Live on Bloomberg TV

00:00This week a Green Magazine special featuring the dirtiest bankers while Wall Street says it's heading for net zero who is still making money from fossil fuels. These big banks make a good amount of money lending to oil companies gas companies pipelines and Wells Fargo. They have been right at the top. What keeps you up at night. Sculptor Maya Lin tells us about her climate nightmare. It was a natural focus of mine to emphasize how critically precarious our planet is becoming due to loss and trapping. Tesco is recycling. We find out what your supermarket really does with all that soft plastic. Most people have no idea what happens to to their waste once they put it in in a in a band or a trash can. And that's especially true of plastic. From Bloomberg's world headquarters in New York I'm Kay Reliance and this is Bloomberg Green. This week we're focusing on the latest print edition of Bloomberg Green. The Next Solar System the world has already hit one trillion watts of solar energy output but it's highly concentrated in developed nations who have relied on subsidies and cheap production in China to shift to renewable power. How can we make sure the next trillion watts gets to those who need it most. In this edition of Bloomberg Green we'll delve into this story by looking at the architectural movement that's making houses with net negative emissions around the world. Our reporter Jess Shenkman draws the connection between investment and inequality in England's capital city. Sculptor and artist Maya Lin tells us her deepest fears when it comes to the climate crisis. And we investigate why one of Wall Street's least putting banks is still wanting money to oil and gas companies. First we'll focus in on the United Kingdom. In recent months supermarkets across the UK have put soft plastic deposit points outside their stores. Tesco the nation's biggest supermarket brand even ran an ad campaign saying recycling soft plastics shouldn't be hard. But Bloomberg received a tip that instead of recycling this material Tesco was in fact shipping it to Eastern Europe where it was being burned in cement kilns. Our reporter Kit Shell. I'll put electronic trackers on some of his waste to find out where all his plastic really ends up. Most people have no idea what happens to their waste once they put it in a bin or a trash can. And that's especially true of plastic. It just goes away. You know it's collected by a van or it's deposited at a recycling point. And then it goes into this hidden ecosystem that very few people have oversight of. Tesco makes a big play of reuse as one of its efforts to help prevent plastic pollution. I had I had three digital trackers placed in a wrappers or bags put into the Tesco boxes which said they were against recycling them. And then I had to wait a few days to see where they went. And yeah they started to move within three or four days of me dropping them off and I could see them moving by truck. One of them went to East London and then sort of disappeared into what looked like the banks of the Thames. It may have been lost. It may have been shaken loose. I really don't know what happened to it but the two other ones took a pretty clear path which was to go to these these Tesco logistic centres you know on the outskirts of London. And then they both headed for the same port which is Hartwich International. And from there they went quiet for a few hours. And the next time I saw them was when they were in the Netherlands and heading east. There are some kinds of plastic that are relatively easy to recycle and those can be sold on the open market profitably. Things like clear plastic bottles are made from selling called T and that's good recycling material you can be used to over and over again. Clear plastic wrap. As long as it doesn't have a label or colour or no heat retardants in it is good recycling material. You can you can melt that down and reprocess it. But as anyone who goes to the supermarket to buy food will know hardly any of the plastic products that we're sold are just clear wrap. They have labels on. They will normally be coming into contact with food and all that means that it's not all the same stuff. That's different grades of plastic and you can't put all that material together into one bulk loads and then melt in recycling. What you'd get if you did that is unusable. Terrible quality plastic. So what you need to do is separate it. They didn't stay long in the Netherlands. They passed through it very quickly and then they went on a German motorway and zipped across the country in the space of sort of 12 to 24 hours. And finally they crossed the border into Poland. And I could see that both digital trackers although this happened on different days ended up at precisely the same spot. What we found in Jelena Gora was a long industrial building a warehouse. It must have been as long as a football field or longer. There were you know there were hundreds of tons of material just sitting out there waiting to be sent somewhere else. There are two main reasons why a lot of plastic waste is exported. The first is that disposing of plastic in a developed economy like the UK or Germany or the US is expensive. But there are also lots of government incentives that are designed to make recycling a more attractive proposition. You get credits from the governments for exporting material for recycling. We know that some kinds of plastic are easy to use. The problem that the world has to grapple with is what happens to the plastic. What happens to the stuff that simply isn't economic to use again. So what if my digital trackers was inside a lentil puff wrapper like a snack wrapper. I was very keen to see where that one went. And I saw it on the move again about 24 hours