84. The BrewDog forest - climate solution or greenwashing?

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Hello, welcome to Talking Rubbish, a weekly podcast delving deep into the world of recycling and discussing the truth behind snappy headlines and one-tuned stories. In this episode, we will discuss Brew Dog's Lost Forest. Are tree guards rubbish or not? And I have a question about whether food macerators are a good thing or not. I'm James Piper, author of the rubbish book, and I'm joined by Robbie Stannaforth, my far from rubbish friend. Morning Robbie. Hey James. How are you? Yeah, very good. Do you know? I was in the car the other day with our mutual friend John. Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. Now, last week we talked about JB the Rockstar on Discord. Yeah. John is our version of JB the Rockstar, isn't he? Yeah. I did confirm that it's not him on Discord. So hello to JB the Rockstar on Discord. You are not John. We definitely have two JB the Rockstars in our lives.

SPEAKER_02 0:56

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 0:56

Very nice. Right. So we're on our way back from an event, me and John. He works for EcoSurety. And we've got nothing to listen to. And he says, Oh, can I listen to episode 81 of Talking Rubbish? And I said, Yeah, fine. You know, I'll listen to myself speak. It's okay. I have to listen to it a lot anyway. So John lives in Bristol, right? Down the road from me. Down the road from you. And he turns to me as I say the line, obviously paper goes in the glass bin. He goes, What? I have absolutely no idea. I've been putting all my paper in with the card for years. He was like, I had no idea that's what I was meant to be doing.

SPEAKER_00 1:35

Very naughty. What people aren't getting the message. When they got that new cardboard bag thing, they thought, oh, all of the paper and card goes in here now.

SPEAKER_01 1:44

And this is, I mean, it does, because Bristol waste mix it up. But it was just a great example. I thought a really good example of hey, here's someone who works in the recycling industry who we have worked with for well over a decade now. And he didn't know his own recycling rules in his city. Wow. That just I just thought what a good example to bring up as a good reminder to get us all to check our local councils recycling rules and follow what they say, not necessarily what we say, unless you're John, in which case you should listen to what we say because we're based down the road from you. But I think for everyone else, you know, particularly in this time of simpler recycling, particularly in this time of complexity, it is definitely worth just having a refresh on your council website. Our question today is Was brewdogs lost forest greenwashing?

SPEAKER_00 2:46

It's an interesting question, this one. I really do fear uh that the answer's gonna be that it was a little bit greenwashy.

SPEAKER_01 2:54

Okay, let's crack into it. So in 2020, brewdogs founders James Watt and Martin Dickey shared a photograph. James was holding a spade, Martin a tree sapling, and to the left of them was a sign that said brewdog forest coming soon. Now, this was actually and linked to this around the time they declared they would be the world's first carbon negative brewery. Ah, yes, I remember that. Sort of linking the two together, we're gonna talk a little bit about whether that's a good thing to do, and we sort of mentioned it back in our carbon footprint episode. But these were linked things. They said we're we're gonna plant the Scotland's biggest forest and make Scotland's biggest forest, and at the same time as a brewery, we are becoming carbon negative.

SPEAKER_00 3:34

What a cool idea. I mean, it really for people like me, it was the kind of thing that was like, wow, this is so cool. It absolutely gives the brand such a great name. Being carbon negative, very cool beer. It was, yeah. I remember at the time thinking this is so impressive.

SPEAKER_01 3:54

Unfortunately, five years later, the land has now been sold. The carbon negative promises have been scrapped, and brewdog itself has announced just recently that it is up for sale. And to be honest, that up for sale piece is what prompted this because they announced they were up for sale, and I thought, well, what's going to happen to the forest? And I Googled it and realized that in October 2025 they sold the forest. And I just think that was massively underreported because I had no idea that had happened.

SPEAKER_00 4:20

Yeah, absolutely no idea. This is totally news to me. So presumably, with all of this announcing they're up for sale, they've already started to sell off certain assets or something. If they've sold this forest, they must have made some money out of it, I should imagine.

SPEAKER_01 4:36

Yeah, I'm not sure how linked those two events were, whether they back in October were thinking, well, we're up for sale and this forest is a liability, so let's get rid of it now. They've only just announced they're up for sale. Um, but certainly the people they've sold it to have not disclosed how much they paid for it. So we don't actually know if they made any money or not. Just to do a full disclosure on this, because it's just an interesting point. I actually have more of a view on this than perhaps uh some of our listeners might. And that's because I decided many years ago now, I can't actually remember the year I did it, but I decided to invest in Brute Dog, so become one of their equity punks, I think they call it. And at the time didn't have much money, but they were a company I massively believed in. I really liked their style of doing business. I really liked what they were about. I really liked that they were doing different things and with a large environmental focus and things like carbon negativity just kind of fit in with the brand, didn't it? And I've sort of got similar stories over my history. I've invested in a a few different businesses, just small amounts of money, but just people I believe in things like this, you know, the uh vegan brand, the brand that produces meat alternatives, because again, it it felt like the right thing to do. I am a meat eater, but I want to support the alternative meat industry, so I've invested in them. I bought a Tesla back in 2017, you know, a long, long time ago, way before Elon Musk was a lunatic. And and now I'm stuck with these problems, right? I'm stuck with an investment in a company I certainly don't align with in Brewdog. They have changed so much. And the things that have come out over the years, you know, the abuse allegations, the bullying allegations, the marketing stunts that have gone wrong, they just do not align at all with my perspective on life. I do not want to spend an hour talking about Elon Musk, but I certainly could do. And I need one of those stickers for my car that says I bought this before he was he went crazy. And I think that's just a really interesting point, isn't it, to reflect on and go, these are companies whose vision and mission I fully backed. That five, ten years down the line, I'm thinking, God, I don't align to them at all now, but it sort of looks like I do because I'm still driving the Tesla. You know, and I still believe obviously in electric cars, and I think they make the best electric cars, but it is a source of frustration how companies can change in relatively short spaces of time.

SPEAKER_00 6:50

Yeah, and the trickiest thing is that they haven't just sort of slightly gone off the boil, they're they're literally the exact opposite of what you thought you were backing, and they've gone a total 180, and now it's sort of like almost embarrassing that you, you know, in good faith, sort of hoped they would be uh, you know, revolutionary companies, etc. etc. And that just hasn't proved to be the case at all.

