Zero Co: Getting on top of the plastic problem

In November last year, Australian circular home goods brand Zero Co launched an ambitious new project called the ‘100-year cleanup’, which sets out to fund large-scale rubbish removal over the next century.The plan, according to Zero Co founder and CEO Mike Smith, is to raise $1 million every year to fund the removal of plastic to the scale of 15 million water bottles annually. Zero Co kicked off the initiative by flying its team to the Egyptian desert, where, in collaboration with local clean-up organisations, it emptied the Nile River of more than 18,000kgs of plastic waste. That waste was then fashioned into the world’s largest waste pyramid at over 10m high, where Smith spent three nights camping to raise awareness and interest in the campaign.Here, we talk to Smith about the highlights of the campaign, and what’s next for Australia’s fight against single-use plastic.Inside FMCG: Can you tell us why the Zero Co team went to Egypt and what you were doing there? Mike Smith: We went to Egypt to launch the 100-Year Cleanup, which is a big, crazy, audacious mission with a goal to clean the planet every year for the next 100 years. Over the last two years, we’ve done a whole bunch of cleanups around Australia and overseas. We’ve done about 25 cleanups now, and we’ve realised that the problem is getting worse, not better. We’ve realised that we’re not going to solve this problem alone, and we’re not going to solve it in our lifetime. It’s going to take an intergenerational effort, it’s going to take people from all walks of life everywhere around the world doing their bit. So that’s why we launched the 100-Year Cleanup, and we’ve invited businesses and individuals from all around the world to join us by sponsoring a bundle of rubbish to fund future cleanup projects. We went to Egypt to kickstart the 100-Year Cleanup. We chose Egypt for two reasons. One, there’s a massive waste problem in Egypt. And two, Cop27, the global climate conference, was happening there [in November 2022], so we thought, what better place to launch this initiative than cleaning up a really dirty, famous river and building a giant pyramid in the middle of the desert in the leadup to Cop 27? We spent about a month cleaning the Nile, working with a local not-for-profit cleanup organisation called VeryNile. We pulled about 19,000 kilos of rubbish out of the Nile River, which is the equivalent of about a million water bottles. We took all that rubbish out to the desert and built the world’s largest waste pyramid. It was just over 10 metres high, so taller than a three-storey building, and I put a tent on top of it and slept on top for three nights, to try and gain global media coverage about the problem, our solution and how businesses and individuals can get involved. This feels like a pretty big step up from what Zero Co has been doing. Can you tell me a little bit about why you feel you need to take this bold action? Without getting too pessimistic, because I try to keep a positive view of the future, I feel like there are a lot of world leaders and big businesses talking about things that they’re going to do at some point in the future, but the brutal reality is we are so quickly running out of time to fix the two biggest environmental challenges of our generation, which are climate change and the waste problem. There’s no more time for empty promises about things that are going to happen at some point in the future. We need action right now today, and it needs to be bold, visionary and unifying to bring people from all walks of life together. Beyond the cleanups, I saw that you also took a stance against Black Friday. Can you talk me through that? I’m about to become a dad for the first time in a matter of weeks, so I’ve been thinking a lot about why I started Zero Co in the first place, and that was because I took two years out and I went on a trip around the world to some super wild, rugged places, and I was blown away by how much rubbish there was out in the middle of nowhere. I said to myself at the time, ‘I hope that one day I can bring my child to these places, and they’re not completely ruined.’  Now that that [moment] is on my doorstep, it’s really reinvigorated me, so that when I see my child for the first time, I can look him in the eye and say, ‘I’m doing everything that I possibly can to protect this planet, so that you get to enjoy some of the amazing places that I’ve been able to enjoy.’  So, coming back to Australia, and seeing my inbox filled up with shit about Black Friday …it’s just mind-boggling that there are so many companies out there – the vast majority of companies – that are more interested in selling to people than they are in taking care of the planet. The brutal reality of Black Friday is [that] it’s just a completely made-up shopping holiday by big businesses that just want to sell shit. If you look into it, some of the statistics are crazy. In Australia, $6 billion worth of product will be bought on Black Friday, and 80 per cent of that ends up in landfill, according to some reports. It’s literally rubbish. Black Friday is rubbish. It’s people buying stuff they don’t need. We’ve just got to stop buying stuff, using it and throwing it away. With that in mind, what are your thoughts around what happened with RedCycle? And what do you think we need to do moving forward to stop something like this from happening again?I think this is a super nuanced discussion, and everyone’s got an opinion on this topic. My position is this: first of all, we shouldn’t be bashing RedCycle. They’re not to blame for this. At the end of the day, they tried to build a solution to a problem, and we need to celebrate companies that are doing that. That’s what I’m trying to do – build a solution to the problem – and anyone who’s out there bashing me, I go, ‘Well, what are you doing?’I think the biggest thing that’s happened here is a whole bunch of really big companies had latched on to the RedCycle initiative, without really understanding the realities of plastic recycling, or soft plastic recycling in particular, and went out and made a whole bunch of claims about soft plastic recycling that we knew from day one were dubious, which is why we never partnered with the programme. The brutal reality of plastic recycling is that less than 15 per cent of all the plastic we use in Australia gets recycled. That’s from the Federal Government’s waste report – 85 per cent goes to landfill, or worse, the ocean. I’ve seen it with my own two eyes. And then of the 15 per cent that does get recycled can only be recycled once or twice before the polymer chain breaks down to a point where it can no longer be reused. We’ve had this gigantic myth in Australia for decades that plastic is this infinitely recyclable material, and it’s just not.You see politicians and business leaders talking about taking plastic bags and turning them into roads. That’s a terrible idea. Every time you drive on a road made out of plastic, it releases microplastics into the environment. You might as well chop up all the soft plastic and dump it straight in the river. The other thing is, ‘We’re going to build park benches out of it.’ How many park benches do we need? They’re just putting more band-aids on this problem. Essentially, what you’re saying is that the retail industry should move away from single-use plastics?We have to do that. The analogy that gets used a lot in the zero-waste space is [that] if you walk into your bathroom, and it’s flooded because the tap has been left on and the bath has overflowed, what’s the first thing you do? Do you go and get a mop and start mopping up the mess on the floor? Or do you turn the tap off? It’s the same with plastic. We can do all the cleanup projects in the world we want, we can do all the recycling we want, as long as we keep the plastic tap on, we’re never going to get ahead of the problem. We absolutely have to stop using single-use plastic. I know it’s hard for some businesses that rely on it, but we have to move faster towards alternative solutions. There are a lot of credible alternative solutions. The industry that we’re in – personal care and home cleaning – almost a billion single-use plastic bottles get made and thrown away in Australia every year. That’s mind-boggling. We have come along in two years and proven that you can have a model [where] nothing gets thrown away. We’re a tiny company – there’s 20 of us in a little office in a tiny town on the north coast of New South Wales – and if we can do it, why can’t Unilever and Procter & Gamble and all the big guys? The concept that there’s not a credible scalable solution today is not a real thing. Solutions exist, and we’ve just got to keep pressuring these big businesses to make the change today. Because doing something in 2030, 2040, or 2050 is just too far away.