after it had been sorted. You learned the corner and it headed east across Poland to a tiny town called It's Over. And I found out there that it had been sent to a company called Stella Park. And they have a facility there that can turn soft plastic back into soft plastic. But they also have a way to dispose of the plastic they can't use. They have an onsite incinerator which provides heat and energy for their factory. The tracker inside the Tesco plastic bag stopped pinging when it arrived in July NIKKEI. After a few days I assumed there'd been shredded or destroyed or trampled on or taken. And then when I got back from Poland I was surprised to see it. Its location had changed and it gave its location as southern Turkey. Unfortunately Turkey as a destination for waste has huge problems and a lot of the plastic that goes to turkey ends up being illegally disposed of. The tracker ended up at this industrial estates a sort of CAC quite remote one. There was no sort of. There was no plastic recycling company nearby that we could identify. So we were confused as to why it was there and know we sent a journalist to the grounds to drive out and visit this site. What she found outside a warehouse just just left in a big pile was tons and tons of waste from plastic waste from around Europe. The facility itself wasn't a recycling facility. It was obviously just left there before we moved somewhere else. Tesco is a very large supermarket chain. It's the UK's largest by far. It makes an enormous amount of profit every year. And it also has this incredible logistics infrastructure in place. And if this entity can't properly dispose of plastic you know what. Hope is there for a little cash strapped town council that we want to dispose of our plastic by the kerbside. Ketchup out there with insight into what supermarkets are really doing with our recycling now. Let's focus in on the English capital London. Last summer Europe's financial hub was brought to a near standstill by torrential rain. Now with a changing climate and a growing population. London faces a dual crisis. Let's bring in our reporter Jess Shenkman now who has been digging into this issue. So just how are climate change and housing interlinked in London. As you mentioned last year there were huge floods across most of London's boroughs right in the middle of summer when nobody was expecting it. Now that this kind of flooding is called surface water flooding. So we tend to think flooding is caused by you know it's not rain that comes along. The rivers overflow anyone near the river. They get hit by flooding. Surface water flooding is really different in the last 20 years. People start to realize that it's a serious threat to the city. So what happens is that because cities become more more concreted over when it rains the water just words really really fast into drains. And those drains overflow because London's drainage system was built when Queen Victoria still sat on the throne for a city of four million people. Now there's over nine million people so it just can't cope. The water comes back up and causes flooding. So that's a major problem. What we look at is how that interacts with the housing crisis. So London also as you know it's it's one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in. Rents have risen by something like 25 percent in some bars in the last in the last year alone. It's starting to flatline. So people are really struggling to find places to rent or even buy. So the capsules under huge pressure to build more and more homes. The mayor of London has the target for sixty six thousand new homes to be built every year. So what they're doing inevitably is trying to find new places to build and those places tend to be on floodplains. So we looked at one area in east London called Hackney Wake. It's a bit like the Meatpacking District in New York. It's formerly an industrial area and it's kind of being turned into a very hip area with lots of cool new buildings and bars and homes. And that was flooded last year in July as well. We're finding the developers are being encouraged to build on these floodplains. It can be done really well. But there were instances where it's being done very poorly as well. All right. A complex problem for the modern world. Thank you so much to our green reporter Jeff Shenkman. Now coming up Wall Street has made plenty of commitments to net zero in the last couple of years. But some bankers are still making lots of money from oil and gas. They say it's necessary. Others say it's irresponsible. So which is nearer to the truth. And the global population is expected to grow to almost 10 billion by 2050. So as well as needing more energy we'll need places for those people to live. What if there's a form of architecture that creates jobs but also slashes emissions. We'll look next at the pioneers of the passive house. This is Bloomberg Daybreak. From Bloomberg's world headquarters in New York I'm Kelly Lines and this is Bloomberg Green commercial and residential buildings account for 13 percent of all U.S. emissions. But what if there is a way to cut that number back drastically. When Maine builder Jesper Kruse began marketing a type of high efficiency home called a passive house a dozen years ago the dwellings appealed mainly to a small cohort of committed environmentalist. Today demand for passive houses is rising sharply as homeowners contend with climate driven extreme weather and governments move to decarbonise buildings. Here's how crews could provide a model for both the homes and the jobs of the future. The main motivation for me to switch over to building past houses is that it's just about a product. It has all kinds of great benefits for the environment. But all the things that makes these homes really