Circular Podcast with Lucy Siegle

Katie Treggiden

I’m Katie Treggiden and this is Circular, a podcast exploring the intersection of craft design and sustainability. Join me as I talk to the thinkers, doers and makers of the circular economy. These are the people who are challenging the linear take make waste model of production and consumption and working towards something better. In this series, we’re talking about waste.

Lucy Siegle 

“When I was about 16, I went to India with some friends. And we travelled through northern India, from Delhi up to Darjeeling, essentially. And on the way we came across a facility that was using child labour to make carpets. And that had a very, very profound effect on me. So it’s more of a social justice thing than an environmental thing. I wasn’t thinking at that stage about, you know, the amount of water and all of that kind of stuff. For me, it was seeing children make carpets, which sort of changed everything.”

Katie Treggiden

When Lucy Siegle agreed to appear on this podcast, I have to admit to doing a little happy dance around my kitchen. She is an independent writer and journalist in broadcast and print and her articles for The Guardian and The Observer. Along with her four books on ethical living fashion and plastics have been must-read materials as my own interest in sustainability has deepened, and more recently in the research for my book Wasted: When Trash Becomes Treasure. Lucy’s book To Die For: Is Fashion Wearing Out The World was the basis for a hit Netflix documentary, The True Cost, in which she appeared and was also the co-executive producer. She co-founded The Green Carpet Challenge with Livia Firth has a weekly slot on BBC1’s, The One Show and has worked with Emma Watson, Ellie Goulding and the UN and she does all of this with unfailing enthusiasm and good humour. If we weren’t so close in age, I would say that Lucy Segal is who I want to be when I grow up. You moved around a lot as a child. Tell me about the role of waste reuse or sustainability played in your childhood?

Lucy Siegle

Yes I did. So I went to about 15 schools, and I lived, not just in the UK, but I lived in Ireland as well, during the 1980s. And I suppose when you’re a kid, you’re not really thinking about waste and reuse. What I was always tuned into was materials. So my granddad was from Liverpool, but he retired to Chester. And he was very, very down on plastic. As a kid, I was like, really aware because you know, obviously 1980s was covered in plastic branded plastic, you know, I even had that one of those headbands with those springy bits with plastic hearts on the end and stuff like that, you know, I was a plastic age child. And he was always saying stuff like, you know, plastic is a very precious resource. It comes from oil. And I remember, you’re two young probably, but they brought out detergent dosage balls, like plastic balls, and you got one on top of your – you still get them on top of – your detergent thing. Yeah. And he thought this was absolutely obscene. Because he was like, that’s when he said, ‘Plastic is a precious resource. And people are going to have one of these dosage balls, and they’re going to lose it and they’re going to throw it away. And then the next time they’re going to buy the whole kit and caboodle again’. And I was like, ‘Oh, that’s really weird’. And then he also would never take plastic bags from the supermarket and stuff like that, which you know, in the 1980s was quite a big deal. He used to take his own bags. So I grew up – because I spent a lot of time with my grandparents – I grew up with this kind of understanding that something was going on. So it wasn’t thinking going around going, ‘Oh, I could reuse that, or blah, blah, blah.’ But I was among people who did reuse everything. And my granddad, of course, had worked for Shell Oil for many years. Right? So he knew a bit about oil. And he knew about chemistry, and he knew about the environment. And in those days, I think those guys were much more trained on the idea of ‘peak oil,’ but it come out of the Suez Crisis, you know, there was like, you know, essentially, you can’t rely on oil, because it’s going to run out. And of course, that’s not the case. What’s happened is completely different in that we need to keep locked carbon in the ground, but I think he would have got that on some sort of level. And he was also a keen sort of amateur ecologist. So although he lived in a very suburban area, he lived in Vickers Cross, which is a suburb of Chester. We used to watch a lot of garden birds. So like many people who’ve entered this industry in some formats, you know, I started with garden birds.