SPEAKER_01 7:16

So Polestar, I'm looking at you, don't do anything stupid, because I'll be absolutely furious if I get another electric car in the future, and then you turn out to be a maniac. Um so let's focus on the forest. We have to go back to 2020, the beginning of the worldwide pandemic, and also over time, as I say, the brewdog purchased a 9,300-acre estate called Kinrara for 8.8 million pounds. And the aim of this project was to plant 3 million trees by 2025. We always like this, don't we, Robbie? When it's like, we're gonna plant this by 2025, and then you're like, oh well, 2025's passed. Let's see how many trees you planted. Spoiler, it was not three million. Oh no, I I was fearing the worst. Now, this site is massive. Just put the that acreage in perspective, it's about 11 times the size of Central Park. So if anyone's been to Central Park, you can that's already a massive site. It's 11 times that, or it's about 6,000 football pitches if you haven't been to Central Park.

SPEAKER_00 8:19

I spent an entire afternoon walking around Central Park at the tail end of last year, and I can tell you and vouch for the fact it is absolutely massive. 11 times that. Well, it's real huge forest this.

SPEAKER_01 8:30

And their messaging was really powerful. They said the forest would offset their entire carbon footprint. They promoted it heavily in their marketing campaigns, and they framed it as proof that business could be part of the climate solution. They even created a special lager for it, which I actually particularly enjoyed, called Los Lager. Um, and they they claimed that the sales of this lager would help fund the purchase of trees. James Watt described the purchase of this land as the purest, most altruistic thing we've ever done. Wow. Welcome on to that. Big statement. Some of these statements I think people live to regret. They say these things and then they go, God, I wish we'd never said that five years later. But maybe it is the most purest and altruistic thing he's ever done, I'm not sure. Before we get into the detail in the Blue Dog Forest, it's worth noting that they are not the only people with these motivations. Many, many companies have bought up land in Scotland, particularly in this time of offsetting emissions and wanting to be seen to be doing the right thing. So, hey, I can be a really nasty corporate over here, as long as I'm planting a load of trees over here. That's a criticism we had about the carbon offsetting episode. It does have a negative effect, but well, depending on where you sit on this, I think it has a negative effect because it drives up the land prices. If you've got lots and lots of companies with lots and lots of money competing for land, obviously it drives up the price. And in just a few years, prices of land doubled to around £1,500 per acre. If you're a lay person just wanting to buy land in Scotland to plant trees to do the right thing, it would be very tricky for you to do that. And if you were already a wealthy landowner, you've just become wealthier. That just doesn't chime very well with the sustainability narrative, does it?

SPEAKER_00 10:08

No, it sounds a little bit disingenuous in a way, or the overall effect that it's having, particularly presumably on sort of local people who it makes it more expensive for them, the land being expensive, housing then becoming expensive, etc.

SPEAKER_01 10:23

And just to put that in perspective, the Guardian reported that by December 2021, 638 new Scottish forests and woods had been registered with the Woodland Carbon Code. So the Woodland Carbon Code is a scheme that allows landowners to sell carbon credits when the CO2 is captured by the trees, and then that's sold to companies to offset carbon emissions, 638 new forests.

SPEAKER_00 10:46

Wow, that does seem quite a lot for I mean, it's not that small a country. There is lots of land in Scotland, but yeah, it's a sudden bubble, isn't it? Obviously, and brew dog was simply part of that bubble.

SPEAKER_01 10:58

And I mean, how can this be a bad thing, right? We're rewilding land, we're planting native trees, we're supporting biodiversity. Let's talk about some of the issues. So brewdog's plan specifically was in phases. They had four phases of peatland restoration between 2021 and 2025, and two phases of woodland creation between 2022 and 2024. About a third of the site was reserved for tree planting, and about two-thirds were peatland restoration. Peatland restoration is so important. It was one of the early worries lots of people had that they had bought a lot of land with that had peatland, and peat stores and holds carbon. So if you disturb it, it can release carbon. So if you said I'm going to plant trees on this peatland, actually, you have a negative impact because you've dug up the peatland releasing the carbon just to plant a tree that will not store as much carbon as the peatland was. And there's this incredible stat here that peatland makes up just 3% of the earth's surface, but it holds twice as much carbon than all forests combined.

SPEAKER_00 11:59

It's amazing, isn't it? I've done a bit of peatland restoration myself to try and secure the peat and make sure it doesn't get washed away. And when you hear these kinds of statistics, you just suddenly realize it's not all about trees and forests when it comes to sequestering carbon.

SPEAKER_01 12:15

How would you restore a peat land, Robbie?

SPEAKER_00 12:17

Yeah, so effectively what happens is if the vegetation gets cleared off the land, then it exposes the peat like the top layer of soil, and it will get washed away into the rivers during heavy rains, and then that's it. You can't get the peat back that's there holding all of the carbon. So what you're effectively trying to do is use uh natural products, grasses, and things like that to plant into the peat that basically holds it. And it's kind of similar in a way to what you're doing with restoring sand dunes, if you like to think of it like that. You're effectively putting vegetation in that secures the bank.

SPEAKER_01 13:01

Functional peatland can hold 30 times more carbon than a healthy tropic rainforest. It is just unbelievable some of these stats. And so I don't think anyone had a particular problem with restoring peatland. It was like, great, two-thirds of a site, you're gonna be keeping the peatland safe, you're gonna be putting that vegetation on, as you say, and we're not releasing the carbon. So no one's gonna have a problem with that. Don't tree plant there. And it is weird, isn't it? This concept of I bought a load of land, and the best thing for me to do is leave it alone. And I think some of the criticism to brewdog is exactly that. It's like, actually, the best thing you could have done is just let it grow naturally. And the idea that you're coming in and saving it and planting a load of trees and restoring peat land actually sounds good on paper, but maybe isn't necessary and and could create more damage than you're actually saving. At the heart of the issues comes a conflict that is happening all the time, all around the world, but you know, Scottish forestry particularly have this issue because they have so much land. They want to hit a tree planting target. And as I say, natural growth might be the best way to go, but they don't count count natural growth as tree planting. So they're spending on average about 70 million pounds a year to hit a government target to plant 115,000 acres of new woodland. And this is by this was by April 2025. So the government are investing huge amounts of money in tree planting when it might be better just to say, actually, what have we got at the moment? What's naturally growing? Let's let that grow really well, let's m cultivate that, and then we'll plant in different areas where we think we need to plant, and we'll peat land restore in different areas where we need to restore peatland. But let's not just have a tree planting target that means that everyone just wants to plant new trees.