energy efficient also happens to make them comfortable. They're healthy to be and they're more resilient. When I heard about the past how standard and the promise of saving 80 to 90 percent on heating and cooling cost and 70 percent of overall energy use it. So I just thought well this is where we need to go. This is what the industry needs to go. No question. It doesn't make any sense to build the way we do now. We're currently twelve people. We built two to three residential homes a year. Some light commercial we've seen probably close to CAC tenfold in interest in the last couple of years. A passive house is a home that is built to pass the House standard which is German developed energy standard which is all related to how much energy the House is using and the tightness of the home. So every single room we built is kind of rooted in that building science and they all have the principles of a passing house in and don't all reach the pass a standard but you can still build a home that's really efficient and has all these benefits. So this project is going to have the principles of the past house. If you are looking up in the construction you didn't see much older super insulation and you know thermal breaching avoiding foam which as you can see how we have this T.J. ISE. We're not having like traditional wooden raft that goes all the way through the building. We just haven't spent on this project. We're using cellulose insulation. So it's basically recycled. There's trade that we enslavement. So it's of those products. It has a low carbon footprint. It's better for the environment. And tightness is really important. If when you're looking on the outside you can see that before we even started building anything we had already put down strips membrane. When you're building a passive house compared to a traditional home the way that it changes the process is front loading the design process. You really want to hire now the vast majority of details. If we are talking about environmental benefits you definitely want to look at the overall energy consumption of the house. But even more important is looking at the materials that you're using within the house because some products have to be energy intensive to produce whereas other products have a very low carbon footprint. In the beginning when we started building it was tough to get certain materials in limited window manufactures that make like triple pane windows. Now most of the materials and the technology is freely available. If you're building a single family home I would say it's probably about 10 percent more to build it compared to a traditionally built home. If you're building like big commercial buildings or multi unit apartment building standards probably break even. It does cost much more to build this way. I think the reason we're not seeing an explosive growth in North America. The thing selling cheap that we want to do stuff differently and change in the way you operate your business. The industry is really slow to move. So I was probably among the first 50 percent in the United States. Let's switch things up now and dig into one of our big financial stories in this edition of Bloomberg Green magazine. Despite the banking industry pledges to go green over the last few years that hasn't stopped lenders from cashing in on oil and gas. Max Abelson and Hannah Levitt have written about how Wells Fargo one of the last Wall Street banks to name a net zero target is playing the long game when it comes to the green transition. So Max just talk to me about that stance. Wells Fargo is taking here. Absolutely. Well one thing that's helpful about talking about Wells Fargo stance is it's essentially Wall Street's stance. Talking about Wells Fargo is really a way of talking about the whole American finance industry and the global finance industry right now because something has changed on Wall Street over the last really it's over last year. But you can say the year you know last year too if you wanted which is that you know historically on Wall Street bankers and lenders and people who provide capital to the fossil fuel industry you know if you go back a couple of years certainly if you go back five or 10 years ESG would essentially random three letters. You know you would not hear it very often. And the way that a guy named Dan Pickering a real veteran of the energy industry described it to us is like you know if people were lending to oil and gas industry their attitude was like yeah yeah I'm lending to oil and gas industry. That's our job in the last year or two. What my colleague Hannah Levitt and I found is that the big banks essentially all in unison although it was over different different different time periods all basically said we get it. We don't want to contribute to the problem over the grand scheme of things. We want to we want to go net zero which means essentially hearing our emissions by the middle of the century. And that creates tension which is what our story is about because these big banks make a good amount of money lending to oil companies gas companies pipelines and Wells Fargo open over the last year. And over the last five years since the Paris agreements they have been right at the top. Well let's talk about that lending. At what scale to the oil and gas industry are we realistically talking about. We're talking a lot of money. So I don't know what you would think is a lot of money but in the last year or so 20 21 Wells Fargo alone was the runner on about twenty billion dollars worth of global fossil fuel ones. So not not to bore our audience but just be very of. Her syndicated loans are syndicated loans and we're looking at book runners. But you know just to be fair to Wells Fargo and to give to give viewers a sense of context you