Season 3, Episode 116 : Bruce Bratley

Will Richardson 00:01
Welcome to the Green Element Podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today. Today we've got Bruce Bratley, who is the CEO and founder of the First Mile, the waste company. And I think what is really exciting about speaking to Bruce is how he has changed his business to help others through this coronavirus pandemic. And not just in two months time after, it would literally almost from day one helping people. And welcome to the show, I can't wait to speak more to you.

Bruce Bratley 00:40
Thank you for having me. Great to be here.

Will Richardson 00:43
And I guess what would be great to start off with is what is your purpose as an organisation?

Bruce Bratley 00:53
So we are the purpose of First Mile is to help businesses and actually increasingly how cells reduce the carbon impact or their environmental impact. And what we are trying to do is to get people to change their habits. Because I've sort of been doing environmental stuff for years, and the science is done. The sciences have half baked, we had a long 20-year battle disproving the climate change skeptics, but they've all been putting to bed now the science is dead. And what we now need to do is to get people to start to do something. And the problem with the environment, it's so massive. And environmental scientists make this worse by saying that there's a huge problem global problem that we need to change. And people who are sitting in their offices go oh, my God, I don't know, what I'm gonna do is far too difficult. So what First Mile is trying to do is to get people to make a small habit, changing steps every single day, which eventually will lead to a positive impact on the environment. So what we're really trying to do is to deliver green impact services to businesses, who then become greener and reduce their environmental impact on the planet.

Will Richardson 02:15
And do you help with any kind of reduction strategies and stuff through waste within that?

Bruce Bratley 02:22
Yeah, we do. And my friends who are sort of outside of the environmental sector, the recycling sector, so you're crazy, why are you talking to people about waste minimization and waste reduction, and reuse strategies when you get paid to take the stuff away? My view is there's so much of this dumb stuff that it's more than a lifetime's work, trying to get rid of waste. But actually, we're really interested in helping businesses minimise the amount of waste they've got. There's some real challenges around that, because, by its very nature, waste isn't measured, therefore, it's not measured, how do you get a baseline so we've put in place technologies to give customers a baseline of the amount of material they've got by streams, and then they can see how they're progressing towards minimising the amount of waste that they're generating. So it's a really interesting sort of long term question, really, which is, how do we, from a business perspective, how do we monetize customers who don't produce any waste? So what we're trying to do is figure out how we can charge people for not generating any waste. But that's some years off yet. But we're, we're really interested in waste minimization. And we really see that as a key component of delivering a green impact as a business.

Will Richardson 03:42
You've been in the waste industry for quite a long time, haven't you? Over that time, I mean, how long have you been working in it?

Bruce Bratley 03:53
I suppose I got interested in recycling back in the early 90s, when I was doing my PhD in environmental Marxism and I actually studied waste incineration in Teesside in 1994. So that loan...

Will Richardson 04:16
So that this is and that's kind of why I wanted to ask this question was over that time, have you seen a change in habit with waste in businesses?

Bruce Bratley 04:26
Yeah, in some ways, it's getting more complicated because the waste stream used to be relatively straightforward. And it was some plastics and lots of sort of plastic bottles and containers not so much, not such a heavy use of plastic to what we call the First Mile two-dimensional plastics, which is plastic film pouches contain sort of two-dimensional containers. And there's lots of paper, cardboard, glass metals, relatively simple waste stream in the last 10- 15 years, and partly as a consequence of waste minimization and reducing the weight of packaging. So it's not all bad. There's been a massive change in the composition of materials in the waste stream. And we still obviously have paper, cardboard, plastics, glass, etc. But everything's been lightweightated. So we see a much higher use of two-dimensional plastics as a packaging item. So you take your classic sort of detergent for a washing machine used to come in a cardboard box. Now it comes in a thin, lightweight plastic pouch. And which is harder to recycle, but good for the amount of materials and the carbon impact of that, getting that product to market. Also, lightweighting has resulted in a growing number of composite materials, which are harder to recycle. And also, packaging scientists have got much better at which is bad for recycling, but good for marketing, at bonding different types of material together, so you get a plastic used to just get a tetra pack cube of milk, you now get a cube of melt with a plastic, resealable cabinet. So you've got multiple materials. So the waste stream has changed an enormous amount since the early 90s. And from an end of life perspective, it just gets harder and harder to recycle. And we, if you're manufacturing detergent, or oat milk, or whatever you're making, you might find a really nice solution for your product, but it all ends up in my facility. And then we have to try and sort it out which becomes a every year a more and more difficult job.

