In this engaging talk, the speaker shares a personal journey shaped by rural upbringing, family values, and a passion for sustainability. The narrative begins with memories from a farm in the UK, emphasizing the importance of valuing resources, minimizing waste, and living in harmony with nature's cycles. This background sets the foundation for a deep interest in sustainable practices and circular economic models.

The presentation explores the fundamental differences between linear and circular economic models, highlighting how adopting circularity—through reducing, reusing, and recycling—not only aligns with natural cycles but also addresses pressing environmental and economic challenges. Concrete examples such as electric vehicles and the problem of battery waste illustrate the need for design thinking that plans for reuse and repurposing from the outset. The speaker also recounts a personal innovation experience (Evolve), aiming to give electric car batteries a second life in domestic energy storage, showing that opportunity often arises from unexpected conversations and collaborations.

Main takeaways from the video:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. serendipitous [ˌserənˈdɪpɪtəs] - (adjective) - Happening or found by chance in a happy or beneficial way. - Synonyms: (fortuitous, coincidental, unexpected, accidental)

serendipitous. Remember the word. It's important.

2. ingrained [ɪnˈɡreɪnd] - (adjective) - Firmly fixed or established; difficult to change. - Synonyms: (rooted, embedded, fixed, entrenched)

It's all sort of deeply ingrained within me.

3. fragility [frəˈdʒɪlɪti] - (noun) - The quality of being easily broken or damaged; delicacy. - Synonyms: (delicacy, brittleness, vulnerability, weakness)

...the impact the weather has, the fragility of life on a farm.

4. resounding [rɪˈzaʊndɪŋ] - (adjective) - Unmistakable; emphatic; having a lasting impact. - Synonyms: (profound, emphatic, significant, strong)

...because it's had a resounding effect on me through my life.

5. circularity [ˌsɜːrkjəˈlærɪti] - (noun) - The quality or state of being circular or cyclic, especially in economic or ecological systems. - Synonyms: (cyclicality, recurrence, loop, repetitiveness)

For me, going with the flow is about embracing that natural circularity.

6. mantra [ˈmæntrə] - (noun) - A statement or slogan repeated frequently to express a guiding principle. - Synonyms: (motto, slogan, catchphrase, maxim)

...is this old mantra, which is reduce, reuse, recycle.

7. repurpose [ˌriːˈpɜːrpəs] - (verb) - Adapt for use in a different purpose. - Synonyms: (reuse, adapt, convert, transform)

...we reuse things and repurpose things to try to minimize waste.

8. incinerated [ɪnˈsɪnəˌreɪtɪd] - (verb) - Burned completely; destroyed by fire, especially as a method of waste disposal. - Synonyms: (burned, combusted, cremated, destroyed)

...80% of consumer goods waste that is produced is either incinerated or sent to landfill...

9. facilitate [fəˈsɪlɪteɪt] - (verb) - To make an action or process easier or more possible. - Synonyms: (enable, assist, ease, promote)

...the systems are not in place in order to facilitate that.

10. residual [rɪˈzɪdʒuəl] - (adjective) - Remaining after the greater part or quantity has gone. - Synonyms: (remaining, leftover, surplus, lingering)

Obviously, there's still a little bit of residual waste.

Go with the flow - Achieving serendipitous sustainability - Tom Mullee - TEDxEDHECNice

And apologies for holding the iPad. It's more for a comfort thing rather than anything else. But hello, thank you very much for inviting me here. Thank you for the very kind introduction. I'm not sure it was deserved, but all the same, thank you very much. Where are we? So here. Okay. serendipitous. Remember the word. It's important. Okay. So it's been a while. This is a familiar space for me. I was an MBA student here last year, not so long ago, and have a lot of fond memories, but moving on.

So, as you can tell from my accent, I'm from the uk. I grew up on a farm just here in Middle England. My parents are farmers. I have three younger brothers. I managed to find one photo that I have on my phone of home where it's not raining. And this is it. So don't be fooled. This is not reality. This was one day, once, one time. But the reason I'm showing you where I'm from is because it's had a resounding effect on me through my life. I grew up with three younger brothers, and we fought for everything all the time. So be it. For toys, for space, for food mostly. But we never wasted anything, and everything was always reused. Everything was given a real value and an importance. And aside from that, we grew up in the middle of the countryside, so we had a real appreciation of the natural world around us. And we saw firsthand what happens each year, the changing each day, the impact the weather has, the fragility of life on a farm. It's all sort of deeply ingrained within me. And it's something that I think has had quite a profound impact on who I've become as a person. And why is that important? Well, you'll find out later on because, for one, I hate waste. We were told never to waste anything. If it's broken, you fix it. If it's still broken, while you're not good at fixing it. So it was important for us to always not waste things. And that, I think, is the key message that I want to bring forward. But moving on to today.