Katie Treggiden 

I think it’s interesting, isn’t it? I live in Cornwall and I’m surrounded by, you know, the sea and the moors and kind of gorgeous countryside. And I think I think the closer relationship you have with nature in some form, you know whether it’s a window box and a bird in the garden or the wilds of Bodmin Moor, I think the more in tune you are with your environment in some way,

Lucy Siegle

I guess so. I mean, I’m always really careful because I didn’t grow up…. You know, I moved around a lot, as you said. And sometimes I lived in very urban environments or suburban. I’m more of a suburban girl really. And I do like the burbs, I have to say, so I wasn’t like I’m not a wilderness fetishist. You know, I’m not like, ‘Oh, I’m out in nature. And I can’t see another person.’ I actually quite like people. I like people. And I like being around them. And, also, you know, I do think, you know, there is this sort of, I mean, I actually did a project on Wordsworth recently for the British Library, I was involved in their project. And, you know, I was reading Wordsworth, and I was thinking – and ‘I love Wordsworth – and I was thinking, towards the end of his life, he and Mrs. Wordsworth used to get very irritated by the amount of visitors to the lakes. And of course, they got lots of visitors to the lakes, because he was such a brilliant, successful communicator on how beautiful the lakes were. And it’s just this tension isn’t there, always, between those who are custodians and telling the story of beautiful outdoor spaces, and those who want to go and have a look. And I’m always really conscious, you know, during lockdown, I live in a really beautiful place now, but I don’t live far from London, but I live near Hampton Court, and I can look across the river and I can see Home Park. And during lockdown, we just had hordes of people who’d never been here before taking that hour exercise. And I was like, ‘Oh, it’s so great’. You know, it’s so great, because everyone’s come to see something. And not everyone felt that way. So a lot of people would be like, ‘It’s too many people. It’s awful.’ So, I think we just have to, yes, you do get a connection to nature. And that’s why it’s really, really important with young children, that they have access to outside spaces, not just access to parks, some of which are horribly managed, and not much different from a car park in all honesty, and that goes for some forests as well, I’m very sorry to say, but that they have access to, they feel like it’s theirs. And they own it even if they don’t live in it. And I think that that’s why I’m a really big fan of, you know, things like Spring Watch, and things that bring nature to everybody and make it everybody’s both problem, because I’m afraid that is the stage we’re at, but also, you know, that opportunity. And it’s really, really important that kids grow up with this idea that they could have a job that involves the planet. And it’s not just for people who were brought up in rural areas.

Katie Treggiden  

Yeah, absolutely agree. And I think it’s been really interesting, actually during lockdown to see even people who live in very urban areas, kind of connecting with nature a bit more noticing birdsong, growing their own veggies on their balcony, you know, I think all that sort of thing can be a close connection with the environment as well,

Lucy Siegle  

Totally. And also, I love the idea that people have very recently, even as part of Black Lives Matter, actually really talking a lot about container growing and balcony growing and like, you know, as a form of resilience, especially if you live in an area that is, you know, so-called ‘food deserts’, where it’s called ‘food apartheid’ in some areas. And it is, you know, what do you do if you don’t have a farmers market, or you know, a good farm shop or, you know, something nearby? You have to kind of try and grow your own. So I’ve been really like interested in all of the little tutorials on how to grow chillies or how to grow herbs, you know, it’s kind of in the last few weeks, I think there’s been a real renaissance of that kind of stuff, which is, which is really, really interesting.

Katie Treggiden  

Yeah, I think it gives people agency doesn’t know which is really that’s

Lucy Siegle  

That’s exactly the phrase, it really does. And it’s really nice to do as well, I find it quite therapeutic. Not that not that I’m saying that I’m a great grower, but I’m just looking out the window at some slightly dying.

Katie Treggiden 

So you studied drama in English at Queen Mary’s in London, and then got your first job in fashion. You mentioned your granddad and the influence he had on your awareness of plastic. But when did you start to become really interested in sustainability? Was there a single aha moment? Or was it just a sort of a slow reckoning?