Will Richardson 06:55
And see, is there any dialogue between the people designing these packages, the packaging, and you as the waste contractor?

Bruce Bratley 07:10
We talked to some of our customers about some products. So you know, we talked to last year, a well-known coffee brand and got them to change some of their packaging. We've spent a lot of time working with Fortnum and Mason's around there. And they can sort of because of their premier products, they can afford to change some of their packaging about making it more recyclable and reusable within the household. So we do but it's, it's at the moment, it's sort of relatively small scale. And the difficulty is the supply chains are really long, and you get lots of, you tend to get smaller producers who are really interested in changing their packaging, but actually they're just buying packaging from wholesalers. And they don't have that much control over the origins and the format of packaging and the people that we really need to get to change their view of the big companies, the massive FMCG's, the Unilever's, the Procter and Gamble's of the world who are putting huge amounts of packaging. And I don't just mean plastic packaging, huge amounts of packaging onto the marketplace, which we can make more recyclable. And there's a very famous case of Lucozade who put the bright coloured wrap around a plastic bottle, which meant it couldn't be recycled, because the infrared light sorters that saw plastic bottles couldn't see what type of plastic it was, because all they could see was an orange Lucozade wrap. So there's a huge amount of work still to do down the supply chain. But things are starting to change, which is positive.

Will Richardson 08:45
Good. More and more dialogue happening is probably a good thing.

Bruce Bratley 08:51
It is big, and it's really important to sort of get people to talk about it. But you know, I was talking to on a Parliamentary Evidence Committee for fashion last week. And there's loads of great stuff going on in fashion around recycling and reuse and repair and new models. But it's tiny compared to the actual volume of clothes that are shoved down people's throats through social media and by by by 52 seasons and everything coming super, super cheap. And it's a tiny, tiny, tiny impact. And we have got such a long way to go to shift that mindset away from high-speed disposables, single-use items, and that's across the piece. But you know, we are there is hope we're starting to make change, but it sort of is frustrating. It doesn't start to come quicker and the people and it's sort of where I started really is. Environmentalists were our own worst enemy because we're constantly talking about massive global issues that turn people off or we're arguing with ourselves about massive global issues, what we need to do is to say, there's a whole bunch of stuff that we can do really easily to half our carbon impact by green energy, you know, first of all, now sells green energy, really quick thing to do, it's really easy, it's cheaper than regular energy. Now, switch, by green energy, you're doing a massive favour to the environment, it's really easy, you can do it today, it's super simple and you save money, you don't need to do a carbon footprint for that you don't need to do a lifecycle analysis for that you don't need to have an argument with some environmentalists down the pub, you can just do it today. And there's so many low hanging fruit things that people can start to do now that they just need to get on and do. But what we tend to do is we tend to go down this sort of rabbit hole of talking about life cycle analysis of whether one thing is better than another thing, you know, the number of offices I go into, and they still have plastic bottles, or single-use glass bottles full of water in the meeting rooms where there's plenty of water fountains, and then they've been around for 30 years. So things can start to change quickly. But what we need to do is to get behaviours changed. And we need to get everybody to do things slightly different day-to-day, there's billions of people on the planet, and we've all made trillions of incorrect choices, often forced by the old or marketing people persuade us to make these changes, which has got us into the problem we're in now what we need to do is to get billions of people to make trillions of correct choices. And they can all be quite small, just small, positive choices like not taking the buy one, get one free option at the supermarket, like eating the Christmas off your loaf of bread, they're all really small things. But if everybody starts to make those small changes, billions of people have a massive impact and will start to turn things around again, we don't need to all go out and buy a Tesla and turn everything green on day one. You know, we can do things small, small spoons more than usual. There's a great book by somebody called James Clear 'Atomic Habits' if you're interested. And what we need to do is to get people to start to change their habits. And it's why recycling is super interesting, because, in the grand scheme of things, recycling isn't a massive environmental, it doesn't deliver massive environmental benefits, obviously developed delivers environmental benefit, but not massively, you know, we're much better off switching to green energy. Or if you look at, you know, mining or concrete production, or fashion, or farming or food, these all have much bigger environmental impacts if we address how we consume things, but recycling is really important as one of the most important environmental activities that people can do, because it changes habits on day one, and you can do every single day and you can interact with things you're throwing away. And if you can see that there's something in your waste stream, it probably means there's problems further up the supply chain. You know, if you're cleaning out your wardrobe and throwing away 20 t-shirts you've only worn once, you need to ask yourself some pretty serious questions about what you're doing with 20 t-shirts in the first place rather than worrying about whether you're recycling them at the charity shop or not. I get changing, you know, get change habits if you want to get fit. Don't set yourself a goal of going to the gym seven times a week. Just put your gym kit on in the morning, you know, buy gym kit on you might go for a short run on might do something and just tell yourself, you got to put your gym kit on every morning seven days a week, rather than say you're gonna go do an hour's workout. And it's just about that habit-forming stuff. You get up in a kit or not your one and then there's a chance you might go do something rather than lying on the sofa watching TV.

