Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Constructive, the podcast for the construction people with news, views and expert interviews.
This is Charlotte dancer for constructive Voices. In this episode of Constructive Voices, you will hear about how an ocean voyage affected a very successful construction business owner.
It showed him his true purpose at the age of 60, and now he can show you how to start making a difference in reducing plastic use in the construction industry.
Dive into the story of Neil Maxwell and changing streams, hosted by Jackie de Burke.
[00:00:37] Speaker B: I'm really delighted to welcome back to constructive voices Neil Maxwell, who was one of our earliest guests in the early days. And he was brought to us by Henry McDonald, who passed away and just over a year ago, a year ago and a few months at the time of recording, who wrote about Neil's story in the Guardian newspaper and then brought Neil to us. And for those of you who didn't hear the earlier episodes, I'm going to ask Neil just to do a really quick introduction.
Neil had a background in a very successful construction background, and he went on a trip and he's going to take over and tell you all about that, something that was incredibly life changing for him. Neil, thank you so much for taking the time today.
[00:01:22] Speaker C: Thanks, Jackie. Thanks for the invitation. And yeah, great, a great introduction.
Yeah, basically my history was in office fit out.
I had a successful business based in northwest for 32 years.
Never expected to come out of that. I expected to retire straight from that. It was a trip in 2018 that I did to the Arctic, which I had an epiphany at. It completely pivoted my direction of travel. It took me to 60 to realize what my purpose was in life, which is never a bad thing. At least I found it.
But I came face to face with the impacts that we're having on the natural world. Because when you go up to the Arctic, you expect a pristine, white, clean environment, beautiful life, beautiful scenery. And of course, it is that. But there's also a lot of devastation of the SARS on a ship with about 20 odd scientists, marine biologists from California, ornithologists from France, geologists from Australia and so forth, lucky enough to be one of ten people allowed out on La sea kayaks each day. So kayaking the Arctic Ocean, Greenland sea and the Barents sea, and we came face to face with the effects of climate change, global warming, plastic pollution and so forth.
Each night we'd have a lecture from the resident scientists, which revolved around their particular skill set, the impacts of plastic pollution on marine life or the birds, or the global warming and the inflation recession.
So when you go up there, your phones don't work. You've got no signal, so you have to kind of concentrate what's going on. You've got nothing else to do, really. And it wasn't until I got home that I realized the impact and it had. Expecting just to come away with a few cool memories and some great photographs, I decided at that point I needed to change my life, sir. And proceeding came home, met with the professor of oceanography at the head of oceanography at the University of Liverpool, spoke to him, told him about the trip, talked about doing marine biology degree, talking about hanging my hat up on my business, and talked about potentially going on some marine volunteer and conservation work around the world, which I've done actually, since then. So in 2019, we set changing streams up as a result of that initial conversation. And in 2020 to 21, I sold my business completely to concentrate all my efforts now on changing streams and the work that we do as a partnership with the University of Liverpool.
[00:04:18] Speaker B: Perfect. Neil. For those who didn't hear the earlier episode with Henry, can you just say initially what changing streams, what the initial intentions of changing streams were when you set it up?
[00:04:34] Speaker C: Initially, when we set it up, we had a six month period to delve into different areas of what we could do, how we could do it, you know, areas that we could affect. And at that point in 2018 to 19, we felt that we were kind of behind the curve in terms of carbon.
So people, because a lot of people already advancing quite well in that area and have quite substantially since. So we looked at plastic, but of course, plastic, then you realize it's ubiquitous in our lives. It's everywhere. So we commissioned a report, and that report flagged up a couple of areas that were really of interest to us.
The particular one that was after the. We realized that after the packaging industry, the construction sector is the second largest user of plastic in the world.
So we produce around about 460 million tons, according to a report in 2018 that's expected to triple by 20, 2060.
The construction sector takes around about 20% of that plastic production.
That's why we thought we need to address the construction sector and help the construction sector reduce its reliance off and dependence on plastic, use of plastic throughout all activities. Of course, they're doing a lot with carbon, but our aim is to bring plastic into that car, into that carbon agenda, because you can't do carbon alone. You need to bring plastic inside that agenda, otherwise you're never going to get hit your carbon goals.
So that's our work. We act as a bridge between academia and industry, industry have got a requirement to respond to the green agenda and also got a big responsibility to get the global GHG emissions down.
And they've also got a responsibility to reduce their waste outputs, but they haven't always got the wherewithal and the knowledge to be able to implement that. Lots of great ideas. We've always got the skills and the knowledge to do that. Whereas the university have got great skills and knowledge. They also don't have a, a great experience in deploying that into industry. So we kind of sit in the middle trying to help those organizations to improve their green credentials by using less carbon and less plastic.