Lucy Siegle  

Well, my first job was actually in textiles, and it was interiors. So it was about industry fabrics. So my first job was all around, wallpapers and textile fabrics. And I used to work for a company that had a factory in South London. So the factory was downstairs producing wallpapers, and upstairs was the kind of sales office and stuff like that. So we used to go naturally between the two – you’d always be running down to cut off different lengths of fabric and check them and blah, blah, blah. So I had this really kind of real deep interest in textiles and how they were produced. And it wasn’t from an environmental point of view, but from an ethical point of view. When I was about 16, I went to India with some friends. And we travelled through northern India, from Delhi, up to Darjeeling, essentially, and on the way, we came across a facility that was using child labour to make carpets, right. And that had a very, very profound effect on me. So it’s more of a social justice thing than an environmental thing. I wasn’t thinking at that stage about, you know, the amount of water and all of that kind of stuff. For me, it was seeing children make carpets, which sort of changed everything. So I was, you know, I ended up working in this textiles factory, and just constantly driving everyone mad with asking questions, especially when the silks came in from India, because I was, you know, like, ‘Where are they from? Who’s made them? How do you know?’ You know, I think I got a warning to stop like asking questions. You know, it was like, ‘Wow’ – it was just constant, constant constant. And I just had to understand where these imported textiles were coming from, and I was trying to follow the chain, which you can’t really do unless you’re a journalist, because who’s going to answer your questions? And obviously, if you work in an organisation, it’s much harder to discover things about it, weirdly, because people caught on to you pretty quick. And they tell you to do your job. Yeah. Which is not unreasonable at one level. So I kind of realised in a really peculiar way that I was going to have to become a journalist, right? To satiate this need to know where this stuff was coming from. So then began a very long circuitous route into trying to get to that point, well, actually, it probably happened quite quickly, in a way, because literally, no one else was interested in doing that. So it’s just a weird thing in life, sometimes you have these preoccupations. And I had that one from when I was, you know, quite young. I do remember, even through all these different schools, and all these different places I live, I always had a bit of a social justice button. So I would always be trying to raise money at break times for different charities. And to, you know, one of the reasons I went to India was because we were supposed to dig a well, in this community. When we got there, they already had a well, and we all got sick, which was a lesson in, you know, not being a gap year students and going and taking up resources in, you know, an area which didn’t have any. So, yeah, so that’s it. It was it was all from a social justice point of view, rather than an environmental perspective, those two things didn’t really come together for a bit,

Katie Treggiden  

Right. Then you went to the Observer, or Life magazine, as it was then it was

Lucy Siegle 

Life magazine. Yes, it was a big, big format, big paper magazine, really known for its groundbreaking photographic stories. And we had a picture editor called Jenny Ricketts, who’s lovely, who now I think, has a gallery in Brighton. (Hi, Jenny!) And she used to commission all these wonderful people like Zed Nelson, the photographer, and they used to do these incredible photographic repertoire stories like gun crime in America, and, you know, all these, unravelling the chain, joining the dots between stuff like poverty and the criminal justice system. And I began to realise that I wanted to join the dots. That’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to join the dots between oil and the way we live the way we live now and consumerism. So that’s where that came from. But I mean, that was you know, it’s quite hard to get into it. Because I started as an editorial assistant, I started as a temp, because I could type. And you know, I was quite good on the phone with the old chat, because in those days, all the readers used to call straight through to me. It was an amazing education. And it was so great, because you know, Observer and Guardian readers were so educated. And they used to do things like they’d ring up and they’d say, could you tell whatever economist there is in the third paragraph, that ‘decimate’ means reduced by 10%, not destroy, and you learn all this stuff. And it was like ‘God, wow!’ And then actually, I had a series of sort of very, very nice editors who kind of saw something in me because I didn’t go in there going, I’m going to be a writer. And when you did those admin jobs in those days in capitals, it would say this is not a route into journalism. Right, presumably to keep the non-Oxbridge people out?! I don’t know. So I just thought it wasn’t really something that I would be able to do. And then, you know, I just had on the magazine, we were a little bit lawless, I think, and they just kept giving me stuff and Tamsin Blanshard, who is the interiors editor, the Style Editor, she has, you know, been on the trail of ethical fashion for longer than anyone I know. And she would just give me bits to write about wallpaper and stuff like that, because she knew that I knew because I’d been in a factory producing this stuff. So she knew I knew about pattern and colour and trend and stuff like that. So that’s how I did it really.