SPEAKER_00 14:44

Yeah, it does sound like a bit of a blunt instrument, doesn't it? It's sort of like, oh, let's just get a few saplings out wherever's good enough. Don't worry about what the land was before, just bang in a few new trees and we can hit this target when environmental restoration is a lot more complex than just a tree planting target.

SPEAKER_01 15:03

When we reflect on James Watt's comment that this is the most altruistic thing brew dog have done, I think we can question that because you have land that is increasing in value just by the nature that corporates are coming in and buying it up, a political climate that is throwing money at planting trees, which then makes the land even more valuable. So I don't know. If they weren't taking, if they said, look, we're gonna do this and we're not gonna take any public money, we're gonna just fund it ourselves, then yeah, I would class it as altruistic. But actually, they signed a contract with Scottish Forestry for £2.7 million, of which they definitely received £1.1 million. So that was £800,000 for the first phase of tree planting and £300,000 for the second phase of tree planting. They definitely received £1.1 million of the 2.7. I'm not sure about the rest because it hasn't been reported. It's not that altruistic if you go, we're gonna buy some land, which yes cost you 8.8 million, but is now worth more, and we're gonna take a load of public money to fund the thing that makes the land worth more.

SPEAKER_00 16:00

I'm absolutely shocked. So I just sort of naturally assume that when you bought a forest and you said you were gonna restore it and plant trees, that that would be a self-funded endeavor. Now, I'm sure the press release and things never actually said, and we will buy all of those trees ourselves. But that's the kind of impression you get when you have these marketing campaigns saying, buy a lost lager, it'll fund the creation of more woodland. It's sort of like, well, that seems a bit tangential, doesn't it? If it's actually uh a grant from Scottish Forestry that's buying all the trees.

SPEAKER_01 16:38

Which is a nice segue to them having to backtrack on that lost lager promise because it didn't really fund the forest. Early promotions for Lost Lager suggested that each can or pack sold would fund a tree in their forest, but there was public money funding it. And so any claim was swiftly removed. Um and my understanding is there was no connection to lost lager and the lost forest. So even though it's called lost lager and the forest is called the lost forest, and you would naturally link those two things. Brewdog said claims linking lager sales to tree planting were an error in communication.

SPEAKER_00 17:12

Wow. And I wonder if the advertising standards authority went after them for false advertising.

SPEAKER_01 17:19

That is a very good question. I don't think they did because they deleted the claim quite quickly. So it was only in a couple of things. So I think it was on their Amazon website uh that it said it, and it said it in a marketing video for the forest. And I think it was pointed out that they were not funding the trees and they took those two things down. I'm not sure I ever made it to the Advertising Standards Authority. Okay. Um but one thing that definitely did make it to be Advertising Standards Authority, because Brewdog do have a bit of a history here, is uh a misleading promo around gold cans. Did you ever see this one? Uh, all vaguely, yes, I do remember seeing something about a gold can.

SPEAKER_00 17:56

What was it though?

SPEAKER_01 17:57

In 2021, they offered people the chance to win a gold can, which they said would be so it was in a pack, I think. You bought like a pack of uh punk IPA, and within it there might be a gold can.

SPEAKER_00 18:08

Oh yeah, because it comes in a cardboard box, doesn't it? So you can't see what colour the cans are. Is that the concept?

SPEAKER_01 18:14

That's right. And James Watt tweeted that it would be solid gold. But in fact, I mean, first of all, your pack would be so heavy when you were given it, you'd be like, oh, this definitely has a gold one because it weighs 10 times anyone else's. I'd definitely be picking off all the packs from the shelf. It was in fact gold plated, and they claimed a valuation uh it was uh something like 10,000, 15,000 pounds they said the can would be worth, and people got it assessed and realised the amount of gold was actually like 500 pounds worth. And they said, Oh, well, when we were calculating the value of the can, it was like the secondary market, so what someone might pay for it on eBay because there's only 50 of them. Oh, that's so naughty. Who's gonna pay that? Super misleading. And the ASA definitely told him off for saying that it was solid gold when in fact it was gold plated. The winners complained and he paid out 500 grand personally to the winners. So uh they do have a bit of a track record of uh misleading marketing, unfortunately. That's crazy. So we've got to this point where public money, not sales of beer, is funding tree planting. So how did the tree planting go? Not well. Oh no. I shouldn't laugh, it's very sad. Uh, roughly half of the 500,000 saplings that they planted in year one died. So about 250,000 saplings. Now, there was a lot of it, you can find quite easily online a lot of criticism of this from forestry experts who felt normal lost would be somewhere between 10 and 30%, not 50%. So they were challenging the quality of the tree planting. In this specific year that we're talking about, uh, which would have been, I think, 2021 or 2022, there was a significant drought. I just think it was bad luck. So I'm not gonna say they did a bad job tree planting. I just think it's so frustrating, isn't it? You've got public money funding huge amounts of tree planting and then half of it dies.

SPEAKER_00 19:59

Having done some tree planting also myself, you've got to have enough people to be able to properly put those saplings in. Otherwise, you come back a week later and they've literally just been blown over by the wind or whatever. So if you're up against these targets that Scottish forestry are setting for uh whatever it was, the £70 million that they're spending on tree planting in Scotland, and you don't have enough people, I must say it probably is quite likely that you just the quality of planting is not that great. And then you lose some through that, as well as obviously, by the sounds of it, this drought. So taking your care and time and thinking about making sure that these trees actually survive to old age is so important.

