Transcript 0:00 [gentle piano music] As most of you know, my new book, Sustainable in a Circular World, is out, and I get into a lot of the nitty-gritty in this book about sustainability. 0:13 And one area where we desperately need innovation is in food waste. We know that nearly one-third of all food is lost or wasted globally. 0:25 [upbeat music] Welcome to The Peggy Smedley Show, the podcasting voice of IoT and digital transformation, with your host, Peggy Smedley. 0:48 Hello, listeners, and welcome to today's edition of The Peggy Smedley Show. As always, I'm your host, Peggy Smedley. This month, we're going to be talking all about sustainability. 0:58 If you have been onto connectedworld.com this month, then you know we have been highlighting the five tech trends to watch in 2021. And what is the number one on the list? You guessed it. It's sustainability. 1:14 It will continue to be a driving topic of the decade. So for today's show, I'd like to dive in a little bit deeper. 1:23 We also know this week is going to be CES, and so as you know, everybody's been talking about it's a little bit of a virtual show, so there's a lot of new things coming from the show, and certainly much of it relates to sus- sustainability. 1:38 So I'll be highlighting a few new cool products with sustainability in mind as well. But before we get to that, I want to tell you about who's going to be on the show today. 1:47 I'm going to be interviewing Ian Barkin, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at Cyc Enterprises, and then I'm going to wrap up the show with Christian Connolly, CEO of TwiceMe. 1:59 So I think I've got some great guests I'm pretty excited about. So all right, let's get started. The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified the idea of being more sustainable. I think you will all agree with me on that. 2:11 It has highlighted our awareness in many areas of our lives, and we all know it. I know I'm kind of glad 2020 is over, but let's look at what we need to think about for 2021. 2:22 All right, as most of you know, my new book, Sustainable in a Circular World, is out, and I get into a lot of the nitty-gritty into this book about sustainability, and one area where we desperately need innovation is in food waste. 2:39 We know that nearly one-third of all food is lost or wasted globally, and this is estimated to be 1.3 billion tons, I guess that would be metric tons, each year. 2:52 Couple this with the fact that at the same time, we are letting almost a billion people, a billion people, go hungry. I mean, that's horrible. Perhaps even more concerning is every second edible food is lost or wasted. 3:10 That's every second. Just think about that for a minute. And I did some research on this, and it's the equivalent of six garbage trucks being filled. 3:20 Now, I can't even think about just what that means for all these people going hungry. 3:27 But the point is, urban and rural food growers need to put greater emphasis on the value of their food production and consider better sustainability methods. 3:39 So those in the technology world also need to consider how can we gain, I guess, and be more innovative to solve this global problem, and how can we work together? 3:50 So the good news is change is coming, and we've all been talking about this, and in some cases, it's already here. 3:57 Now, we're already progressing in many different types of products, and I'm talking about things that help with, such as like anti-food waste, let's say indoor gardening, composting, smart city farming, and some of these things I've actually talked about in the book. 4:15 But even interestingly, the list goes on and on and on. 4:18 So but I thought on this show today, we'd talk about a few of these, and I'm going to give you a couple examples now, and some of these are even being talked about at CES. 4:28 One way is to reduce food waste is to grow it ourselves. Kind of cool, right? Indoor garden pods provide a way for city dwellers to cultivate and produce inside our own homes. 4:41 Pods can be connected to one another to create a small garden. They can also be nourished in part with built-in LEDs. Now, here's another idea, which I think is kind of interesting. Indoor vertical farms. 4:57 These can also create an environment for plants. Plenty is just an example, right? This is just the way to think about it. These farms use up to 99% less land than conventional farms. 5:13 Another example is Plantecube. Many of you might remember this example from CES last year. It's a vertical farming system that can also be remotely controlled. Pretty neat, right? I love this idea. 5:29 Certainly, we are seeing an uptick in this trend to- kind of to this urban farming innovations. But these trends can extend to any household anywhere. 5:42 Now, another specific example of innovation at work is at the Conceptual Sustainable Family Farm. This project takes advantage of food waste in a household. 5:54 So it's a mini indoor garden that uses waste to produce fertilizer. Now, I'm not sure I want to do this just yet unless I figure out exactly how to do it. 6:04 But the hope here is with this mini garden, people don't throw away any food. Rather, they can use it to grow their own food.Now how really cool is that? 6:15 We really need to look at how circularity is at work here, and I love that idea, and I talk a lot about that in my book too, but it gets better. We are seeing apps coming to market 6:29 that can help all of us reduce our food waste as well, and the more we can do that, the more we can feed more people around the world. Now, I have an example for you. 6:40 When food items are placed in a capsule, like a container, the Bubble of Food tracker app can let you know the details and enables you to avoid buying what is already in your home. I love this idea. 6:55 The app also tracks eating habits, what foods are consumed the most, and what is often left behind. I can tell you, in my home, a lot of things are left behind. 