Katie Treggiden  

So I was interested, I was having a debate with a friend about whether you were a fashion writer who writes about ethical fashion or an ethical writer who writes about fashion. So I’m interested to know, obviously, the social justice came first from what you’ve said, but fashion has become a big part of your output.

Lucy Siegle  

It’s of no interest to me, and I don’t know anything about it. No, I’m absolutely serious. So why fashion, I’ve never done a… because fashion is about textiles, for me. And textiles is where the story is, right. So I have literally no interest in fashion. As you can probably see, by looking at me, I just like I don’t know, if I’ve ever written an actual fashion story I have like, towards the beginning of my career, you know, they would you know, Tamsin or whoever would give me features to write, or Louise France, who’s now at the Times and, and they would give me features to write and I would go and do them because I wanted to learn how to be a feature writer. But I would usually do stuff where I worked in tandem with a photographer, so they had all the art, you know, they were the eyes, and they were the visual concept. And then I would interview people about their relationship with their clothing. I don’t think I’ve ever interviewed a fashion designer, I wouldn’t know what to ask them. Really. I’ve interviewed them about sustainability. Like I’ve spoken to Stella McCartney many, many times, but always about sustainability. I wouldn’t dream of asking her like about her hemlines or whatever. I don’t know, I’m not a fashion designer, I don’t really know about fashion design. So I yeah, for me, it’s all about the materials and the textiles. And that’s where the story was in terms of water usage. It’s where the story was in terms of chemicals. So you know, there’s an old saying, in journalism, follow the money, my thing was follow the oil. And that’s where I really started, like looking at the footprint of the fabrics. And that led me to look at the footprint to look at all sorts of things like capital flow, who’s getting the money, wage theft, I quickly turned on to looking at the assembly of the garments, who’s making who’s putting the fabric together. So I knew and I was interested in fabrics, textiles, and I’m interested in production processes and factories. You know, both my parents came from a food production background, so they worked in factories. So I know about it actually, to know, it’s really weird. Now, I’ve interviewed a couple of people this summer during lockdown, who run big businesses. And they both said to me, how can you know about factories, or you’re interested in them? And that’s that’s kind of why

Katie Treggiden 

Yeah, I do think that coming from that sort of a background rather than coming from a fashion background, where you’re interested in the name and the label, and the headline has given you an ability to kind of cut through the bullshit a little bit and kind of get underneath the spring, summer 2020 collection, or whatever it is?

Lucy Siegle  

I don’t think so actually, because I would say that the fashion journalists that I know, and people who actually come from a fashion background who not necessarily fashion journalist, but communicate in different ways around sustainability. They get all of this stuff pretty quickly. I think it was just my route in it’s not that they don’t know it, and I do they completely know how things are made and stuff like that. And they have capacity for that. I think they have something extra really, you know, it’s like, the way that trends disseminate through culture, and embed, is really, really important. And also really something very important to look at with sustainability. I’ve had to sort of learn that piece. And I think I’m just like anyone else, like when you get into a luxury fashion situation, for example, I was laughing about this with someone the other day, we were talking about a time we visited a handbag factory, and you walk in and you’re like, this is ridiculous. No one will pay three grand for a handbag is absolutely ridiculous. It’s obscene. And then you go through the first couple of things and you meet the first people in the lab coats who design the bags, and then you go into, and you suddenly find yourself in this room full of snakeskin dyed different colours and they go, this is our collection for autumn winter, usually be vomiting into a bucket that you’ve been doing. You’ve been brainwashed over three hours and you’re thinking ‘Oh, that’s a nice python skin.’ And then you get to the end of the trip. And you’re completely like, yes, it’s perfectly reasonable to pay £3000 for a handbag. So it’s just like anyone can find themselves in that context. Then it’s like, I think a lot of the really great fashion editors are slightly cynical. And they just I think they don’t buy the bullshit actually. And that’s why they’ve survived so long in fashion. I have a great deal of respect for A lot of those people, actually the good ones. Yeah. Because they’re not they’re in it, but they’re not in it. Right. And especially the good ones who take on sustainability. I just think, ‘Wow, you know, you can see where this needs to go, even though you’re in a total bubble.’ Yeah. And I think that’s really kind of impressive. And one of the things I discovered later on, is that I really liked working with designers on sustainability problems, because they, you know, it’s a cliche, isn’t it? But if you give designers constraints, yeah, they bloody love it.