SPEAKER_01 20:44

And remember their plan to go carbon negative, partly with the help of this forest? Well, that was always going to be an issue, as we discussed in episode 49, which was our carbon offsetting one. Trees are a terrible way to carbon offset. Partly for this reason. Lots of trees do not survive. Most trees do not make meaningful carbon savings until they are at least 10 years old. So this idea that, oh, I've planted 500,000 trees over their lifetime, they're gonna save this much carbon, so I'll start monitoring that and keeping that. You just can't do it until you know the tree survived and until it's at least 10 years old. Their marketing videos on this were pretty shocking. They started off when they launched the forest, they said the forest would be capable of sequestering up to 550,000 tons of CO2 each year. So let's just hold that number in our hand. This is what they said in their marketing. We're gonna sequester 550,000 tons of CO2 each year. When that was looked at properly, it was a million tons over a hundred years. What? That is absolutely crazy. So what would they have said over that a hundred years? They would have said fifty five million tons over a hundred years is what they were claiming it would do. And it was actually one million tons over a hundred years. So nowhere near what they said it would achieve. We're out by a factor of times 55. Yes. We do have to remember that there is good in this. You know, the you are planting a forest. It is good fundamentally, but I think some of these issues are just quite large. And at this point, I descended into a massive rabbit hole. And for that, I have to thank Nick Kemp, who wrote some excellent blogs on this forest. He'd been visiting the site and giving his views. And he writes a blog. I think he's part of a team that writes a blog called Park Watch Scotland. So if you want to find them, just search Park Watch Scotland. These guys go into huge depth on some of these issues, you know, literally going around photographing like caterpillar tracks from the truck saying, like, why was one going down this road when it wasn't allowed? etc. etc. So I will distill all of their blog posts into three comments. They felt the tree planting was happening in the wrong places. They were planting pine trees, for example, Scottish pine trees, where trees were already naturally starting to grow and they would outcompete the natural trees. So they sort of had like this stretch where they were planting pine trees next to some naturally growing. But the ones that were naturally growing were about to be outcompeted by the ones they were planting. So it was just a complete waste of time. As I said at the start, you could just leave it to grow naturally. Poorly planned, presumably, about where they're placing these trees. And a lot of the planting involved heavy machinery, which disturbed the peat. So they were watching these trucks just go over peat land that was basically causing the carbon to get released from that. So that wasn't great. And the third point that was really interesting, we'll sort of come onto it with our rubbish or not as well, was some of the public money had been used to erect fences to keep out deer. They were using a lot of fencing. This is obviously important. Deer eat the saplings, stop the trees from getting established. But the argument from experts is, and these guys on this blog, is it just pushes the deer elsewhere. So whilst your forest may thrive and grow, another forest is getting eaten. It's not like it reduces the number of deer, it's just shifting them into a different place. And therefore you have this kind of net benefit of zero. You know, it's not worth doing, yes, your forest thrives, someone else's doesn't. People may have personal views on this, but the better thing to do is to control deer and sheep populations and to let everything happen naturally, to let deer and sheep roam around, to let them graze, but just make sure those populations don't outcompete the saplings that you're planting. Okay, so to give the other side of this, at the time where the criticism was at its peak, which was around April 2022, James Watt shared a letter from the person who was the scientific advisor to this project, friend of the podcast and interview for episode 50, Mike Berners-Lee.

SPEAKER_00 24:33

Oh, really? Okay, fine. So he got involved to try and help him understand what he needed to do, presumably.

SPEAKER_01 24:41

Well, he was already involved. He'd been involved from the start in terms of working out where to plant, what peat land to restore. So I have confidence that they had good minds behind them in terms of making sure they were doing the right thing. But uh they did roll him out. So they oh there's criticism. Mike, can you write us a letter that we can share? And the three things he said that are kind of worth us flagging are he highlighted that brewdog's land management activities were separate from and in addition to its own carbon reduction activities. One of the criticisms had been, well, you can just keep ramping up your carbon because on the other side you're planting this forest. But actually, brew dog were doing a lot to reduce their own carbon activities. He said about the government funding, it is entirely reasonable for brewdog to seek financial assistance from the government in its efforts to be the stewards of this estate in just the same way that farmers and other landowners routinely seek subsidies. And in criticism of the pace, because there was a lot of criticism of you said three million trees, and you've done 250,000 at this point, because half of them have died, he said it would not be responsible for brewdog to have immediately embarked on a mass tree planting exercise, since it was first essential to carefully understand the complex environmental and social issues, and doing things properly takes a bit of time. His summary line, which James Watt likes rolling out, is it looks to me as if Brewdog is approaching its stewardship of the estate with the care for people and planet that I wish was demonstrated by all landowners.

SPEAKER_00 26:02

I mean, it's reassuring in a way, but on that second point, that it's normal practice basically to take government assistance, like farmers and other landowners do. But farmers and other landowners don't claim that it's the biggest act of altruism they've ever done. They like say, I run a business which is farming the land, and in order to make that financially viable, there are some government subsidies for it. They're not saying, look at how great a person I am doing this out of the goodness of my heart because I'm an ethical uh operator, person, company, or whatever. It's kind of, yeah, I I I get this point from Mike, but it's a totally different context to all those other landowners, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 26:50

My greenwashing antenna is tingling because it's about marketing. It's about how you present this. It's about what you're saying. If you're going around saying this is the most altruistic thing we've ever done, people don't expect you to take public money. If you're going around saying it's going to be the biggest forest in Scotland, people expect you to plant the biggest forest in Scotland, not 250,000 trees. And that's the problem with brewdog, and has been the problem with brewdog for many, many years, that they are quick to launch a marketing campaign. They don't deliver what they said in the marketing campaign and they have to roll back. And I've experienced that personally as an investor. I invested to a level that meant I got a brewery tour with some friends and an opportunity to brew my own beer in one of their London sites. And then they pulled it and said, sorry, we can't do that anymore. Here's a voucher. You know. So I've experienced that, which is fine. I bought some rum. Um but it's funny, isn't it? You know, just my little micro experience is is a great case study for how brewdog operate or operated. So my view on greenwashing is it's misleading communication, it's exaggerating positives while downplaying the negatives. And I think if we look at this in the round, that is exactly what has happened here.

SPEAKER_00 27:59

It sounds like this is just like any other successful company where they get a huge buzz around them. Uh, it's a new product, it's a new way of doing things, way of business. But actually, all it really is is marketing in its purest form, and they just have decided to use some of these in inverted commas punk principles and also some environmental principles to create a buzz around the company to make it grow, which we've seen a million times over with other companies trying to talk about how different they are to everyone else. But fundamentally, when you look at their operations and now uh the state of the business, they're just the same as everybody else, really. There isn't much in the core of how they've run the business that's any different.

