Abi Godsell catches up with the GBCSA’s own Technical Lead, Alex Varughese, to chat what circularity means when it’s at home, and what it can teach us about more meaningfully appraising value.
Abi: Alex, Technical Lead is a position that invites a practitioner to take a step back and think more strategically about the different components of sustainability that go into our day to day tasks. I know that no one likes taking work home with them, but work perspectives are another matter. Are there perspectives on sustainability that you’ve found helpful to take home with you?
Alex: Sustainability has so many parts to it, but what’s been really piquing my interest at the moment is waste, and trying to apply a first principle: reduce, reuse, recycle approach to everyday activities. A single person can consume so much if they aren’t aware of it, but if you engineer how you look at things, you can really stretch out the journey between purchase and landfill.
For example, we all try to reduce the number of grocery bags we buy, but still end up with more of them than we want cluttering up the home. I’ve been focusing on those, and what to do with them. If someone needs something to take a gift home in, or if I’m offering something to a neighbour, or if I need to clean up a liquid spill, I’ll reach for a bag to get at least a second use out of it. Having a little one sometimes means more liquid spills than we’d like, but we use these unwanted bags to get things cleaned up and thrown away safely. And gardening, we use bags as many times as we can for anything in the garden!
Abi: So, your trick is not see it as waste to be gotten rid of, but as an asset that you can do things with?
Alex: Exactly. I regard my grandparents as pioneers of sustainability, carefully washing every piece of plastic, using it until it broke. I think that’s getting a bit lost with my generation. We just reach for what’s easy and available as long as it doesn’t cost a lot. So many things are made for convenience, that it’s a challenge to see past that. It needs creativity to start seeing past that, to stop wasting the use and reuse in an item that we’re told isn’t valuable because it doesn’t cost much.
Abi: So, Alex are you saying that the price, specifically the money we pay for things, isn’t a good measure of something’s value.
Alex: I think the value of something is up to the person looking at it. Price changes, the exact same thing can have different prices based on different localities in South Africa. So, price isn’t an objective thing. And the value of something, the value that we can see in something, or get out of something, that’s very different to its retail price. Seeing value, or getting maximum value out of something, more than its price tells you should be there, that’s a daily challenge in creativity.
Abi: Because we are talking about circularity today, let’s close this circle – these are the sustainability lessons you’ve taken home from work. What has your pragmatic application of sustainability thinking at home brought to your work at the GBCSA?
Alex: When we look at projects holistically, you start to see that every initiative that a project team or a developer implements has value, and needs to be acknowledged, not just the costly ones. I think we always associate a big cost involved in getting a concept out with having a big impact, but simple things, inexpensive things can make a huge difference. Practicing sustainability at home has helped me see that price isn’t the best way of measuring value.
When it comes to work and sustainability, the one quote that comes to mind is that the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time to plant that tree is today. We’ve missed the best time for sustainability work, but that doesn’t mean there’s no value in the trees we plant today. And learning to see value and define value for ourselves in something simple like a plastic grocery bag, helps us see hidden value in other things we do, even if that value doesn’t have an obvious measure, like price, or isn’t going to be felt in the shorter term, like a tree that’s planted today.
Seeing that value, fully extracting that value, I think it’s a daily challenge. I don’t think we can be perfect at it, but we’ve got to practice it, aim to get at least 80 percent right.
Abi: I like aiming for 80%, it’s ambitious without being inaccessible, and accessible targets are important too. Alex, thank you for your time in sharing how to see circularity in shopping bags, and making sure we’re not too quick to confuse value with price.