Katie Treggiden  

Yeah.

Lucy Siegle  

So you know, I think people with a fashion background who come out of fashion school, they grew up, because those, you know, late teenage, early 20s are very formative years, obviously. And a lot of them grew up with designers. So their friends went on to be designers, and they went on to be fashion writers, or whatever. And I think they have a great sort of base and understanding. I think it’s difficult now because I think that whole education system needs a bit of an overhaul. And this is not someone who went through fashion education, but I’ve seen it and I’ve been an Honorary Professor for London College of Fashion and stuff like that. And I think that now, if you’re looking at the creation of materials in laboratories, like Modern Meadows in New York and synthesising leather, from collagen, not cows, you know, all of this means that designers, we’ve got too many designers, fashion designers. And, you know, we need people now, who are not just innovators, but probably scientists, or at least need to be able to work at the bench with scientists. So that whole piece is changing. So in a way is quite nice. Because I never felt shut out. I never felt shut out of the fashion scene, actually. But I was always a little bit like, Oh, I don’t know if these are my people. And now I think it’s going to be much more diverse landscape anyway. Yeah, maybe there’ll be a fashion week where you won’t be able to tell the fashion people from the rest of us.

Katie Treggiden 

But I mean, fashion has changed, hasn’t it? I mean, struck me when I was growing up new clothes were a rare treat and usually bought two sizes too big. My mom was a ClothKits addict, so it would make things….

Right, you remember ClothKits?

Lucy Siegle 

God made me and my sister because it’s quite a big age gap to me, my sister like five and a half years, we just have to wear the same one. Yep.

Katie Treggiden  

I’ve got an amazing picture of me and my sister in the same dress, but it’s got this really little pattern on it. So it looks like we’re in one big dress.

Lucy Siegle 

I love it. How old are you? If you don’t mind me asking…

Katie Treggiden 

41

Lucy Siegle 

Oh, so you’re a little bit younger. I’m 45. But yeah, definitely that that kind of era. Yeah. And it was just like my heart used to sing when the postman needs to deliver this ClothKits bundle. Because if people don’t know it was sort of chalked up so that you would, you could sew it together quite easily. Or you could cut it out, sew it together quite easily and through a sort of step by step process. But yeah, it was a real fad, wasn’t it? It was like, people love that stuff.

Katie Treggiden 

It was definitely a look.

Lucy Siegle  

It was very sort of weirdly aspirational.

Katie Treggiden

Yeah. Yeah.

Lucy Siegle  

And a lot of needle cord.

Katie Treggiden 

Yeah. This sort of ‘Good Life’ vibe. So what’s changed? I mean, how have we gone from this idea when you know, new clothes were a treat, you know, people would make clothes and mend them too. I think – now I’ve got some stats, which I’m pretty sure I’ve pulled from your articles! – that one in three young women consider a garment old once they’ve worn it once or twice, a quarter of the clothes in London’s wardrobes have never been worn. And one UK fashion brand works on the assumption that address will only be kept for five weeks. What’s happened in the last 20–30 years?