SPEAKER_01 28:53

And just to balance this out, look, there was a genuine desire for change. The project funded rewilding, and there's no way the public money was enough. So they will have definitely put their hands in their pockets and done some themselves. And as I said at the start, we said it was inspiring. You know, we kept talking about it, we kept referencing it as the kind of organization that we found interesting, albeit a lot has changed, obviously, in the last five years. But for me, some of the unforgivable things, things like saying you're going to sequester 550,000 tons of carbon in a year and being quite public with that, and then it turns out to be a million over a hundred years, is just unforgivable. That's just basic, you know, basic science, basic maths. You should know that going in and you should make sure you're not presenting it in any other way. Just to close the story on this forest, as I said at the start, it was sold in October 2025. And for me, this is the biggest, biggest frustration. Brands cannot be certain of their future. And they take on projects like this that are huge projects that only work if you look at them over decades. If you're going to take the carbon sequestering from this project, you have to be in it at least 10 years. And here we are five years later, and they've sold it. Blue Dog is not secure enough to commit and do the right things by this forest. And they have just posted losses of 37 million pounds. And there are many, many, many companies who say they're doing something absolutely amazing for the planet, and then find a few years later that they're not doing so well, and they ditch that thing. They get all the marketing, they get all the buzz, they get all the pros, and none of us realize that they've sold it and ditched it at the end of its life, as I didn't. And I'm an e, you know, I'm an equity holder and I didn't know they'd sold this forest. The good news here is it was sold to Oxygen Conservation, which is a company that appears to be a group of very wealthy rewilding enthusiasts who have bought up a load of land, I think, off companies who are like, well, we don't want to do this anymore. It's too difficult. So this sounds better to me, and they have said they have a plan to continue the peatland restoration and woodland creation. And my understanding is uh but they have massively ramped up that uh that planting in a very positive message that really feels like it was signed off by a brew dog marketing team. Please don't sue me for libel. I don't know if that's true. The CEO of Oxygen Conservation said, we were blown away by the job that had been done, far better than we expected. No woodland creation or environmental restoration project is without its challenges, but genuinely we were astounded about the quality to which the estate's been delivered. Definitely think Nick from Parkwatch Scotland would have something to say about that. And I'm sure he does. I haven't read his latest blog. So the Lost Forest is still there today, trees are growing, it is a very real venture. But the debate around it and how we think about corporate climate promises continues. And in an era where, in my view, climate action is urgent, can we believe companies when they set out to do things that really only benefit over a very, very long period of time? How do we take that long-term view? And how do we tell the difference, I guess, between genuine progress and just some pretty clever marketing. Additions and corrections. Robbie, the Welsh have been out in force responding to you. Oh, really? I've missed this. What the Binfluencers don't know is the Welsh might have been out for you a lot more because this is episode 81 where you discuss um Welsh recycling rates, and I had to cut so much out of that because you'd sort of said, here's the top five Welsh areas recycling rates, and then you went, What about cities? Cardiff. And of course, you'd mentioned Swansea as a top five, and I thought we are going to get absolutely crucified if we say Swansea isn't a city. So what the influencers don't know is the amount of editing and the amount that's on the cutting room floor. Oh, you're looking after me. So if you wonder why Cardiff wasn't mentioned, it had to be cut out. Unfortunately, this one I couldn't correct without doing something really weird. Um, because you said that Wales was third in the world for recycling, which was certainly true in the older rankings, but the latest has placed them second. Really? Who've they jumped ahead of then? Robbie. This is so funny. Episode one of Talking Rubbish. Okay, you did exactly the same thing, and we were talking about collection rates, and you went, Well, there was a third in the world, and I just and I can't remember if it made the episode or not. I haven't listened back, but I went, probably they're second, and you re-recorded it. And so you have got third in your mind as like so annoying. It's a core memory for you, you can't break it.

SPEAKER_00 33:25

Do you know why it's core memory? Because once someone told me that they were first in the UK, second in Europe, and third in the world. And that's such a memorable thing. So you're right, I have got a core memory that I'm just struggling to update.

SPEAKER_01 33:42

Yeah, so you are super leapt ahead of, but actually, I think it's a change in the rankings. If I remember rightly, when they were third, I think first was Germany, and I can't remember who was second. But now they're second, Austria is first. You might think it's easy to work out world rankings, but every country reports recycling slightly differently. Some include like incinerated bottom ash is a good example. Where in England, in the UK, I think, we include the ash out the bottom as part of the metal recycling rates when there's metal in there. Other countries won't do that or might do something a bit more. And so it there's an environmental consultancy based in Bristol called Unomia who standardise all the countries and say, okay, this one we need to bring this bit down, and this one we need to bring this bit up. And that's how they work out the world rankings. It's actually quite hard to work out who's beating who when it comes to recycling. I also had a message this week from Liz, and this is possibly one of the things that has made me laugh the most that we received. And I said, I have to include it. So this is again following episode 81 where we put contact lenses in, is rubbish or not. Liz messaged me as she felt her Instagram was targeting her. Um, she actually felt this is from kind of building up the aluminium ball, you know, because she'd been telling her husband we need to build up the aluminium to bigger than a um tennis ball. This Instagram account is called Aisha the Contact Ball, and it is someone who is posting daily building a contact lens ball until it's the size of a basketball.

unknown 35:08

Really?

SPEAKER_01 35:10

Yes. As we're recording this, it's like day 155, I think, 156, and it is about the size of a Brussels sprout. And and it looks a lot like a Brussels sprout. Slightly green, looks like it's got lots of leaves. This account has over a hundred thousand followers, including us now. They follow one account, which is Lens Direct. Now, Lens Direct only have 11,000 followers, so I just wonder how annoyed they are that an account balling up their rubbish, their product as rubbish, has 10 times the followers.

SPEAKER_00 35:45

Oh, that's amazing. What are they gonna do with it when it gets to the size of a basketball? Just go out and play basketball. Yeah, bounce well, I think.

SPEAKER_01 35:58

We'd like to take a moment to thank our sponsor, EcoSurety, who are on a mission to rid the world of unnecessary packaging. They help brands navigate the tricky world of extended producer responsibility, but that is not all. They also collaborate on some incredible recycling projects and consumer awareness campaigns for those tough to recycle materials. If you're an organization looking to make smarter packaging choices, check them out at ecosurety.com. So, as always, if you want to help us grow, the best thing you can do is tell your friends and family about us, but also you could leave us a review. And if you do that, you can be Robbie's review of the week.