Will Richardson 13:48
Sounds really interesting. I'm sending a look at that book. Yeah. Can you tell us a bit about how you engage your staff, suppliers, and customers with your mission and purpose?

Bruce Bratley 14:03
Yeah, so we, I mean, culture is the one word there really and cultures sort of, we've spent a lot of time on it really, it's a buzzword that a lot of companies throw around. And they go we've got a great culture. And I started looking at the culture of the business because we had we took some external investment three years ago, I had loads and loads of sort of wizzy smart people come around to the business that never seen this before, where you've got an amazing culture and I was like, wait, okay, so when someone tells me something that's good that I don't understand it, I take it very seriously. So we spent a lot of time trying to understand our culture and work on it. And if frankly, someone thinks is good, it could probably be better. And so we've spent a lot of time working on this because it is really the foundation of our success. And it's all about the values and behaviours that we work and live by. It's not something that magically happens. And it's why people love working at First Mile is the bedrock of our brand. And it's sort of why we beat our competitors when customers and get suppliers to work with us. And if you're interested in the culture, you can just google first mile Big Green Book or sometimes called a big buck. And it describes our culture and what we about and how we've worked towards sort of having this sort of winning culture. But it's also a very nice place to work because I'm super competitive and everyone is super competitive. But we're we don't stand on each other to succeed. We're very supportive and collegiate and look after each other. We won an award couple of weeks ago for sort of recognising and supporting mental health as an issue in the workplace. So we do a range of things from supporting and recognising mental health as a workplace issue. Diversity, we are an LGBTQ, plus red recognised business, we've done a lot of work with Stonewall and training. I do CO walks in the countryside to get everyone who lives in the city out once a month and get some fresh air and talk about the business or talk about flowers. And get out and walking in the countryside. We did training workshops, maker men workshops, lunch and learns a huge amount of work around the culture, which if you look at our P&L, you get away spending all that money on it, but it delivers 10 times the investment because we have a great team of people that live by our values, which is treating people fairly and amazing customers while we are on our North Star mission of reducing and business's environmental impact through our green impact services. Does that answer the question, Will?

Will Richardson 17:17
Yes, it does. What I'd like so you had this investment in a few years ago, and you had these whizzy people saying you had amazing culture. Was there anything that you changed on the back of that? Did you go, oh, actually, we could do this better?