Lucy Siegle  Fast fashion has happened. I mean, that’s it. So fast fashion is a system of production, a rapid system of production, just-in-time production, where deliveries happen just before they go on sale to maximise the opportunity to sell them in a trend-driven environments and fast fashion produces relatively low cost garments at volume. And they have been traditionally retailed through the high street and catalogues maybe when we were growing up as we got a bit older, you may have had a catalogue, we certainly loved the catalogue, and then it now has become turbo-charged fast fashion. So now online, we have online fast fashion as well, which is the same model, but arguably, even faster, often even cheaper. And you know, gaining gaining in popularity as the high street ‘bricks and mortar’ stores lose ground and market share. And we’ve also seen some interventions over the years. So sort of in the early noughties, you saw supermarkets get into fast fashion as well. So there’s been, you know, pretty much, it became obvious early on to retailers and brands. It was a great way of making money. And obviously, the true cost of fast fashion was not immediately obvious.

Katie Treggiden 

What is the true cost of fast fashion?

Lucy Siegle 

The true cost of fast fashion and the truth about the fast fashion system that I described, and it’s really important, we think of it as a system and not just individual brands. And the truth of that system is that it’s predicated on exploitation, and modern day slavery. And modern day slavery looks often a lot like old day slavery, so just slavery. And it is part of the characteristic has been defined by this phrase, race to the bottom. And what that is, is essentially margin, you know, so you’ve got to secure a certain margin so that the brands and retailers get their profits. And to secure that margin, everything that can be squeezed, is squeezed. And that means textiles. So the actual textiles that are used must be as cheap as possible. And labour, that’s where the two biggest savings are. Sometimes logistics also, depending on the oil price going up and down. So sometimes you can make a saving there. And you can, in fact, make a killing if you offshore and use some of the lowest wage workers in the world, and fast fashion. That’s why it’s migrated . So we used to have a lot of fashion production in the UK, for example, especially in the North of England. And that’s migrated to countries like Bangladesh, famously, and more recently to companies like Myanmar, and Ethiopia, which, you know, actually advertises for companies to come here based on the fact that they have the lowest wages in the world. Right? Very, very recently, we’ve seen the race to the bottom, come home. I’m not saying that’s just happened recently. It’s always been here, but and particularly the last few years, but we’ve seen it in the press, because we’ve seen the brand boohoo.com, which is allied to lots of other brands as well be called out for using factories in Leicester in the Midlands, where workers are paid far below the minimum wage. So one investigation in the Sunday Times, where reporters went undercover found wages at £3.50 an hour. So people tend to react more when this story comes home. And the true cost of the fast fashion system is exposed in UK shores is probably when it gets the most attention.

Katie Treggiden 

So it’s all about a race to the bottom and reducing margins. Why is there so much waste? I mean, in the research for the book I’ve just written, which is about waste, I found that 47% of the raw materials that go into the fashion industry don’t even make it to close the end up on the shop floor…

Lucy Siegle  

For how I think I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think in production of most consumer goods, it’s quite high in terms of the raw materials that don’t end up in the final product. And I think that’s to do with the lack of investment in the supply chain. And the fact that brands and retailers, so the names that we all know, they don’t own the factories that they produce in. So it’s a real like hands-off in terms of liability. So they’re not investing in like, you know, great cutting machines, or zero waste cutting or blah, blah, blah, because they don’t care. And they don’t want to put any money upfront to minimise waste. We also get you got to remember this is a chaotic supply chain. And actually a lot of brands and retailers don’t even know where their stuff is coming from. They might place an order with one factory who subcontract it out. So there’s pretty much, there are so many different points at which you can create waste and exploitation. The true cost of fashion of garment production is also externalised in environmental terms. So the textiles, back to textiles, the textiles that are being bought and are being sourced are often have very, very low quality, and they will be increasingly plastic-polymer blends. And this means that this also gives us a lot of waste in the system. So it is not just like we’re using like really high quality linens or cottons that you might want to cut really carefully because there’s a, you know, a finite supply or they’re expensive or whatever. This is stuff that it’s extruded, you know, oil is cracked, and then it’s extruded. And then it’s spun into yarns, and it’s just like, you know, millions and millions of metres being created every every single day. And it just doesn’t seem, there seems like there’s abundance all the time. And the the environmental and the emissions from that the energy that’s used the carbon emissions, it’s not paid for. It’s not in the product. And it’s no one’s paying for it. You know, some consumers in rich Western countries like ours, we’re paying for some of the disposal of it through our council tax when when these clothes are slung in the bin or need to be incinerated or whatever, we are paying for that. But at the point of creation, there is no minimization of waste. Because why would you that you’re not paying the cost of it?