SPEAKER_00 36:29

And this one comes in via Apple. It's a five-star review from Waste Warrior83. And here's a tip about how to get on Robbie's review of the week. Mention Robbie in your review. So here it comes educational and entertaining. This podcast is a breath of fresh air. I'm a fellow Waste Warrior and I'm busy catching up on all the episodes. I really enjoy the lightheartedness of what could be a rather dull topic. As a South African immigrant, I also love Robbie's impersonations of the accent. I have so many rubbish or not questions, but we'll catch up on all the episodes to check they haven't been covered. Please keep it up. I've even got my kids hooked to listening during the school run.

SPEAKER_01 37:12

You can follow us at rubbishpodcast. You can email talkingrubbishpodcast at gmail.com or you can WhatsApp us and also join our Discord. It's the easiest way to engage with us and listeners of the show. The link to all those things are in the show notes. This item has been requested quite a lot. This is plastic tree guards that you put around a tree while it's growing to keep it safe. It's amazing how many people email about tree guards. I think because people see them when they're out on a walk and it's just a very visual rubbish or not. Somewhere between 14 and 24 million tree guards are used in the UK every year. I'm assuming the Lost Forest used quite a few in the planting of trees. Have this felt very apt to save tree guards for this specific episode. Robbie, are they rubbish or not?

SPEAKER_00 38:09

Oh gosh, I think we're gonna have to go with rubbish. Okay. The problem is that if no one removes them at the right point, they either fragment and turn into microplastics or macro plastics to be honest. They're probably quite large fragments as well as small ones too. Or the tree grows into it, you know, and then you really can't get it out because there's plastic all stuck in the trunk of the tree. Or both things happen. So I would say on the whole, they are rubbish. However, that said, if you manage to get these generally plastic uh tree guards away in time, I'm sure there are recycling schemes out there, ways that you could put them in a hard plastics recycling, but it's so extremely specialist that that's just not happening, basically.

SPEAKER_01 39:01

So I'm going with rubbish. And they talk about alternatives to plastic, don't they? So combustible, biodegradable ones. And again, you've got a same sort of issue that just leaving them out in the open is not going to cause them to break down in the way you want them to. So they might be home combustible, which means they need to be in a home compost heap, they might be industrially combustible, which means they need to be taken back. But just leaving them around a tree, they're just breaking down like normal plastic. They're not going to do anything differently.

SPEAKER_00 39:27

Yeah, and I was talking to a friend who's actually works in forestry. He was a tree surgeon and then uh was part of the head of trees at one of these major arboretums in the UK. And he said that they've trialed alternatives to plastic or bioplastics and things like cardboard. He had uh sheep's wool. Uh, there was even the cashew nut one, to which I was sort of like, that sounds pretty expensive. Cashew nuts aren't cheap, uh, but it's actually the shell resin um from the cashew nuts. He said, While they will they do seem to degrade, they're like natural, they don't actually protect the tree enough from the deers grazing or the squirrels uh nibbling on the leaves. So he was sort of said that really there's nothing out there that he's used that's a better alternative than the plastic one, which to be fair, does really protect the tree itself. So his suggestions were you can kind of cluster the planting and have like a sacrificial thorn on the outside that deters the deer. You can overplant as brewdog did, they lost 50% of them. I don't think that was necessarily deliberate, uh, but that's weird because you're kind of paying for sacrificial trees. Or again, as you mentioned, um with the uh with the brewdog forest, you can manage those animals that are potentially nibbling away at the trees. I think he did also say that you can use plastic, but you really have to be absolutely on it to make sure you give the tree room to grow and collect them up to recycle at the end, and then you've got to be doing it and using enough of them to go and find a supplier who's gonna granulate it and actually recycle it. So I think it's uh I think it's a very difficult situation to know exactly what to do.

SPEAKER_01 41:21

Got a philosophical question for you, Robbie. If a tree is planted in the forest with a single use plastic tree guard, and that single use plastic tree guard lives with it for like 10 years, let's say, before you remove it, is it single use?

SPEAKER_00 41:36

Only if there's someone to see it at the end of its life. Um it is single use, isn't it? I mean it's uh it's a single use for a long time. What is the definition of single use? I suppose it's it's depends on short-term single use, is uh something that I've heard as a terminology to kind of explain this phenomenon of you're only using it once, but you're using it for ten years. So it seems like quite a worthwhile use of plastic, so to speak.

SPEAKER_01 42:08

So this is long-term single use. I guess the tree is using it day day after day after day after day. So I get that was the that's the argument, isn't it? It's not, you know, it's not like a can that you're just drinking out of and going, oh, I've used it and it's done. It's um the tree is using it all the time.

SPEAKER_00 42:25

The tree has used it 3,650 times. Exactly. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 42:31

This is some brew dog level marketing going on here.

SPEAKER_00 42:35

Oh gosh, I do not believe in any of that.

SPEAKER_01 42:38

I'm sticking with yes, it is single use. Okay, cool. It was just a yeah, I didn't have an opinion either way. Um I think, as I said, BIMFluencers have written in about tree guards quite a lot, and I think this is the longest between an email being received and it being mentioned on the podcast. Oh no. Because John emailed me all the way back. Well, you say oh no, but it shows that I'm attentive. And even if you email me back in October 2024, as John has done, I will remember. So uh I hope you're still listening, John. October 2024 was very early. We'd only been going for two months. So uh yes, apologies that it's taken us so long to get to tree guards. But John was saying he helped at a nature reserve down the road, which used to be an old quarry, and there were lots of tree guards from planting that had happened 25 years ago. They'd planted 15,000 trees in this nature reserve, and he is removing and disposing of the plastic tree guards. So he contacted the council, which was High Peak Borough Council, and they said, Thank you for your inquiry with regards to recycling of plastic tree guards. Our recycling officer has confirmed that they should not go in your recycling bin. However, they can be recycled at your local household waste recycling centre. So you could take them back there. He did mention a company called Chewbacks. So Chubex are a major supplier of plastic tree guards. They have 25 drop off points. My nearest I had a look was down the M5 near Tiverton. So probably what, an hour and a half drive. To get to it. So you could drop the tubes off there, or they do offer doorstep collection, but that is at a cost. So there's a couple of options there, should you wish to use that. We also had an email from Katie, who is a Woodland officer and co-hosts a podcast called Sustainability. It's a nice name, isn't it? Asking whether we could cover tree guards. And uh this morning on my walk in, I listened to their episode to try and just get a little bit more info and the things I pulled out from their episode. So thank you, Katie and Mike, who also co-host that. A lot of tree planting schemes require you to use tree guards. And we've experienced that. We've done lots of tree planting, and we've always, as part of the funding, um, been required to use tree guards. One of the things it does is it helps to find the trees. I've done this where I've planted, you know, a thousand trees, and then you look at and go, cool, I've done nothing. Whereas if you have the tree guard, you it looks amazing. So they were saying like councils use that so that people understand that planting has happened. So councils are like, we're planting loads of trees, but unless you have the tree guard, people don't see it. Uh so that was quite interesting. And quite a lot of trees don't actually need tree guards and they don't help them that much because they get quite warm within the tree guard, they get lots of moisture, it doesn't actually help them grow. Um, but for ease, it has become the default. And certainly for um for a lot of these schemes, the grant funding is available if you use a tree guard. A lot of times the grant funding will say if you're going to use a tree guard, you have to remove it at the end of its life. But I mean, who's checking that you did that 10 years down the line? Robbie, I'd like to end with a fact on trees that always astonishes me. When I say think of an analogy for a big number, or think of a metaphor for a big number. I don't know if it's a metaphor or an analogy. Which one is it? Anyway, what would you say? So, like for example, grains of sand on planet Earth. You know, what would be your analogy when you think of a big number?

