The Oblique Life Global Goals

Episode 8 presents the challenges that the food industry must overcome to accommodate the 10 billion human population forecast for 2050, while restoring nature and mitigating climate change. There is much to 'chew over', from production to storage, trading, transport, packaging, marketing, purchasing, consumption, waste and hunger. As with our earlier sector-specific episodes, we cannot...

Following the meteoric rise of 'fast' fashion, there is now increasing pressure to re-think textiles and apparel. In episode 7, we probe into the industry challenges, from the over-production, self-regulation and environmental impact to consumer behaviour and greenwashing. Yet fashion shapes cultures and identities, and so we need solutions. Our speakers provide them, including their own...

Episode 6 presents the myriad challenges the electronics industry is facing, from design and materials to consumer behaviour, obsolescence and legislation. Even if customers want to be more discerning, there are still few sustainable products on the market as of today.  Our speakers present a raft of solutions to shift this sector from being one of the biggest villains to a protagonist of sustaina...

Episode 5 takes us through the challenges of the linear economy and the exigency to shift to a new production and consumption paradigm. We talk about how the Global South has never stopped repairing, re-purposing and sharing goods, and why recycling is at the bottom of the pile in the circular economy. While incremental, bottom-up steps have a role, that does not relieve governments, corporates an...

Episode 4 explores the role of policy in production and consumption. France made planned obsolescence an offence in 2015 and curbed retail food waste in 2016. More recently it has introduced a repairability index. Scotland is bringing about holistic, far-reaching change through various tools, including a Green Recovery Plan and a Circular Economy Bill, with links to the SDGs. But how do we acceler...

Our first episode investigates how consumerism is causing many of today’s global economic, social and environmental problems, and how individual livelihoods and national economies are driven by it. As populations, purchasing power and materialism grow, we must confront the biggest challenges - the linear economy, globally interconnected supply chain, depletion of natural resources and fear of miss...

Episode 2 explores production, from materials and design to human resources, energy and extending producer responsibility. Supply chains are no longer just about physical goods; there is also the data, and who owns that is a hot topic. Concepts like Cradle-to-Cradle have been around for two decades and, more recently, COVID-19 has disrupted global supply chains, but much remains to be done for str...

Episode 3 takes an introspective approach, focusing on why we, as consumers, are so susceptible to wanting more than we need. By overconsuming, we are fast-tracking climate change, destroying ecologies, exponentially increasing waste, and finding ourselves caught on a hamster wheel. While materialism gives us a temporary high as it feeds our insecurities, it does not resolve them. Conscious consum...

Find out what The Oblique Life Global Goals Podcast is all about, what you can expect and what we hope you will take away from being part of this series.