17:36
Now what we wrote it down, which is what the big buck is, it's the First Mile big buck of the culture, because we didn't really, it was just there. And it's something that I guess, because I lead I, I sort of say it but ironically I set up a business not so I wanted to be the next you know, super entrepreneur, I set the business because I didn't like being told what to do or being scrutinised. But ironically, you're constantly scrutinised when you're a leader of a business. And you have to behave in a particular way. But I have a very sort of strong ethics and a clear sort of way of working and the culture sort of emerged from that, and the culture books very much a sort of a blueprint of my sort of work ethics and mind, really. But we'd never written it down. And the worry was, with the business growing and maybe less, you know, hands-on in the business, because we've got a you know, we had another layer of management involved have another layer of management, well, I didn't want to lose that essence of First Mile and that culture. So the first thing we did is we wrote it down, we tweaked it, we didn't change it. And when we understood it, we then invested across all of the values that delivered the culture, and we effectively the culture is an activation of the values that you hold dear to the business. And you activate the values through behaviours and how you behave. You don't just have a culture by magic. And any business with a strong culture works on it, and they work on it, and everybody understands what it is, and they understand the mission and understand what you're doing and understand the direction of travel that you're going on. And actually, you know, the magic sauce for First Mile isn't anything. It's We do lots of things differently. We do things lots of things cleverly, but you know that the fundamentals are the culture and it's the bit it's what gets me out of bed in the morning. It's why I come to work is to the people and the culture. It's super interesting stuff. And it links directly into that piece around behaviour change and, and habit-changing because we have a behavioural issue, too. You know, everyone knows we're saving the planet planets going to be absolutely fine. What we're trying to do is save humanity. How are we going to save humanity? We're going to save humanity by changing people's hearts and minds and behaviours. And the first one is a company that's trying to do that and if we were a bunch of child does with terrible values or we don't stand our cultures. How on earth are we going to do that? So, you know, we can't, we can't culturally, to use an environmental metaphor stand on a carved iceberg that's floating into the southern oceans or ordinations, which depending on where the carving happened, slowly getting thinner and thinner, because we're not standing on a culturally valid foundation. And we are, we're trying to do that in a way that says, this is how we're behaving and how we're thinking about the world. And we want to bring you on that journey because we need to get you to change your behaviour. That was my analogy didn't work so well, there.

Will Richardson 20:38
No, it did it. Did I get it, I get it. It's, I think it is really hard, isn't it? It's is it is really complicated. I think this leads on to my next question of when it comes to running an ethical and sustainable business what has been your biggest struggle so far? And can you tell us a bit about how you've overcome it?

Bruce Bratley 21:05
Yeah, so the for it's that I mean, sort of getting back to the thing we've talked about the start, which is, you know, recycling is a relatively new business. And fundamentally, what we're trying to get people to do more recycling. And people think is really easy. And you just put something in your bin and old sort of gets taken away by magic. And they don't really understand is actually recycled for really long supply chains. And they're usually quite confused supply chains, because it's a very nascent market, and not particularly well established and has lots of data issues, because it's waste, therefore, you, you don't, you know, measure it. So one of the challenges really has been, we're dealing in a very sort of new market. And it's one of the exciting things in the opportunity of working in a new market. Our product, if you like, which is waste is changing all the time, because there's people further up the supply chain, who are making packaging or products, which are innovating at a very rapid rate. So we've got new materials coming into the waste stream or new formats coming into the waste stream all the time, we then have our sort of product users, if you like, who sort of have low levels of knowledge, and very conflicting sources of information, because they go from one Council to another Council and one council saying, rinse out your yoga pots. Another one saying we don't recycle yoga pots at all, or whatever it is. So there's lots of imprecise and inconsistent information coming into the users of our products, which then causes problems because we can't get consistent materials. And therefore it's harder to recycle those materials further down the supply chain. So there's, you know, a huge amount going on in that in that arena. And you've got a user who, and this has started to change, you've got users who think it's waste, therefore, the cost of managing it comes straight off the bottom line, therefore, it just needs to be as cheap as possible. And we don't really care what happens to it. And that's sort of the context of the market. And that's starting to change. And also, there's apathy around, you know, people say, Well, I don't really care about waste, it's not my core product, I don't really care about recycling, and that is also starting to change. So although, you know, we're right, in the sort of nexus of the sort of environmental movement and sustainability, there's a load of sort of financial and behavioural issues that sort of make it quite difficult for us to sort of power forward. And, you know, it's not a complaint because it's, you know, everyone has those issues. But it's, it can be a real challenge sometimes, and particularly, the bigger the business that you're talking to they want the big impact the big story, but quite often on the ground, they've outsourced their cleaning, or their waste management or their recycling, and their people on the ground are getting squeezed, too tiny, tiny margins by the same people who want a big impact. And there's some real disjointed thinking around at the moment where the corporates and people need to get their story straight and story, right. And that supports recycling and support sustainability across the piece. And actually, we have some of, you know, the most fun and the most progress and the most action from owner-managed businesses because they tend to get it and they tend to go Yeah, okay, I get that. I'm happy to pay a bit more for this. I'm happy to put a bit more effort in because I can see there's a real impact here, both to the environment and also to my sustainability story that I'm trying to tell my customers and we've done some great work with companies like Lauren Smith who make women's underwear from deadstock fabric. And we're working at fabric recycling. And there's some great unit some great stories out there. But it is a challenge to get all of that change when I get a spill. A little bit focused on the bottom line, but it's changing.