SPEAKER_00 45:51

Um I was gonna say fish in the ocean, but that's probably not a good one anymore, is it? Let's think more galactic. Atoms in the universe.

SPEAKER_01 46:01

Less galactic. Uh tr trees on planet earth. Yes, that's one half of this equation. The other half is stars in our galaxy. Which do you think there are more of? More stars in the galaxy or trees on planet Earth.

SPEAKER_00 46:12

Is that the question? Correct.

SPEAKER_01 46:14

That's the question.

SPEAKER_00 46:15

Do we is this a definite answer or a philosophical question?

SPEAKER_01 46:19

Yeah, I think so. No, I think it's a definite answer. Stars. I'm surprised you did that, because obviously by asking the question, it's gonna be trees, isn't it? But it is significantly different. There are a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way in our galaxy. Hundred billion. There are approximately three trillion trees on planet Earth. Wow. Isn't that just such a good fact? There's more trees on planet Earth than there are stars in our galaxy. Rubbish news. My news this week is that Wales have been granted an exclusion from the UK Internal Market Act, which sounds really boring, but is actually really important.

SPEAKER_00 47:00

This is the kind of stuff that I talk about as the policy guy. This should have been your news, definitely. This is this is great to hear someone else struggle their way through making this sound interesting.

SPEAKER_01 47:12

So we talked about DRS before and deposit return schemes, and one of the issues with Scotland was that they wanted to include glass, but England wasn't allowing them to do that. For some reason, Wales have been allowed to do it. So Wales have been given an exemption for the Internal Market Act, which will allow them to include glass in their DRS. I think the difference here, I don't know if you've got any insight, Robbie, but it it was a non-negotiable for Wales. So Wales were saying we already have high recycling rates, we're already better than you lot, DRS needs to go above and beyond what you're planning. We want to include glass. And they were saying, if you don't let us include glass, we are not doing DRS. We don't need it, we don't want it. And that would have created huge market issues if Wales didn't have a DRS that England did, because you might have people in Wales cross the bridge, overturn their bottles to get a deposit back, and then jump back over the bridge again. So we need this to be unified as a scheme. The risk was that Wales was saying we're not doing it. And I think that strength and that kind of we are this is a non-negotiable means that the UK government has had to give in really and let them have this exemption. Whereas for Scotland, I think there was less strength. Is that fair to say?

SPEAKER_00 48:21

Yeah, so it was really that what Wales said was in the original consultation, glass was always in. Then the British government for England rode back on it and said, Oh no, we've uh decided that we were wrong the first time round when we said we'd include glass. We don't think we should include it anymore, it's too expensive. And Wales just simply sort of said, No, we're just holding the line to what we got from the public consultation and what we first agreed on as the four nations. And they're just, you know, it's a sort of hill to die on, so to speak, and it sounds like they've got their way.

SPEAKER_01 48:54

So there will be a four-year transition period for glass. Um and I think we said this before the podcast. Basically, this means glass bottles are not going to have a deposit applied, but the reverse vending machines will be designed to accept glass. So, in practice, I suspect for four years, people will just continue with curbside because there's no deposit applied. Are you really going to take heavy glass back to the supermarket? People will just keep using curbside. But in four years' time, a deposit will start being applied for glass and a system will be set up to accept glass.

SPEAKER_00 49:21

My news this week is good news for increasing recycle content in packaging. The Food Standards Agency, which is the UK regulator who approves any direct contact with food, the materials that we use to package them and things. They do it for all materials. But the government's announced that this FSA Food Standards Agency will act as what they call a competent authority for approving the use of recycled plastic in food contact that gets exported to Europe. So industry is desperately trying to show that it isn't just a HDP milk bottle or PET soft drinks bottle that can have recycled content included in it. And the EU essentially need assurance from these competent authorities outside of the EU that they're going to maintain the standards that the EU expect. And that's what UK companies are going to need to do if they want access to the European market. So the FSA have already started inspecting and auditing UK recycling facilities and trying to support this ability to export their plastics to be used in packaging. And the one issue is that you know compliance with these rules is very complicated. We all want recycled plastics to be used in food contact packaging, provided that they meet these really strict food safety regulations. The last thing we want is migration, um, chemical migration or contamination into the food itself. You know, that would be a real big problem.

SPEAKER_01 51:01

Rubbish question. I posted about food waste collections on social media. We posted quite a lot about it. Range of responses as always. But we did keep getting the same comment. We got it a few times. So the person I've picked for this comment is Mac McCarthy 607. If only there was a way to shred all your food and wash it down the sink. So lots of people talking about food macerators. So this is where you have a shredding device in your uh in your sink. I just think of it from like horror films and final destination, things like that. I'm sure they had one in one of those. The question today, Robbie, is is it acceptable to shred food waste for it to go down the sink?

SPEAKER_00 51:42

Oh, I just don't think we've got the infrastructure in the UK, do we, to deal with all of that food waste being ground up and uh going through our sewerage system. Also, I've got a net, you know, that little sink, what's it called? Sink sieve thing to deliberately stop food from going down. I mean, maybe that's because the particles are too big. And quite often that's a lot of what ends up in my food waste caddy is the stuff that comes out of uh that little that little sieve.

