There’s a world of difference between dreams and reality. Ask any aspiring inventor, innovator or entrepreneur.
Here in circular economy land, we know dreams are the stuff the future is made of.
At Circular Disruption, the forum is designed to shake up business as usual, so you’ll hear how the best dreamers get past the biggest barriers. Sheer guts is part of the story, but also the vision to imagine a different future.
There’s no surprise that much of the event has landed on building materials. These are probably our biggest challenge – given the forecasts are for the doubling or tripling of our footprint on this poor oppressed planet, using our natural resources.
Thing is alternatives are emerging in leaps and bounds.
Among them is a new building material that looks like wood, cuts like wood but lasts longer than timber and is lighter than concrete. Even better it’s made from the mining tailings and… hemp, and it’s devoid of toxins.
At the event you’ll hear from the man who’s divesting his substantial property empire to plough into this new potential green unicorn, George Reinke, who reckons he’s beating off investors wanting a slice of the action before it gets as big as he can see it getting. (Spoiler alert, he’s not keen but the VC judges on the day may make him an offer he can’t refuse.)
From the hemp masonry innovator Klara Marosszeky, we’ll learn how a hemp masonry board provides acoustics, thermal protection and a nice clean environmental slate that leaves our precious forests untouched.
From Ninotschka Titchkosky, former co-CEO at global practice BVN (which has offices in New York and London), we’ll discover how far she’s come with Systems Reef – the innovative alternative air distribution system. Titchkosky founded the company Systems Reef in 2024 to commercialise the product globally, which we profiled in that rip roaring Surround Sound we did in 2021. At Circular Disruption we’ll find out how far that innovation has come.
Quite a way, it turns out!
But sometimes things just don’t work out. And here we’ll call on the hugely impressive architects we interviewed on Wednesday from the Melbourne-based Fieldwork to discuss the project they designed for Master Builders Victoria with six emerging alternative building materials.
The client was up for it. Unusual, except perhaps in sassy Melbourne, where style and daring seems to be in that stuff they sprinkle in the water.
Bettina Robinson and Tim Brooks submitted their work for this event six months ago and it’s remarkable how much has changed since then as they started to put into practice six so-promising new materials.
While the fails outnumber the wins, both sides of the ledger offer great lessons that can be learned from taking a punt – namely that dreamers need to have their head in the clouds but their feet on the ground!
There’s great insights to be had on how to create circular precincts (difficult on the energy front) and circular finance (there’s more infrastructure in place than we think) and some of Australia’s leading architectural houses such as Cox and Woods Bagot will let us take a peek into their inner workings.
Who says we’re losing the game?
With such an exhilarating feast of ideas, who says we’re losing the game?
There’s a sharp contrast between the reality of action we see on the ground and the bleating surrender on climate peddled by former PM Scott Morrison and his maybe-new mate on the international circuit Bill Gates.
Both have told the world to give up on climate. Gates says we should focus on disease and poverty instead of carbon emissions. This is line with early chief distractor academic Jorn Lomborg who told a green industry event we attended that if they cared about people they should forget climate and concentrate on solving malaria and hunger.
Most of the crowd nodded in approval. We bailed him up after the show and asked him if he wasn’t embarrassed at his lack of science and evidence. To be honest, he did look embarrassed and turned away. He’s an intelligent academic who, after all, knew exactly what he was doing: sowing the seeds of the climate anti-Christ.
This week Scott Morrison was quick to jump into the prevarications and general shambles of the opposition by backing out on his previous commitment to do at least something about emissions.
Suddenly, this is optional, he said and needs to be a factor of how neatly it can fit into the balance sheet.
Seriously?
“Net zero at any cost on any rigid timetable is not policy, it’s just ideology,” Morrison said.
We wonder if he can convince that nasty Mother Nature that climate disasters are not real – they’re just an ideology.
We thought we’d left this kind of prevarication behind.
But it’s not just the shambolic opposition that thinks it can win the next election by embracing the tropes that lost it the last election – this anti-climate thing trending globally.
Our only suggestion is to regard the whole thing as television entertainment – a weird reality TV show – and concentrate on the real work going on all around us.