Will Richardson 25:25
Could you offer one piece of advice for our listeners, which could help them with their purpose? And what would that be?

Bruce Bratley 25:32
And, yeah, there the I sort of touched on this earlier, really, which is, don't just start doing something today, people get slightly obsessed with wanting to know the truth before they act and get an 80% of the truth, and then act and then figure out the other 20%, you know, we've got till 2050, which is 30 years to become carbon net carbon neutral firm that will seize that frozen dead set net-zero carbon. But basically, we will fit with another 30 years to sort ourselves out. And to get there every 10 years, we need to half our carbon impact. And the first 10 years is really easy, because there's loads of stuff you can do by green energy, start recycling, get an electric car, change your boiler home, relatively easy stuff to do, and all the technology exists. The next 10 years is a bit harder but still achievable. And technology have caught up a little bit by then and in 30 years time or year 21 to 30. We don't really know how we're going to get there. But the assumption is that we'll have figured it out by the time we get there. But don't worry about that. Because it's we thought answers questions anyway. sort the stuff out that you can do now. Look at your scope one emissions, look at scope, two emissions, don't worry about scope three emissions overly at the moment. And just do stuff, you know, get out there, do stuff, change habits, get organised, there's 20 things you can do tomorrow, most of them cost you very little money, do it get out there. If you don't want to know and you want a list of ideas, you can DM me and I'll send you hundreds of things you can go on and do.

Will Richardson 27:18
Brilliant. And you as an organisation I would hazard a guess, are quite environmental? And what sort of things have you done? Like, is it through procurement? Is it through the managing of the operations and what sort of things have you done as an organisation to minimise your impact?

Bruce Bratley 27:42
Well, we work on this all the time. We're in the sort of holding pattern for becoming a B Corp. And I think they're so overwhelmed with applicants at the moment. And we do loads of sort of ISO 14001, all that sort of stuff. But actually, fundamentally, its day to day behaviour that you need to change. Everybody in the office is super engaged around any initiatives that we've got, we do loads of things to reduce our impact. But at the end of the day, 90% of our impact comes from driving trucks around cities that run on fossil fuels. And we have sort of at the heart of our sort of impact strategy is our transport agenda and our vehicle logistics agenda, and reducing the carbon impact of our logistics platform. And we did three things in that area. One is moving to electric vehicles and all of our deliveries now on electric vehicles. We do deliveries on cargo bikes as well. But it's harder to do collections at the moment because you can't get big collection vehicles that run on electric at the moment, they have to run on diesel. Where we do have diesel vehicles, we work to make sure that the highest standards so we've got ultra low emission vehicles. And then it's about if you've got a vehicle, it's about making sure that its impact is as minimal as possible. So we have software to make sure we're optimising routes. And then a key thing I'm going to sound like a stuck record is back to behaviour. And so we put a black box on all the vehicles which monitors driving behaviour. And if you've got a super-efficient super clean vehicle that has all sorts of technology to make it nice and efficient, but you drive it like Lewis Hamilton, it's going to consume more fuel and it's going to burn through more brakes and rub off more tire. So we monitor driver behaviour. I mean monitoring for safety but a big part of that is monitoring for environmental reasons. And we track harsh braking harsh acceleration, harsh cornering, idling time, which is getting out and leaving the vehicle running, scramble the ignition key and have a league table. And if you're at the top of the league table is a big prize every quarter. And, um, you know, iPhones and holidays not you know, not not a 50 pound, most expensive voucher like a prize, it's worth it. But also, the drivers, both the men and the women drivers, and a super competitive and even the ones that said, Oh, this is ridiculous and like just any of that and now fighting, fighting to get at the league table. So again, it's about behaviour of things, you know, now, electric vehicles, if you drive an electric vehicle really badly, you know, the chart, we charge them with renewable energy, but if you bought if you drive, if you're driving really badly, they're gonna need more charge at the end of the day, which is using renewable energy that somebody else could buy, and you're rubbing off tires and at the moment of breaks and at the moment, I think it's something like 20% of vehicle emissions are from tires and brake pads and there's no way of capturing those. And so you know, there's little tiny particulates in air emission and you know, coming to school gates, and it's a watercourse is coming from tires and brakes, even an electric vehicle has emission. So this notion of it being zero-emission is another bit of green hyperbole, it's not zero emission. And so we're constantly working on trying to reduce and it's what I said earlier is that, you know, we can have lots of nice stories and PR around the fact that we've got recycled paper in the office makes diddly squat difference for what we're trying to do, what we're trying to do is reduce the impact of our vehicles. And that's what we're putting our effort in.