7:06 So the hope here is that you're reducing your wasteful habits. I think all of this is pretty neat, right? These are just a few examples I've come across in recent weeks, and I hope more and more of these come out. 7:21 But there are so many more that we're seeing come out at CES this week that I think is so really cool. 7:28 Procter & Gamble announced an twenty twenty-one CES Innovation Challenge Finalist back in December, and as you might have guessed, many of them have a deep focus on sustainability. 7:40 One example, Spotless Materials, is a collection of non-stick coatings designed to use less water and less aggressive cleansers to keep surfaces clean. But here's a really cool one that I like. 7:55 SavorPack provides a patented food packaging technology that keeps food fresh. 8:01 It promises that soggy delivery food is a thing of the past, but it also, as you might guess, the food packaging reduces food waste by removing moisture from the air. Now, how cool is that? Again, it's very neat. 8:18 All of these are just great examples. Rather than waste food, we can redistribute it. 8:26 We can tap into technology and innovation to solve this worldwide dilemma that we've been talking about, and this is what's so important. We have to continue to innovate, and we have to find ways to save our ecosystem. 8:43 So here's my tip for today, and this is why it's so very, very important. We need to better understand how we are living as individuals. We need to recognize the trends in sustainability. 8:57 We need to know what it is that we, as consumers, what we want, and then we can apply that to what we are doing as companies. And even more importantly, here's my opinion. We need to be able to be more sustainable. 9:15 We need our products to be circular, because that's what we're not doing. We need to start moving in the direction right now. We can't wait for tomorrow. 9:25 We need to be thinking about what is most important now, and that's why I wrote the book on this very topic, Sustainable in a Circular World. 9:36 The objective is to design and restore our natural ecosystems through innovation. I've said it before, and I will say it again. 9:46 We need to move away from our gray economy to something more green, and we need to do that through digital actions and new design techniques, and that's so very important. 9:58 If you would like to learn more about what I'm talking about, Sustainable in our Circular World that I'm talking about, please go up to our new website, sustainablecircularworld.com, and you can find my book, or you can get it on Amazon. 10:11 But really, what I really want you to do is I want you to think about why we need to do these actions, why this is, I call it, this new gold rush to green. 10:22 Because if we don't restore our ecosystem, we're not gonna have it for future generations. 10:28 And I recognize, and I talk about this in my book, that we have multiple generations that are in the workforce right now, and the idea right now is we have to get us all on the same page to understand what's happening, and if we don't, we're not going to be able to move forward. 10:47 And I think it's so important right now, and that's what's interesting. If you look at what CES is doing right now, we have a lot of products that they're talking about. 10:56 They talk about how we move to the cloud and 5G and AI and IoT and all of these things that are happening there right now and these solutions that are there. 11:05 But I think twenty twenty-one all the way to twenty thirty, we are gonna be talking about how we can move the needle to green by doing things more effectively, more efficiently, and the only way that we're gonna do that is if all of us start understanding how we can do this innovatively. 11:24 You can't just do it overnight. 11:26 We have to figure out how do we do these things, how do we work together as a society, as a global society, and how we can do these things individually in our homes and reducing our food waste. 11:39 That's a great way to do it. We started doing it in my home. We always use bottled water. We went and purchased bottled water, so now I'm not purchasing bottled water anymore. I don't do it. 11:51 There's nothing wrong with tap water here in Chicago, so we are no longer buying bottled water, and it's amazing how less waste, those plastic bottles showing up in the ocean. 12:03 If we all make our efforts, each thing changes. So one little step in the right direction, each little step as all of us change our habits, it's amazing how we can contribute. 12:16 I've learned a lot in doing the research for my book, and as I can share that knowledge with all of you, if all of us learns... I'm a baby boomer. 12:25 If I can change my habits, as I've learned from my book to all of you, and the younger generation has taught me so much, this is what we need to do together. All right. 12:35 Well, I'm out of time, but again, what I'd love for you to do is I'd love for you to tweet at me at connect2wmag. I want to hear what you think or go up to Twitter and, and post some comments up there. 12:46 Go up to LinkedIn, share your thoughts with me. Get my book. I really want you to get my book, Sustainable in a Circular World. 12:53 I think you'll find some really interesting things there, but I really want to know what you think. 12:58 Together, we can change things right now, but we have to do things together, and we've got some great guests on the show today, and they're gonna be talking about all of these things in a sustainable world. 13:09 But we're gonna take a quick commercial break, and while we take this quick break, I'd love for you to go up there and, and post some comments. All right. 13:16 That's all the time we have for this segment, but remember, this is The Peggy Smedley Show, the podcasting voice of IoT and digital transformation. And remember, with great technology comes great responsibility. 13:27 Go get that quick cup of coffee, and we'll be right back after this commercial break. [upbeat music]