So given the very brief brief of the word flow, and told that I could speak about anything at all, that resonated with me. Being a simple man, my mind went firstly to a river because, well, obviously they flow. And with the amount of rain we've had here in Nice the last few weeks, you can see the Vaal river flowing strongly. But this is important because, and you'll forgive the scientific diagram here, I know it's complicated, but rivers flow Downhill. So they start up high at their source and they flow down towards the sea or the ocean. And you. That's the journey of a river, but it's only a small part of a much greater cycle. And the flow of water through this cycle creates a loop. So from evaporation, from the seas, from the lakes, from rivers even to condensation, through clouds, through rain, again through perspiration, it continues the loop. And it's the story of the existence of water. It passes through these loops, and all these loops are everywhere around us in nature. You can see them through the passing of the seasons. Each year we go through spring, summer, autumn, winter, and again and again and again. You see them. Well, you don't see them actually, but geophysical ones through the way that tectonic plates rotate through the mantle of the Earth over the course of millennia. None of us will ever see that, but it happens, I've been told. And then obviously the most obvious. I hope all of us is the one that we were taught about in the Lion King, which is the circle of life. I mean, that one's deeply ingrained in me as. As a natural cycle. And we see it all the time with everything.

And why is this important? Because my title is Go with the Flow, Achieving serendipitous Sustainability. And for me, going with the flow is about embracing that natural circularity. So embracing the way that nature is encouraging everything to act with circularity naturally. So why is that important? Because I want to draw your attention to one of my other passions. My other passion is sustainability. Growing up on a farm, we like to try and act sustainably. And it's something that was ingrained in me again from a very early age. SDG12 talks a lot about being sustainable in the way that we produce things, the way that we use things, the way that we reuse things and repurpose things to try to minimize waste. And amongst many of the things that they say that we can do to help SDG12 is this old mantra, which is reduce, reuse, recycle. And guess what? It's another loop. They're everywhere. It writes itself, this stuff. Why is this important again? Because it talks about the circularity of things. And one of the main things that they say can help with SDG 12 is a move towards circular economic models such as this.

So a circular economic model is one of my favorite things. It reduces waste, it encourages sustainability, and it can help fight a lot of the problems that we have in the world today in terms of resource destruction, in terms of over Fast fashion and destructive consumer behavior habits of the last 50 years, which we need to move past. But I have a question for you. What is the difference between a linear economic model and a circular economic model? That's right. One is a line and one is a circle. You're a sharp bunch. I knew you would be. So why is that important? Because in a linear economic model, you take your raw materials, your trees, whatever, you've mined out the ground, and you pass it through a process, you turn it into something useful, be it a product or a service, it moves through, ends up with a consumer, you get to wear it, you get to eat it, whatever. And at the end of the day, it gets thrown away, whatever you haven't used and you have to start again. In a circular economic model, it's slightly different because there's an extra step. So you pass through the same process of taking the raw materials, of obtaining that resource that you need to create the product with, but you design it differently. You have a circularity in mind so that you know that it's going to pass through the same cycle, and you can find a way to reuse it, you can find a way to repurpose it, you can find a way to mix it with something else and create something completely different. But that's the important thing. Obviously, there's still a little bit of residual waste. There always is, because it's just what gets consumed. But it's significantly less than in a linear model. And why am I passionate about these circular economic models? Because it's quite a nerdy thing. I get it. But where I'm focused on is this part, sustainable design. So when you start thinking about a product, when you start thinking about a service, if you have this sustainable design in your mind already, you start looking at the way that things are constructed. You're looking at the materials that are used to construct them, so that when you pass further along in the chain, it becomes easier to repurpose, it becomes easier to reuse or recycle. And at the moment, that's just not happening in the linear model. It's about taking the material, turning it into something, selling it, using it, throwing it away. So this is the mindset change, and I just want to highlight on this one as well. This is from Gartner, who are much smarter than I am. So if you don't believe me, believe them. But at any stage during the process, from resource to waste, there are opportunities to create these loops, to create these circles, to increase the amount of value that you can get from Your resources, from your raw materials and from your products. This is important to remember.

So some, I guess, bad news, and I don't want to labor the point on the bad news because I'm British anyway, so we're very negative, naturally. But the global economy is only 9.1% circular at the moment, which means over 90% of it is linear. Obviously you're all good at maths, but that's a big problem. It's also a big opportunity. 49 megatons of E waste is created each and every year worth 60, something billion US dollars, but only 20% of that is recycled or reused or repurposed. So again, huge opportunity. And according to the Ellen MacArthur foundation, who are experts on. I say experts on circular economic models because I really like them, but I'm biased. Check them out for yourself. 80% of consumer goods waste that is produced is either incinerated or sent to landfill because it's either not been designed to be recycled or reused or repurposed, or because the facilities and the systems are not in place in order to facilitate that. And that's part of the problem. So one of the other things that the UN talk about doing is engaging with local councils, engaging with national and local government to try to put these policies in place in order to facilitate the recycling and repurposing of consumer products, like electronic waste, for example.