Will Richardson 31:29
It so it's interesting, the vehicle emission stuff, isn't it, because we had a guy called Nick Malden on. And he, his organisation monitors the exhausts in real-time. And they monitor all new vehicles, and they're trying to monitor all the old vehicles as well. So you actually get the actual emissions from it. And he brought up in our podcast about the tires and the brake emissions, and said it's completely is something that needs to be looked at more. And it's interesting that your organisation and you are looking at it and try and reduce it.

Bruce Bratley 32:06
Yeah, we've done work with King's College, we put air quality monitors in the vehicles, our operatives wore them. And now we're working around, we have an app now that we give to landlords and Business Improvement districts where they can obviously track the recycling rates and where their customers are. But it also links into kings API, so they can see what the air quality is in that local area. So we do quite a lot of air quality mapping as well. And obviously, London's air quality and Birmingham's air quality issues it isn't directly as a result of First Mile. But we recognise that we contribute to that, you know, and it's why we're delivering on a bicycle because you know, do it using a cargo bike for deliveries is even lower impact than an electric vehicle. So we're doing a lot of work on it. But the whole the sort of the layout of the alternative fuel vehicles is sort of frustrating because councils and sort of local politicians want everyone to have electric HGV's. And they and they sort of taught they sort of, unfairly if not unfairly they're unhelpfully targeting big lorries and saying, why can't these be electric? Why can't these be hydrogen-based when it actually doesn't make much environmental sense, because right now we double shift the vehicle. But if we went to electric, we'd have to have two vehicles, because we'd have to look at it and use it one shift, because the other shift would have to be charging. And therefore the carbon impact of two electric vehicles which have got a much higher carbon impact than a diesel vehicle anyways, absolutely massive, and local politicians are thinking about it from there, the ultimate in been NIMBYs about things. They just don't care as long as not and they're not environmentalists, they just don't care as long as it's not happening on their patch. And they just want to push all these emissions elsewhere, rather than thinking about it in a more holistic sense. And at the same time, they are not addressing the issue which could be addressed today, which is small delivery vans, because we, our entire fleet of small delivery vans are electric and have been electric for two years. And they're much cheaper to run than petrol and diesel delivery vans. And what the city Mayor should be just doing is going you can't come into the city and anything that's less than a three-tonne vehicle unless it's electric cars are out there. They're commercially viable, but you've got Amazon and other delivery companies all doing this instant delivery in old diesel vehicles. And if they just said you can only come up with electric vehicles every day stop this sort of madness of instant delivery, and it would get the emissions down way more than 10% of vehicles which are HGTV. So as a result I'd like to announce though running for London Mayor in May, I'm not.

Will Richardson 35:00
I was like wow! that's pretty amazing. Because actually the experience that you have, and this goes on to my next question, and the experience that you have would actually be incredibly beneficial, to be honest with you. Because you'd actually understand what's going on in the real heart of things. And wait, there's a lot of talk about plastic at the moment. And there is a lot of celebrities saying no plastic and is plastic as bad for the environment, as people are making it out to be.

