materials. When they say trash is analog, you put it in a landfill but it doesnt contain information on what to do with it. Now if you digitize fabrication, you can. The model of the circular economy is a forest. When you die in a forest, you get disassembled and reborn but the way that works is youre built out of molecular legos. Amino acids are exactly like lego. You can reversibly join them and take them apart again and build something new. The real science, the real revolution is digitizing the materials. We can talk more about it. Were learning how to put codes into the construction of material. Think of molecular lego. What it means is you can disassemble technological materials and reassemble them. So trash is an analog concept means you smush stuff around. The people on the panel are doing as great as you can resmushing stuff around. The real Science Behind the fab lab, the Real Research revolution is digitizing fabrication to code the construction of materials so rather than recycle, you unbuild and reassemble. I follow that. I agree with it but maybe i can give a practical example. So we already heard that we need to design products for the circular economy. We already heard that waste is very valuable. But products are made up out of individual materials. And all of these materials are very valuable. And so think of a product as a whole list of components and there is a passport of all of those components and youre going to track where these components go as we distribute and sell our products and we get them back and then were going to extract all of the materials from those products because we know that theyre there, we know that theyre valuable so that we get the gold out and all of the other Precious Metals in the rare earth and we bring them back into the mainstream process of product creation. In turn, if i could amplify that ali this makes me look really smart because i have no idea whats going on. Where the technology road map is going is when you get a cell phone today, theres chips, semiconductors, theres boards. What you can do today that is fabulous is to be able to unso solder it. It is very much coming and come and well show you, were actually making for eway for electronics. Think of lego bricks. So a lego brick, you dont need a ruler to place it. They correct errors so it is more accurate than the child. You take the bricks apart. The reason you can do it is the bricks contain information. For ewaste, where the research is going is were making a brick thats a conductor. A brick thats a semiconductor. A brick thats an insulator and theyre very, very tiny. The size of microelectronic components. Then were making assemblers that assemble the lego. Today, its fabulous, you do it and you unsolder and separate the elements. The step after that is you pull apart the conductor brick from the insulator brick from the semiconductor brick and reassemble them. Thats meant to be an automated process . It is an automated process. So it is not a forecast. Come visit and ill show you the earlier version but thats where were heading. We wont get there fast enough to transform the economy in the next few years. It is essential to take the existing supply chain and close it. Ali do what were doing. As quickly as possible, the goal is to make your job ease easier to disassemble them. Ali you wrote a great article. Glowing articles about 3d printers read like stories in the 1950s that proclaim that microwave ovens were the future of cooking. Microwaves are convenient but they dont replace the rest of the kitchen. I notice as i read that, you obviously havent been in my kitchen where the microwave does 90 of the heavy lifting with the toaster moving in for support. Bill, in 1996, you became the first and only individual recipient of the president ial award for sustainable development. Guess they didnt know about circular then. In 1999, time named you a hero for the planet. One of the projects youre involved in that im very interested in and youre more than halfway into it, youve taken the symbol of oldfashioned american manufacturing, the river rouge plant in dearborn, michigan, the old ford plant. You were asked to do something with this. It was, by all accounts, 12 years ago, a mess. Tell us what a mess it was. What you were asked to do and what youve done. In 1999, bill ford asked me to take on the river rouge. It was his great grandfathers center, Industrial Revolution of the United States. Integrated manufacturing from the beginning of wood, limestone, coal, iron ore, vertically integrated from start to finish. And steel mills, paint shops. And we looked at the site and it was very compromised as we could say. With concerned metals and things like that. We werent even allowed to test the soil because if we did, it would start all kinds of crazy liability issues. Things like that. So we decided to try to clean it up using plants and got permission to do that. We took the industrial facility, a million square foot plant and underway, with the same budget and the same schedule had to open up we built the Worlds Largest green roof. Instead of having three Chemical Treatment plants and four kilometers of concrete pipes and 70 workers praying it doesnt rain, we used natural assistants to create Natural Habitats for birds. The budget was quite interesting. In presenting it to fords board for approval, this is a fiduciary board. They said okay, whats your Business Case . Turned out that using Natural Systems versus Chemical Treatment plants saved ford 35 million. First day. Cap ex. Capital expenditure. 