SPEAKER_01 52:14

Okay, so you've given your opinion that you don't think it's necessarily what we should be doing. Let me give you the marketing paragraph from Insynchorator's website. Uh they are one of the companies that produces these macerators, Insyncorator. They say composting is a great way to tackle food waste. Correct. That's the talking rubbish, correct? And where composting isn't practical, a food waste caddy may be the next best option. Yes, this is good so far. However, smells, leaks, and flies can be a problem. No. No, they're not. We disagree. But let's, you know, let's pretend they are. A food waste disposer offers a clean, fast, and odour-free alternative, grinding scraps instantly and keeping your kitchen fresh. Quick, easy, and convenient that disposes advanced technology, finely grinds food waste and safely disposes of it directly down the sink, just like wastewater. So has their marketing paragraph changed your mind?

SPEAKER_00 53:05

Absolutely not. They're really just playing on that food waste is yucky, it's dirty and smelly and keep your kitchen fresh. It's like so immature. Does anyone actually believe that?

SPEAKER_01 53:19

Yeah, I completely agree. I th I always think food waste is okay as long as it's done weekly as councils are being forced to do now. But I always assumed if products are for sale, like the insyncorator, they must be allowed, right? They must be okay. Waste water companies must agree with them. This appears to not be the case. I have been scouring water company websites, and none of them recommend food waste going down the sink. And I also reached out to my contact in the water industry, who reminded me that her mantra, and she says it to us often as a group of friends, is only the three P's down the sink or toilet. That is pee-poo paper. Only those three. That's her rule. And Water UK had a statement on this where it said Water UK does not recommend the use of food waste disposal units in any situation, domestic or commercial. Just as a side note, on this post, moving off uh macerators, on this post, we also had a number of people who said they do not have food waste. And I just wanted to remind, as I have reminded all of them, you can put tea bags, bones, veg peelings, fruit rinds in your food waste bin. And I think most people will have some version of that in their lives. Residual rubbish. You're just shaking your head from the last bit.

SPEAKER_00 54:35

I cannot believe that people think they have zero food waste. They eat absolutely everything. They've never once had a piece of cheese go mouldy at the back of the fridge. They've never they've they eat ever they eat the skin of a pineapple, these people.

SPEAKER_01 54:54

Some people did comment saying, I've got teenagers. And I felt maybe that was a good summary of it. I still don't think teenagers eat tea bags. Okay, back to the task at hand. Residual rubbish. That is something that has happened to us this week that has made us feel like an emoji. In episode 79, I mentioned that Latural was my favourite podcast. Imagine my surprise the other day when they had a question on the show about carrier bags.

unknown 55:18

Really?

SPEAKER_01 55:20

And it really made me laugh. It was so funny. So if you listen to Latural, I'm about to spoil an episode from a few weeks ago. But this is a story from 2019 in Vancouver, and it was a grocery chain called East West Market, and they decided to shame customers who didn't bring their own bag with them by printing embarrassing messages on the single-use plastic carrier bags. So the messages included things like Into the Weird Adult Video Emporium, Wart Ointman Wholesale, and the Colon Care Co-op. Oh, very good. Unfortunately for them, as you can imagine, they did become collectible and customers wanted to get them. And it was a bit of like you walked around Vancouver with a colon care co-op bag, and people were like, nice. The guy did say, Unfortunately, they've become quite popular, which is good for us. Oh, God, you can make a trend out of anything, can't you? You can, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 56:18

Uh, and my residual rubbish uh for this week is oh, what did it make me? It was a smile, but also a face palmness. I was on the telly, uh BBC Breakfast, to be precise, talking about a residents association, Chewesbury, that wanted the council to do more about the bins that were cluttering up the pavements in their pretty town. Um, fortunately, I didn't embarrass myself like I did on Sky News with an ill-judged sip of tea. If you know, then you know. If anything, I got great feedback, um, specifically from my sister and a few other friends, on my use of the word streetscape to describe bins on pavements uh getting in the way of pushchairs and wheelchairs. Apparently that's not a word you hear very commonly. It was the same day as our live event at Packaging Innovation. So the BBC dispatched a film crew to meet me at a location of my choosing, which uh all sounds very glamorous, but in reality, I got up at 5 a.m. to drive to the outskirts of Soly Hull, where I was filmed for about 10 minutes on the side of a busy jewel carriageway. So it was uh far from as glamorous as it sounds. It was really strange being able to hear the presenters but not see them. So you've got to like look down the barrel of the camera and you can hear these sort of famous people. Sally Nugent was one of them. And I'm pretty sure there was some sarcasm in her tone when she said fascinating as part of her sign-off. Um and by the way, they love the podcast name, which made me chuckle within the first few seconds of the interview.

SPEAKER_01 57:53

I had a few influencers messaging me going, it's very on brand for Robbie to laugh as the first thing he does. It was so funny. Talking rubbish. Oh, I love the podcast name, and then just to hear it is great. I loved it.

SPEAKER_00 58:10

I'll be honest, it was genuine. If you look back closely, there is still some room for improvement. This is the face palm because unbeknown to me, and has been pointed out by a few people, I was on slightly uneven ground. So my one shoulder is lower than the other. And someone commented, Are you taller on your right side than your left? Uh, and someone else told said to me, Uh, I always knew you had sloopy shoulders. So I look like uh I've got a bit of a sort of lobsided um uh posture. So, room for improvement for the next TV appearance. I hope it's not too long before they invite me back on again.

SPEAKER_01 58:48

So the time this episode goes out, Robbie, you uh will have had your second BBC Breakfast appearance. We are in the moments away from you going back up to do it again. So best of luck for that. And let's be honest, I like the radio stuff because that's like being a podcaster. You like the TV stuff. So we've got a really nice split. I go on Radio 4, you go on BBC Breakfast, but together we are talking rubbish to the UK. Absolutely. As always, thank you all for listening. Thank you for the reviews and engagement. We love getting the opportunity to do this podcast. Join our Discord, follow us on social media at rubbishpodcast. You can email talkingrubbishpodcast at gmail.com or you can WhatsApp us. And everything we have discussed today can also be found on our link tree. The details of all those things can be found in our show notes. Thank you so much for listening, and there's nothing left for me to say other than see you next win day. Bye.

SPEAKER_00 59:42

Bye.