Bruce Bratley 35:37
It depends where you, it depends on what at which point you're looking at in its lifecycle, really. And the issue with plastics in the oceans isn't a plastics issue. And it isn't a recycling issue. It is a basic waste management issue. And the fundamental reason that we have waste management as a concept as an environmental concept is to control waste after it is generated. And the first thing that you need to do as a waste management person is control of waste and stop it from escaping. And then when you've got it, you need to do something with it, which is either landfill, incinerated, recycle it, wash it and reuse it, whatever it is. But the first thing you got to do is to stop it from escaping and that ocean problem is the fact that there's no formal waste management country. No, there is no formal waste management in the countries where this plastic is coming from. And actually, nobody's changed what they're doing. The only thing that has changed is the form in which people buy things from the market, because the waste disposal route is the same. And people in developing countries have always thrown their waste into rivers to get rid of it. And it just turned out it was organic packaging, which was paper bags, banana leaves, bamboo tubes, whatever it was, went into the river didn't cause a problem. We then suddenly had companies mentioned a few names earlier in the podcast already selling noodles, or shampoo, or cleaning products in plastic pouches, which then got thrown into the river, because that's the way that waste management always happened in developing countries, none of that plastic is ended up in the oceans. And that's the only thing that's changed is the type of packaging that we're using in developing countries. And people in developing countries are trying to increase their standard of living with better hygiene with better food. And it's coming packaged in plastics, and that's what's changed. So the issue is not so much the plastic as the problem of not having any form of waste management in companies in countries where the packaging is coming from. And there's ways around that. I mean, there's some great innovative companies that making plastic out of seaweed, so it ends up in the ocean, it completely disappears. And for me, that's sort of that's fine. If you accept that it's okay to keep throwing material into rivers. But actually what we should potentially be looking at is, how do we control the waste in the first place? And then let's look at its recyclability. And sort of then if you then turn your mind to sort of Western economists and let's talk about the UK, yes, it's frustrating that we've got lots of items packaged in plastics and everyone goes to the, you know, the peeled Satsuma that's put in a clamshell, and obviously, that's crazy. And, you know, supermarket executives are purchasing people in the supermarket should be like, you know, put in the markets square and flogged with satsumas or something just as punishment. But because it's just, you know, stupidity, really. And, you know, we consumers don't have to buy this stuff. But the issue really is we're producing lots and lots of plastics that we can't recycle easily because they're blended with other materials, their composite materials, you know, 60% of clothing now is made out of plastic, but it's blended in with Cotton's it's blended in with other fibers, it's blended in with wools blended in with denim, and therefore, it's very difficult to recycle and recover it. Therefore, we need a different technology for recycling plastics, which are hard to recycle through a mechanical means of recycling. And that technology is probably almost certainly going to be some form of chemical recycling where the plastic is broken back down into the building blocks the chemical building blocks for making new plastic products rather than a mechanical system, which is grinding up washing it, and then reforming it into a plastic product. So I don't think you can escape from the fact that we can have plastics because plastics are fundamentally an amazing product that increases the longevity of a product. They are lightweight, they make it easy to package and move around. We just need to get better at managing it. And sure there's some you know, you can pick loads of examples of where plastics are used in a crazy way. And we should get rid of those. But fundamentally, we're going to end up with plastics and people that say they're gonna have, you know, plastic-free world or zero plastic. Well, that sort of not being realistic or honest with themselves.

Will Richardson 40:20
That's really good to hear. Yeah. Yeah, totally agree. It's that whole lifecycle, isn't it, and people use glass one. And the using plastic is so much more carbon-efficient than that glass. Well, it'd be great just how we connect with you more and learn more about you as an organisation. And obviously, all of this, all of your social media handles, and everything will be on our web page for the podcast.

Bruce Bratley 40:57
Yeah, show so I First Mile are at First Mile on Twitter. Similar, I think we're the same on Instagram ago, we're on an on LinkedIn, we'll find us anyway, first Mile. If you want to, if you want to hear what I'm talking about. I'm just at Bruce Bratley on LinkedIn, I mainly use LinkedIn and a bit of Twitter. So if you want to hear what I'm sort of talking about, follow me on LinkedIn, check me out on LinkedIn. The website is thefirstmile.co.uk, you can find out what we're going now we've got a blog running on there. If you are listening in your home, go to First Mile home, which is just firstmilehome.com. And that has some Home Services and you can buy green energy fuel home from us there as well. In enhance your recycling services with our first Smart Home service. And we're competing in the world of podcasting, you can listen to my podcast, which is available on Spotify and apple and it's called wasted. So if you just look up, First Mile Wasted, you'll find the podcast and you can hear it's not really talking about First Mile but it's talking about some nice guests on there as well. So check us out obviously not as good as this podcast, which is amazing.