[00:07:10] Speaker B: Okay, Neil. And so I suppose the first thing that comes to mind is we've had a lot of acceleration since the earlier days of changing streams. And I'm referring to, obviously, climate change. And at the same time, we've also had a huge increase over the last couple of years in building materials. How has that affected the response of those in the built environment that you have been hoping to affect?
[00:07:39] Speaker C: Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, building materials, I mean, don't need to shine too much of a light on it. But Grenfell was a perfect example of what we shouldn't be doing in buildings. And the cladding and the toxic fumes that, you know, the people that suddenly died in Granfeld, it was a result of toxic inhalation, not because they got, you know, that was, that was why they died.
So that's why plastic, you know, one of the reasons why we need to reduce our reliance on plastic. There are changes happening, but it's slow.
We need more regulatory mechanisms in place. We should reduce that reliance. If we don't, we're just going to continue on business as usual.
Takes around average 4.5 fossil fuels to produce 1 plastic. So going back to the figure that I mentioned before, 460 million tons and then that tripling by 2060, and you can understand where we're going with the carbon numbers.
Also, a recent study was done around plastic pollution correlated directly with plastic production. So every 1% of plastic production results in 1% of plastic pollution. So we can't continue the way we are. We've already got too much plastic in the environment.
We need to get that down. But yeah, the materials that we use in now are changing, but it's too slow. And so we need more emphasis on helping people to understand where they should make changes, how they can make changes, design, detailing how we help those construction companies think about the choices that they make and changing behaviors. Because a lot of construction companies do things the same way because that's what they've always done. That's what I've always done is a standard answer. It's always worked for me. It doesn't mean it's right. Think about other options.
[00:09:48] Speaker B: Absolutely. Now, obviously you have been partnered with the team in the University of Liverpool. What kind of knowledge has come out of that and how can people benefit from that? I'm going to drop in the word membership, I think you have a membership scheme, Neil?
[00:10:06] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, basically we're doing some. We've done some research. We've done a great piece of research with the major housing association, which we're going to be disseminating shortly.
We've also done a great piece of research and study with peel to be pllMp. It's now called peel Waters on Wirral waters. That's one of the largest regeneration projects in the UK.
But the study there was to understand, excuse me, where plastic is used in a typical building and we analyzed a brand new build 550 on apartment building, a new build. We didn't influence it, we didn't interfere with the bill process or anything like that. We just went in and did a snapshot of what it looked like and where plastic was used to identify those areas where we could implement change.
The output of that study has highlighted three areas that we need to consider and do more research on and those are interior, interior finishes, foundations and insulation. Because those are the three biggest areas that were impacted. We saw opportunity to drive change. So that's one of the things that we're going to be building on. As a result of the work that we've been doing with the housing association and Peel, the University of Liverpool have now settled. We've now got changing streams research centre, which is campus that's headed up by my colleague, co director doctor Gareth Abrams, who's an architect and a passive house designer. Gareth heads up the research centre.
It's not about researching in a better materials on. We want to drive that. Ours is about understanding where the barriers are, where the challenges are and identifying where the opportunities for change are. So it could be simple design changes, it could be material changes, it could be different choices that we make and how we do things. Retrofit reuse is a big thing now and obviously we need to look more closely at that.
But the membership side of it, this is to bring in the memberships in our memberships. We've recently relaunched so that's available at stream, river or ocean levels. Doesn't matter how much you turn over small or large organization, you can pick the level that you want. There's a whole raft of benefits that goes with the membership. Sitting underneath the membership is a community.
And we're just investing now several thousand pounds for a brand new app based community platform that we're building that will be available anytime in the next couple of weeks. This will be free to members and it will also be free to academics because we want academics to get involved. We're not wedded to University of Liverpool. We do and are working with other universities around the country. So what we want to do is encourage that discussion piece. Where are the barriers? So in this community, we'll have architects, designers, manufacturers, developers, contractors, material innovation specialists, people that are innovating new materials out of things like mycelium, hemp, miscanthus, saladin grass, bamboo, etcetera, so forth, because we want to drive the transition from fossil fuel derived materials into natural materials. But we want to understand where the opportunities are for that, where the barriers are and how we can overcome those barriers and how we can find solutions. So all those people, we want those people to come together in one community to create that cross dynamic between various disciplines within the built environment, that want to know more, that want to learn more, that have a common interest in making the construction sector more sustainable and greener.
[00:14:23] Speaker B: Right. Daniel, if I was coming to what I hear, at least from what you said, there is going to be like a sounding board, kind of a safe place for me to bounce around ideas and concerns with, as you say, like a cross dynamic of all sorts of people from built environment, from academia. Is that what you're hoping to achieve?
