First Mile's Climate Heroes

Composting provides a safe and sustainable way to recycle the millions of tonnes of garden and food waste we generate. In this episode we discover how composting has gone high-tech to reduce landfill, capture carbon and provide a sustainable alternative to peat compost.

We have 29 million homes in the UK and they account for 18% of GHG emissions but they could all have a much lower impact if properly insulated and heated. This episode explores what we need to do to decarbonize homes, businesses and cities, and my guest is leading the way with a major social housing project.

You can make a big impact on climate change if you invest your savings wisely and Clim8 have made this easy for you. In this episode we find out how to invest your money and ensure good   is done with it.   

Cabilla is an upland hill farm on Bodmin Moor and home to an ancient temperate rainforest where we can enjoy the restorative power of nature. In this episode we delve into some of the least-known and perhaps hardest to understand ecosystem services, or wellness benefits of nature.

As more of us are searching for sources of plant-based protein tune in to find out how Hodmedods have their finger on the pulse of the British Bean scene.

The Urban Worm is on a mission to show us how worm farming can deliver future food security and provide simple solutions for managing food waste.

This episode hears how Hereford Pedicargo are taking cargo bike logistics to a new level and collecting waste and recycling from an entire town. Tune in to find out recycling-by-bike really works.

Reuse can be a tricky business because items are often hard to find, they can have inconsistent specifications and there’s limited data available. This episode’s guest is changing the reuse with a marketplace to manage and track items, and bringing much needed liquidity  and  data to reuse. 

In this episode we learn from explorer and activist Robin Hansbury-Tenison how we must harness the power of microbes, free electricity, weather management and climate geoengineering to tame the four horsemen of pandemics, conflict, famine and death. 

This episode finds out if we can stamp our climate change with a stamp – or a Planet Mark - to be more precise. Andew Griffiths, from Planet Mark talks about the importance of story-telling, measurement and goal setting to achieve net-zero.

In this episode we meet former ‘sneakerhead’, Rory Hugill, who is working to transform the fashion industry from its linear model to a circular Good Fashion approach that is regenerative and restorative for nature.

Plastic could be a $4trillion social opportunity for the planet, and redistribute worth to the poor who can escape extreme poverty by recycling plastic. In this episode we meet the founder of Plastic Bank who is connecting circular economies with social justice to build regenerative opportunities for our planet.

There can be no life without soil and no soil without life and this episode meets Soil Heroes to explore how regenerative farming works with nature to harness the chemical and biological power of soil – preserving biodiversity and increasing its ability to store carbon.

Environmentalists often turn diet into a behavioural battlefield – getting polarised around being a veggie, vegan, beef-free, or a pescatarian. Today’s guest is the founder of Honest Burgers, who are on a mission to feed people from locally sourced food from regenerative farms. Tune in to learn about cooking, food miles, sustainable produce and British farming.

This episode meets The Commitment who are using the power of our democracy to deliver on climate change and biodiversity loss. We need politicians on side to change policy for the climate and UK Government directly controls 40% of UK GDP which could be spent wisely.

I love having guests on Zero 50 who want to kill my business by eliminating waste and SafiaQureshi, founder of CLUBZERO is planning on doing just this by replacing billions of items of single-use packaging with better quality and more resilient reusable alternatives.

There’s no shortage of money to solve the climate crisis. Property is a case in point because the sector is worth £280 trillion globally. In this episode we hear how Savills Property Investment are using their property portfolio to green cities and make them better places to live and work.

EIGHT billion people live on this planet BUT we grow enough food to feed 11 billon, and yet we waste millions of tonnes of edible food a year. In a generation, we have changed how we grow, cook and consume food. We’ve become disconnected from what we eat and where it comes from. To understand this and how we can change we meet Cookery School and learn how to cook sustainably.

This extra episode of Zero 50 is released for Glasgow’s Cop26 and we are joined by Professor Mark Maslin, who is Professor of Earth System Science at UCL and says “The challenge of the 21st century is that we must learn to think and act as a global species so that we can take care of all individuals, our global species  and   our planet, that we rely on for everything”.

How do we move our economy and society towards carbon net-zero? Who does the work? This episode explores how with Sustainability Activator Debbie Hitchen, who leads the Sustainable Production and Consumption team at Anthesis. Learn how organisations focus their sustainability ambitions on deliverable impact. Not just talk.

This episode of Zero50 meets the CEO of British BIDs to explore the importance of  place  in building sustainable futures. Our towns and cities have a huge environmental impact and greening these places will be key to meeting our future carbon goals.

The use of compostable plastic packaging has exploded in recent years, but do they actually compost at home, or in our current industrial composting infrastructure? In this episode we meet Danielle Purkiss who runs  The Big Compost Experiment  at UCL and we find out if compostables are a the perfect substitute for plastics or not as simple as they seem.

Recycleye, the artificial intelligence & robotics recycling company, is on a mission to codify waste identification and use machines to pick pure materials from a mixed waste stream.

We think we are using less paper, but the inkjet printer market is growing at 6% per year and we throw away billions of used cartridges per year and 80% of them are landfilled. In this episode we hear how the Ink Bin is on a mission to change the ink industry to be more sustainable and environmentally conscious.  

We put the record straight on sand extraction in this episode with author and sand activist Kiran Pereira. Sand is in everything from computers to paint and we learn how our insatiable demand for sand has huge and unseen social, biodiversity and environmental impacts.