Perhaps it's surprising that as
a professional tree hugger,
I'm going to be speaking to
you about supply chains.
They don’t sound very sexy, but
when it comes to stabilizing
our climate, supply chains are the
hottest topic on the planet.
And that's because more than half of our
society's carbon footprint can be
attributed to the impact of supply
chains and specifically
the raw materials that products
are made from.
We have built our societies around
take-make-waste production systems:
the fossil fuel industry, plastics,
industrial forestry and paper.
These are massive global supply chains
that have shaped our world.
They've left deep scars across landscapes,
legacies of pollution and push species and
cultures to the brink of extinction.
Now, on the other hand, we have
game changing solutions,
brilliant innovations that use 90 percent
less water and 50 percent less energy.
But they’re stuck at small scale
because they can’t secure
the financing that they need
to commercialize nor
the markets that underpin their success.
It's the classic chicken
and egg situation.
And even with slow progress,
we're losing ground to the climate
crisis and biodiversity loss.
This at a moment when we need all
hands on deck for our planet.
We must scale solutions and we
must scale them quickly.
And this is not just about doing
less bad. That time has passed.
We need the 2.0 industrial revolution,
one that sets us on course to
operate and live within
the natural bounds of our planet.
And so overhauling
these huge and powerful,
entrenched industrial systems,
it can appear daunting.
But I've seen how change can
be successful up close with
the work that I’ve been doing for the
past 20 years. For my organization,
Canopy, our focus is on protecting
the world’s ancient
and endangered forests and transforming
the massive pulp paper
packaging and viscose supply chains.
But the principles from those supply
chains can be applied to any sector in
need of change. Keeping forests standing
is one of the fastest, cheapest,
most effective ways for us
to stabilize our climate.
But of course,
we can’t keep forests standing
if we keep mowing them down to make
pizza boxes and rayon T-shirts.
The surge in e-commerce and fashion
derived from tree-based textiles like
rayon and viscose is driving
the destruction
of climate-critical forests
and creating mountains of discarded
textiles and packaging.
We must move our supply chains out of
forest ecosystems, and to do that,
we need to change the business practices
of thousands of brands.
And that's where we come in.
Canopy works to create
the market conditions for change
by working with hundreds of the
forest industry’s largest customers.
First to eliminate the use of ancient
and endangered forest fiber from their
packaging and their textile supply chains.
And now increasingly to introduce lower
carbon circular Next Gen alternatives.
Get rid of the bad, phase
in, scale up the good.
These companies are often
fierce competitors in
the rest of their business operations,
but they’re willing to come together
in a pre-competitive space
because they know that no single company,
no matter how large they are,
can transform an entire supply
chain by themselves,
nor can they solve the climate crisis.
And the CEOs
of these companies’ suppliers,
giant companies responsible for 90 percent
of global viscose production
and half of packaging, can sit around
a single boardroom table.
Imagine that. The outsized influence of
this small group of suppliers can unlock
ambitious levels of change through
their collective supply chains.
And of course, the same can be said
for other sectors as well.
Supply chain transformation
starts when you have
a critical mass of brands telling their
suppliers that they need to change,
that they have
zero tolerance for packaging
and textiles that originate from
the world's endangered forests,
that they want lower carbon, circular,
Next Gen alternatives and
giving their suppliers
a short timeline to achieve that target.
And this strong market pull through
for low carbon alternative creates
the value proposition for
conventional producers to change
business-as-usual practice,
to fund the new tech,
to develop the systems to replace tree
fiber with these low carbon,
more circular feedstocks like discarded
clothing and agricultural residues,
and then to build the systems to make sure
that these new feedstocks can then
make their way to the new
Next Gen pulp mills.
At Canopy, we call this strategy
“Survival: A pulp thriller.”
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Thank you. So industry leaders demand
change, suppliers respond.
It creates value that moves investment.
The pipeline of solutions is buoyed,
and you have a supply chain well on
its way to sustainable change.
Canopy’s early work greening
the Harry Potter book series has grown
to working with brands that represent
$1 trillion. These companies are
changing the packaging and
the viscose textiles that they're buying
based on the environmental qualities,
and it is this leverage that has enabled
us to shift more than half of global
viscose out of the world's ancient
and endangered forests.
(Applause and cheers)
And now we're working with our brand
partners, with conventional producers,
with investors and with brilliant
innovators to scale climate resilient
supply chains for the 21st century.
And in fact, the world’s first Next Gen
mill is now up and running.
It's a giant industrial mill
built in the bones of
an old shuttered wood mill
in northern Sweden.
And rather than requiring huge swaths
of forest to be cut every year,
Renewcell will use hundreds of millions
of old jeans and T-shirts.
It's re-employed 100 people.
It uses 90 percent less water
and five tons less carbon
per ton of product compared
to a conventional tree-based rayon.
Renewcell is a spectacular swords
to ploughshares example and it is
the first of hundreds of
Next Gen mills that are
on track to be operational by 2030
as our strategy unfolds and boosted by the
generous support of the TED community.
It’s heartening and remarkable to see
the viscose supply chain
transforming in real time
and proving that solutions
are indeed sexy.
But it mustn't stop there because
many of our production systems
and supply chains are unsustainable
and in need of change.
The food system, plastics,
paper-based packaging.
For every sector, there is a more
sustainable path forward and
the solutions and the people needed
to make them happen
are often closer than we think.
When we create
the right market conditions,
change can happen
exponentially and quickly.
Carbon intensive supply chains are
relics of the 20th century.
Let’s leave them back there.
Thank you.
(Applause)