[00:14:44] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. So everyone that's operated professionals and non professionals. So, you know, obviously we want. We want people that are engineers and surveyors, architects, etcetera. But we also want contractors involved as well, small and large, because everybody has a different challenge, but actually one person's challenge. Somebody else could already know the solution to that and maybe they could swap ideas and that could overcome some of that. So this is really important. We want to get investors involved as well, because ultimately they're the people that set the standards to start with. They're the people that make the choices.
We've spoken to supply chains, but supply chains are, and buyers, but buyers are very driven, generally by price, and that will remain in place for the foreseeable future, in my opinion. But the buyers, the investors and the people that are funding these things have the opportunity to drive that change. And the people that I've spoken to who are big developers and big investors, are willing to spend a little bit more if they get the right outputs, providing they can have tangible benefits of showcasing how our buildings can be not just carbon less and energy efficient, but also more, you know, healthy in terms of less plastic, because we already know plastics in our blood, in our food and in the air that we breathe.
So memberships will bring in.
We'll have a repository of extensive resource library that will include research papers, it'll include documents to how to guides plastic audits if you like different things. It's early days yet. We're still developing it, but it's exciting what we're doing with the memberships because it is still early days. We're offering 50% discount family members to get involved. So it's never been a better time to join our membership and get involved with us.
It will give you automatic access to that community forum. You get regular world of plastic news stream updates, a curated list of relevant podcasts, quarterly visual events. We'll have round table discussions.
We want cross sector collaboration, networking opportunities. It's an opportunity to upsell as well, to promote. Promote your own company. Within that environment, you might be people in the community that you never would have ordinarily met in your everyday life.
We want to do members shout outs. We want to do spotlights on members that are doing great things, shine a light on their work. Hopefully that will encourage other people. It's an exciting place to be, actually. And it's something that I would really encourage anyone that's operating the built in environment to get involved with.
[00:17:42] Speaker B: Yeah, that sounds really, really excellent, Neil. So, I mean, I guess under all of this you've got your, you know, you've got your own background the last few years of being so passionate and involved in changing streams. And you've also gone off and done a course with Cambridge.
How has that affected you?
[00:18:03] Speaker C: Very intense baptism.
Yeah. I'm not an academic, I should add.
So it was a short course. So it was a short online course with Cambridge Institute of Sustainable Leadership CISL and it was in business sustainability management.
It was an eight week course online and it was intense.
It's a real academic course.
The language was different to the language.
Never, never knew how to do references.
Rubiks. I didn't know what a Rubik's was. It was a block of different things that you have to square up to get different colors all on, same size.
Yeah, it's all. But it was enlightening.
It actually sort of gave me a huge insight into the challenge that we face in industry and in society.
To address the climate crisis. So it was an overarching. It wasn't plastic Pacific, it wasn't carbon specific, but it touched on those areas.
We read a lot of information that was really, really useful. I can share some of that.
Some of that will be on the repository within the community to help provide better guides on what people might want to. How they might want to do things, how they might want to do things differently.
So, yeah, and I met a lot of great people in my, in my cohort that I've remained friends with.
One of them is working with me now, Caroline Harris, Susan, who's become an advisor to the board as a result. Yeah, yeah, fantastic.
[00:19:50] Speaker B: So, Neil, just I suppose, to look at the not too distant future because the app is coming out during May. This episode will also be released in May, but then a little bit later this year, possibly in the summertime, there is something else really exciting happening. Do you want to talk about that?
[00:20:09] Speaker C: Yeah, sure.
So during our conversations with people, we're always asked the question, well, if not plastic, what can we use? And the second or equal question is, how much extra is it? That's always the barrier.
Interestingly, I spoke to a chap in the Netherlands this morning and his comment on that was cost isn't a barrier, it's availability of better materials. It's a barrier. There's just not enough stuff out there. So I thought, well, that's useful because we've been developing quite a comprehensive list of plastic free, low plastic and recycled plastic, more sustainable products for the industry, because we want to have this information when people ask. And we thought, well, that's great, but on an Excel spreadsheet, it's raw data, it's not easy to navigate. So we've been out for funding for some time to try and put the tech behind that and build a new website.
So the University of Liverpool have, just, after six months of fundraise fundraising, not getting anywhere because it's hard.
The University of Liverpool have just fully backed it, so they're going to fully fund this. So we're now in the process of building a brand new platform of material database, which will be available open source. We're going to call that changing materials. And it's shining a light on predominantly on natural materials. We want to. It'll be categorized in terms of internal, external roofs, floors linings, interiors, etcetera, but it'll also be the manufacturers will be set out in three different sectors or stages, if you like.