know companies not just oil and gas companies but court corporations throughout America. They make their money. You know they could raise equity. Obviously they can borrow these loans but they also issue bonds if you want to look at bonds. I think J.P. Morgan will be ahead if you want to look at loans. Wells Fargo will be had. But JP Morgan is not not far behind. And you know it's it's a matter of what when we switch to Wells Fargo and we ask them how they view how they do this. Scott Warner who is essentially the head of their energy were saying look you know the energy transition is not it's not flipping a light switch. It's not going from fossil fuels one day to green the next. They want to be part of the green transition. They say you know but in the meantime there is going to be pressure on them from the government from non-profits from environmentalist to you know get with the program sooner rather than later. Well that's something we talk a lot about on this show. It's called a transition for a reason. It requires transitioning. All right. Really interesting to get a lens into this. Thank you so much to Bloomberg News reporter Max Abramson. Now coming up this part of a new series for Glimmer Green magazine. Sculptor and artist Maya Lin talks to us about how climate inspires her work and crucially what keeps her up at night. This is Bloomberg Daybreak. From Bloomberg's world headquarters in New York I'm Kailey Leinz and this is Bloomberg Green. Maya Lin is an architect designer and sculptor best known for her design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. and the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery Alabama. But as well as marking U.S. history much of her work takes inspiration from environmental themes. Her 20 21 installation Ghost Forest won her The Wall Street Journal magazine's Innovators Award for its haunting depiction of the impacts of climate change. As part of a new series for Bloomberg Green we asked her what keeps you up at night. Sometimes art has the power and capacity to get us to feel something almost instantaneously. We can think of climate change as an abstract threat. Art can present it in a new way that's gonna get you to stop and rethink the problem a little bit. My interest and concern and caring for the environment has been there all along. And even you go back to the very first memorial I just wanted to preserve the park. As I got more concerned about climate change it was a natural focus of mine to emphasize how critically precarious our planet is becoming due to us. The forum memorials that I've worked on before that Vietnam Civil Rights Memorial over women's table at Yale the conference project. So I thought the fifth and the final would be one I call into being. This is my entire what is missing. Library missing is unlike anything else I've ever done on the memorials. Ostensibly it started out I was going to focus on the extinction of species the fact that we're in the sixth extinction. But then I realized that a main cause of climate change emissions is land use changes and it's also the main driver for biodiversity loss. If I can get you to think about protecting species in lock step motion with reducing emissions so that we do not forget about biodiversity. I started interviewing scientists and they were we cannot just talk about what we're losing without giving you what can be done to help. So missing it is both a wakeup call. This is what we're losing. But it is also oh this is what you could do individually. This is what we need to be thinking of globally. And it starts with a very simple premise. What if a monument. What if a memorial could jump form. What if it could exist in multiple sites in multiple media around the world like Ghost Forest in Manhattan. These die outs are happening all around the world because of climate change. And all of a sudden you go from a vibrant living forest to a rust red dead forest. And on the East Coast the Pine Barrens the Atlantic cedar there are being killed off by rising seas. So we chose trees that were actually being taken out because the saltwater had come in to bring a ghost forest to downtown Manhattan. This is one of the first markets I ever made for Ghost Forest. We calculated our entire carbon footprint to go get the trees bring them back. It took three years. But as well it has to arrest you. It has to stop you. You have to feel something. Walking through a dead forest there's just a sense of of ghosts. Myelin there opening up about her biggest climate concerns. So from climate negative houses to smarter city planning and holding companies to account for their net zero goals. That's just some of the ways we can ensure the next trillion lots of energy is spent in the right place. That wraps it up for this week's special magazine edition of Bloomberg Green. You can keep the conversation going by following us on YouTube Instagram and Twitter at climate from Bloomberg's global headquarters in New York. I'm Kailey Leinz and this is Bloomberg Green.

No schedule data available.

Bloomberg Green: What Really Happens to Your Recycling?

Tesco says it's cleaning up your plastic, but where is the waste really going? In this special magazine edition of Bloomberg Green, we look at how Britain's biggest supermarket is tackling its plastic problem. Plus, sculptor Maya Lin tells us how the climate crisis is inspiring her art... and stopping her from sleeping. And: if Wall Street has pledged to hit net zero, why is it still making so much money from fossil fuels? (Source: Bloomberg)

More From Green
All episodes and clips

Bloomberg Technology
The only daily news program focused exclusively on technology, innovation and the future of business from San Francisco. Hosted by Emily Chang.
More episodes and clips