35 million in savings is the equivalent with the ford taurus at a 4 margin out of chicago at that time, of an order for 900 million worth of cars. Ali the interesting thing about this for those who havent seen the river rouge facility, one could argue this was the birth of industrial america. This is where the middle class was born. It was a fully integrated site, as youve said, where they produced everything the energy, the wood. Everything. Ali so to change that into a modern facility is a symbolic thing in addition to being a great Business Case. Well take a quick break on our discussion from the circular economy here at the World Economic forum. Stay with us. s why im riskingy life. Killing the messenger on Al Jazeera America ali were having a conversation about the circular economy. Can you give me some examples of stage two of this when i say stage one was what you both said. You did because you were trying to save energy and not use toxic stuff. Now youre in the stage two where youre able to make money off of in many cases, your waste or using fewer resources. Tell me some of the things that you do at heineken. It starts obviously with the design and it is a design of how you manufacture how you brew. You ferment. There are a lot of efforts in the design of our industrial processes so as to reduce the amount of energy you consume, the amount of water you consume. That is a very important part. Then there is a second part is you have to sell it in a packaged way. Now things like you put it in a bottle. You can make a very solid safe bottle with 30 less weight. When you know that glass is just sent and 70 is the cost of the energy of melting the sand down to make glass, if you can reduce the amount of sand and energy by 30 , it is a huge deal. It is a huge deal for the resources and atlarge for the planet but hugely for ourselves because we have some economies of scale there. Now, the same goes with the amount of carton you use, the thickness of carton, how you glue it. So many details that makes that in the design, you make a better product which uses less resources. Then you how do you recuperate the waste. The waste at the consumer level. That is a thing of it is a combined effort. You cannot do that alone because a lot of times recycling waste, if your product is in the collective approach that you have to do within an industry, with other industry, to collect the waste and recycle the waste. It has a lot of value. Aluminum has a lot of value. Glass is recyclable 99 of glass is recyclable. When you brew beer, you spend which everything ali you sell that to farmers. For cattle. The yeast is sold to the farming industry. It is also used in the cosmetic industry. So you have a lot of things that are constantly recycled. Even washable labels. Also recycled. Ali i was asking jeanfrancois why there are two dutch ceos here. Is there something in the cultural environment that supports that two of you are here . I know there is no plan. It happened the two of you are here and were happy to have you but you did say there is something. I think so. The explanation is essentially i think cultural. When you have over a quarter of the country which is living below the sea level, and for a long, long time, it has created between the population and nature a special bond. And that if you dont care about your environment, the environment is going to destroy you. So when it comes to use of resources, sustainability and the whole loft, i think people get it. And the ceos get it but the people on the workshop get it, also. And we have had an easy task as ceos of Dutch Companies to create a coalition for sustainable growth, we call it. By the way, that circular is a better word that sustainable because it gives more action to what sustainable is. Ali it does mean something. Thats what the dutch have been good at and last but not least, of course, dutch are traders so we like to export. We are if we have technologies that are exportable. If we can make money on it and that makes also the better the world a better place to live. We think that it is business. Ali ellen . We talk a lot about the value of a circular economy and the topic of this debate is waste to wealth. A few figures that struck me when we were putting the economic reports together, the first report was look at medium complex goods, lighting, cars, we looked at five different subjects. Circular economy was worth 560 billion. Only based on recycling 25 of the materials and components within them. We then did a consumer goods one for us to move into consumer goods. We thought that would be much harder because you cant put the same business mozelles into place with remanufacturing. We ended up with a 703 billion u. S. Figure globally for Economic Opportunity in this space which included the heineken examples of the beer spent grains. Saying it has value. The grains have value. But when you look at the consumer good sector, it is a 3. 2 trillion u. S. Market globally and we only cover 20 of that. 2. 7 trillion is lost to the Global Economy because we dont have that system in place to recover those materials. That is unfortunately the point ill have to end the discussion. It is really the beginning of a discussion. I certainly leave convinced that i understand the topic better using terminology that i was not aware of before i got here. The circular economy. It allows us to think more clearly about this. I want to thank these fantastic panelists. Jean jeanfrancois from heineken. Ellen of the Ellen Mcarthur foundation. William mcdonough, thank you for joining us. Thank you all for joining us. Thank you to the World Economic forum for providing this platform. Im ali velshi. This is al jazeera. Check check welcome to Al Jazeera America. Im Morgan Radford live from new york city. Here are the top stories we are following antigovernment protesters interrupt an election. Demonstrators have forced the closure of a dozen polling stations in bangkok and the southern provinces. The areas have seen clashes between antiand progovernment supporters. Areas in the north of the country have stayed quiet. 16 are dead after a volcanic eruption in indonesia. Mount sinabung is spewing out ash and gas. More than 30,000 fled. On saturday 14,000 evacuees were allowed home once again. Port authorityies are investigating whether a chemist that worked for the state stole drug evidence. It could lead to a probe of hundreds of cases and result in prisoners being released. Landrieu has elected for a second time. His efforts have been heralded following hurricane katrina. Those are the headlines. There we go its ok. Look at that look [laughs] [inaudible]. I dont believe it. What do you mean by saying that a baby loves its mother . Hey. Cute little thing. So whats her name gonna be . Cami. Camilena anna diaz, but its cami for short