David:

I am not too sure who asked this question but I think it was with the circular economy. There are different people and different sectors, for example, farmers, cows, cattle and livestock, that all produce methane, which is a greenhouse gas, which cannot be stopped because they are that sort of animal. Factories that make clothes will probably produce greenhouse gases since they use fossil fuels to make clothes, and plastic is made of oil and fossil fuels as well. It is quite a hard problem to solve. However, there are other ways to do things. We could focus more on natural material, such as flax or cotton. Cotton is quite consuming in that it uses a lot of water. There could be more of an emphasis on people who produce flax and different natural materials that humans have been using for thousands of years. If there are more expenses, they could charge more. It could be advertised more. People could be charged more for buying stuff made out of polyester.

Not all of the materials that are used can be replicated using natural material. Obviously, there will have to be some form of processing to fix these.

In terms of food, there are substitutes, but it is still important to have a varied diet of different meats and then proteins and carbohydrates. Many of these things come from livestock. There are schemes through which people can be rewarded for planting more trees but not when it comes to issues where the root of the problem could be the livestock. There is also insect farming, although that might not be as suited to our climate as it could be to other climates.

There could be more emphasis on vegetarian diets and plant substitutes because some plants and certain foods contain more protein, for example, peanut butter or any form of nuts. A fair few nuts will contain protein, although not as much as we might get in meat. There is also the option of fish, which also contains protein. If there was less focus on red meat, there would probably be less methane. Farmers could start focusing on other meats and different plants, herbs and vegetables, which would give a person all his or her body needs to work. The same thing goes with clothing.

Even with bins, there probably needs to be a scheme through which people are told very clearly what goes in which bin. Therefore, instead of referring to waste by using words regular people might not understand, for example for something like polyester, we might say that a crisp packet will go into one bin instead of another. Then, the black bin is not really a bin; it is kind of a bin for everything else. Many materials could be recycled and reused if they were treated properly. Things are just going into the black bin and then dumped. I am not saying we should make loads of new bins, but they could be more clearly defined and used in terms of trying to recycle or finding some way of making sure the contents do not get just dumped and burned. Instead, they could be reused in some way. This can be facilitated by more clearly advertising what goes into which bin so that people are not throwing the wrong thing into the wrong bin. In this way, our circular economy could probably work a lot better.