Will Richardson 42:14
Thanks. Now I love the name. Love the name wasted.

Bruce Bratley 42:18
My friend, actually I was at uni with who now he's actually just got an album out at the moment he did the jingle. It's not you know, it's not quite the Dr. Dre level of production. But it's quite nice. So jingle says done by a friend of mine.

Will Richardson 42:36
Brilliant, brilliant. Bruce, thank you so much. And we didn't actually, even though I mentioned it in the beginning, we didn't even talk about all the good stuff that you've been doing through this Coronavirus. And I think you're you've got lots of blogs and things and maybe if we could just quickly just touch upon it. And I think it's really important. The reason why I think it's important is because what you did very quickly was look at the capacity of your, yourself as an organisation and see how you could help and change and you were delivering flowers, you delivering food in your vehicles. You were doing so much more than just your normal day job as it were.

Bruce Bratley 43:22
Yeah, so we basically London came to a standstill, you know, people couldn't get food. You know that there was there's nurses working around the clock and doctors working around the clock who couldn't get hand creams and peepee equipment and food and snacks in hospitals. So we've we basically did three things. One, we delivered loads of stuff to hospitals, and we did that for NHS charities. But also at the time, we couldn't talk about something but actually, we delivered PP to hospitals. We were paid for that by the NHS and they only that is quite funny really they only announced that they were getting help delivering PP when the London fire brigade agreed to do it. So I think that was a bit more of a sort of sellable story than saying there's a waste company delivering your PPA. We delivered 10 we did we delivered you know millions of items of PPA to hospitals. We lots of offices that were closing had loads of like really sort of mundane things like biscuits and tea bags that they were going to throw out so we took those into hospitals through NHS charities UCL charity we worked with a lot, just so that, you know, hospital workers could get biscuits and tea and things like that in between their shifts. And so we did loads of that stuff, which is a sort of, in many ways waste minimization, avoiding waste. We delivered furniture to our staff so they had a nice comfortable chair at home we move things around for various people. We then realised that people couldn't get fresh fruit and veg so we did a deal with a wholesaler who actually was the dad of one of the people that worked for me who had a wholesale business based up in Warwickshire that just used to supply restaurants and obviously had loads of fruit and veggies that he couldn't get rid of because all the restaurants would shut. So we set up a veggie box scheme in sort of 36 hours before that went live. And then we then somebody contacted us, a woman called Miranda, who'd read in the newspapers on the Friday that garden centres had grown all of these small plants for the Easter weekend and they'd spent since January growing all these plans, we're gonna have to landfill them all. Because all the garden centres were closed and from the Friday to the she called me on Saturday morning and said would you be able to deliver plants from for us so from between Friday and the Monday she set up a plant delivery company, and then we had for the next month for vehicles just delivering plants from wholesalers all over London. And that was really important as a waste minimization, waste avoidance activity, but it just the amount of joy it brought to people is incredible because a lot people just stuck at home. They had a garden which was bare soil, and suddenly they were unable to and couldn't get to the garden centre, they never had time to look at the garden before. And or there might have been avid gardens that were planning syndrome. We just turned all these like brown gardens into like amazing flower beds because people could actually get out there and do some gardening so really good for mental health as well. So yeah, I was busy all the time.

Will Richardson 46:30
Brilliant. Brilliant. Love it. such an inspiration. Thank you so much for being on the show today. It's been an absolute pleasure talking to you and finding out more about First Mile, you're geographically based in London and Birmingham, aren't you? are you go...

Bruce Bratley 46:45
The whole of the UK now but we do direct delivery of services in London and Birmingham do the whole of the UK we've launched two weeks ago, a full eCommerce website. So you can just go on the website order services anywhere in the UK, with either delivery direct or deliver it through one of our trusted partners elsewhere in the UK. So we're open for business everywhere.

Will Richardson 47:06
Brill, bril. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. Well.

Bruce Bratley 47:11
Great to be on the show. Thank you very much. Take care