So I'll bring you onto this now. So can I have just a show of hands, please? And I know one person already said, how many people here own an electric vehicle? So not too many. I know you do, Sandra, because we've spoken about this. But I imagine over the coming five to ten years that number is going to change significantly because one of changing regulations within Europe and the rest of the world and car manufacturers are now seeing the benefits of advantageous policies around it to produce more electric cars and to stop producing internal combustion engine cars. So we will see a natural shift towards electronic vehicles. But also because over the lifetime of a vehicle, the emissions generated by an electric vehicle are over four times less than that of an internal combustion engine. And that's even when you take into consideration the fact that the production emissions are higher in an electric vehicle. The emissions for an EV drop even further if you charge the battery using renewable energy sources. So it's a real winning way to reduce emissions. But I know I'm singing the praises of electric vehicles. There is a problem because within electric vehicles you have a battery. And at the moment the battery in the electric vehicle is part of those bad linear economic Models we've all heard about and we don't like anymore. What we need to do is make the battery part of a circular economic model. Which brings me to my next point. So when I was here last year as part of the mba, I took the entrepreneurship track. It was a great track. Was counseled very, very wisely by that man over there about this idea for Evolve. And it all stemmed from a project at the Hackathon where I was working for Maserati in a marketing project actually, for their new line of electric supercars. So not really very sustainable supercars, but there you go. But something that the CEO there said and it really kind of resonated with me. He said, it's great having electric cars and it's even better having electric sports cars, but the only problem is if you drive it how a Maserati is meant to be driven, the battery doesn't last very long. So we're going to have a pile of batteries that we don't know what to do with. He said, because a battery is only any good for an electric vehicle until it's at about 80% capacity, after this point, you can't use it in a car. And I said, ok, so great, what do you do with it? Do you recycle them? Do you repurpose them? He said, no, for the most part, they get scrapped. Sometimes they get recycled, but that's more expensive. So we tend to just scrap them or pile them up somewhere trying to find something to do. And so that got me and a friend talking and discussing the idea and thinking, well, there's got to be something that we can do here. And that's where we decided to start working on our idea called Evolve. And what Evolve does is it forms that missing link to try and create the circularity within the electric vehicle battery market, let's say. So you take an electric vehicle battery, after five to eight years it's been in the car, it's 80%, you can't use it in a car anymore. You can use it for many other things. And the use case that we found was to use it in domestic energy storage. And if you store energy in it, you can save people money because they can either charge it using their solar panels, they can charge it when you have off peak pricing of your electricity and use it when you have high peak pricing so you reduce your energy bills. That was our biggest play. And we felt then that we could extend the life of this battery further by another five to 10 years before eventually recycling it and using the parts to make new batteries or to sell back to the car manufacturers, thus completing the circular loop, which is.

Well, as you can see, we've flown into the loop now and to be honest, it was successful. We had a lot of traction. We did very well in the entrepreneurship track. We worked with our mentor Jean Louis, who introduced us to Sofia Business Angels as well. We got to pitch there and promote our idea with a lot of other more well established startups. But we actually won an award for the best picture pitch as well. So we did really well. Unfortunately, it got shelved at the end of last summer because I'm being completely honest amongst friends, the reality of needing to pay rent was probably a little bit heavy on my shoulders and we decided that, hey, we need jobs, we need money. So it's on ice at the moment, but it's still something that we're iterating, we're still something we're discussing. But the reason I talk about this is not because I want to promote myself or whatever, is because if you go back to the title, the serendipitous Sustainability through a conversation completely unrelated to my background and my background's in banking and finance and boring numbers stuff. I'm not an engineer and I have nothing to do with electric vehicles. And my only passion for sustainability came from growing up on a farm. But from that conversation I had in a cold January day in Paris last year, it set me off on a path towards exploring circular economic models towards sustainability towards electric vehicles and renewable energy. And it's really shaped how the last two years for me has panned out. And I think that from that point I'd like you to take away is regardless of where you are and who you're speaking to, you don't know what impact that conversation could have and where it could lead and how we can all become more sustainable and have a positive impact on the world if we just go with the flow. So we can achieve serendipitous sustainability if we just let it happen. Thank you.

SUSTAINABILITY, INNOVATION, ENTREPRENEURSHIP, CIRCULAR ECONOMY, ELECTRIC VEHICLES, INSPIRATION, TEDX TALKS