Stage one will be startup stage idea phase.
I've got some miss canvas. I'd like to develop a building block of it. I'm doing some work with Exeter University, maybe, and I'd like to try get this in the mainstream. So that's of interest. But it's not available yet. But it just shows you what's being done. Stage two are those materials, mycelium, miscanthus, hemp, elephant grass, etcetera. Those things that are now have been developed, are proved, tried and tested and certificated, and are currently available. But it's fairly new, so they're only available in small quantities. Don't forget, we speak to people like Mork and Sindel Mace, Arab, Wilmot Dixon, and, you know, they say, well, great, but can we have lots of it? And sometimes you can't, because it's just a brand new product on brand new solution. And in stage three, stage three is those products that are bio based, materials that are available mainstream, and, you know, you can get as much of it as you like, try, test it, certificates approved, and you can get as much of it as you like. So the thing is, the more we get of stuff like that, the price will come down. So this will address the price barrier.
I remember leds coming in when I was in business because of my fit out, because design, when leds came in, they were three or four times more expensive than traditional light fittings, and we spoke to clients about having them because they 60% less cost to run and they lasted ten years, so what's not to like? And landlords then weren't really bothered because their priority was profit. Their priority was making sure the cost was kept tight. So they didn't really. They weren't interested in taking those things up. Well, fast forward where we are now today, leds are much cheaper than the standard fittings now, and they still get the benefits of 60% less to run and ten years guarantees. So this will happen with natural materials. We've seen it with paint, lead based paint, moving away from lead based paint. We're moving towards mineral paints now.
Mineral paints are an exciting space because there's a lot of companies doing some great stuff out there with mineral paints that act the same way as plasticized paints, so, but the majority of them are more expensive and therefore it's still a barrier. But the more we do of those sorts of things, the more we buy of that, the price will come down. So these are the changes that we need to try and drive. So this material database is really exciting. It'll be, as I say, it'll be a website, it'll be free we want manufacturers to come to us because what we've done is a desktop search for those materials. We're still doing it now. We've got about 100 5200 lines, so not a great deal of stuff at the moment, but we're building on that. And we want manufacturers and developers and people that are developing new ideas and inhibit solutions to come to us and say, hey, I've got something. Can I put it on this on your website? Cushcan. It's free, why wouldn't we? So I don't. People that want to use it, it's aimed at architects, designers, specifiers, etcetera. And hopefully it will help them. It will help give them better choices. They may not always use it, they may not always find it useful, but it will give them an option somewhere else to go that gives them an alternative.
[00:26:00] Speaker B: Absolutely, Neil. And it's irresistible not to end on the obvious point about changing materials and changing streams, but certainly with changing materials, surely that's going to be a really interesting platform for investors to keep an eye on.
[00:26:16] Speaker C: Of course, yeah, that's another good reason, because part of our community, as I mentioned before, the community, it's all interlinked and this is what we want to do. Everything that we're doing is interconnected. It's all, you know, everybody's got an opportunity to cross fertilize and share the stuff. So with the community we'll have investors in there and people and finance banks, we hope, that want to get involved in that.
We'll shine a light on some of the products that we're putting on the new changing materials website and talk about that in our community. And hopefully it will flag up opportunities for investors where they might see stage one idea stage and think that's a good idea. I'd like to fund that. And those companies in startup phase might very and often are looking for funding. So it's matchmaking again, matching the investor with the opportunity, with the developer and the innovator to try and come together to drive that transition. The more we can get of this, the better. We want to encourage people to come out of their silos.
Everyone I speak to bar virtually none. They all operate in their own ways, in their own silos and they all do great work. There's no disputing that, most of them, but they're all operating in silos. What we want to encourage is that open communication, that open community where everybody can get involved and talk to different disciplines to understand why things might not be done that they expect to be done in a way that they expect it to be done. And share ideas, share solutions, find new, innovative opportunities.
[00:28:05] Speaker B: So just to wrap it up, obviously we want people to find you. We will have it in the notes for the episode. But if you would like to say the name and spelling of the current website, which is changingstreams.org, I think, is it not?
[00:28:19] Speaker C: Yes, it is. Yep. Yep.
[00:28:20] Speaker B: Fantastic. And what about changing materials? Do you have that one as yet?
[00:28:24] Speaker C: Changingmaterials.org dot as well?
[00:28:27] Speaker B: Okay. Another very easy one. Neil, it was an absolute pleasure talking to you today. Thank you so much.
[00:28:33] Speaker C: Thanks, Jackie. I really appreciate the opportunity. Thank you.
[00:28:36] Speaker B: Thank you.
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