It’s somebody else’s problem.

Lucy Siegle  30:20

It’s someone else’s problem. And of course, you know, it’s your kids’ problem. Well, it might be your problem! Is your kids’ probably your grandkids’ problem, but we don’t think like that, do we? And we’ve also created, you know, the fashion industry, the fast fashion industry has created this sort of parallel universe, which is incredibly seductive. That basically says, When times are good, it says, you know, ‘Enjoy yourself, this is fun. It’s fashion.’ It’s not fashion, it’s plastic, disposable consumer goods, which is not what fashion is. And, you know, ‘Enjoy yourself when times are hard,’ we’re now told the narrative is to keep the economy going. ‘It’s your duty.’ It’s a delusion actually is what it is, you know, it’s quick way of saying that.

Katie Treggiden 

After the break, I talk to Lucy about why we should all be buying clothes, like an Italian ‘Nona’ buying fruit at a market, but also why we’re citizens, not consumers, and why it’s time for an intervention to push for structural change. I might have mentioned I’ve got a new book coming out! Wasted: When Trash Becomes Treasure is published by Lydian. It’s available to pre-order from Amazon now and in local bookshops from the 8th October. What can people do? You are a sort of ethical agony for the Observer. So for our listeners, you know, obviously there’s this huge system that needs kind of global systemic change, but for an individual person at home listening to this podcast, what can they do to tackle some of the waste and some of these externalised environmental issues and fashion?

Lucy Siegle  

Well, there’s lots of things that you can do by yourself, but I actually, you know, I, I used to be an agony art for the environment. I wouldn’t do that now. Because I think that actually, we don’t want lots of, you know, individual action, I think is really important as a gateway to create change. But I would invite you to see yourself with agency, as we described before, and at the forefront of pushing for structural change, and now is the time to do it. Because how many different points are we going to let fast fashion companies drag us up to the brink? So, at the moment, we’ve got a situation in Leicester as the moment we’re being recording, and we’ve also got slave wages. So are we just gonna let this carry on for another cycle? Remember, in 2013, we had the Rana Plaza catastrophe, where one 1,134 people were killed making clothing for Western brands, not enough changed after that. So now is the time for an absolute intervention. So obviously, people are naturally concerned with their own wardrobes and their own patterns of consumption. So there’s loads of different things you can do there. You know, I think there’s research that shows that if you extend the lifespan of a garment by nine months, you reduce its carbon footprint by you know, 30 to 40%. You know, for younger people as well, you can try and switch some of your allegiance from online brands – I know it’s seductive – to things like Depop, and be part of you know, recirculating clothing, because we know that there is a real untapped resource in terms of the amount of clothing that is circulating. That may not all be in our size, or style, which is where a sewing machine comes in really handy. Yeah. So there’s all those things that you there’s all of those great things that you can do, you know, you can buy more carefully, you can buy, you know, I don’t buy online myself, because I like to feel the textile, you know, I buy a bit like, I always say like a a ‘Nona’ – an Italian Nona buying fruit in a market. That’s what I’m like, I want to see the seams I want to like, you know, you know, look at the buttons and the way they’re put on. So I think like buying things with more due care and attention is really, really important. But I think this whole process of structural reform, if you care about clothes, and fashion and design and all the things that we’re talking about, why not be part of it, there’s so much that can be done. You know, later on today, I’m talking I’m doing a panel with The Circle, which is an NGO, which was set up by Annie Lennox actually, the singer, and it’s all about women’s rights, and they’ve actually stepped in, you know, I just told you about the problem of brands not paying up for orders and Bangladesh. They have launched an appeal and they’re providing grants to garment workers in places like Bangladesh because it’s mainly young women with families who are being left in this position and then stepping into that breach – they shouldn’t have to. But they are. Labour Behind The Label also have an appeal. A workers rights consortium in the clean clothes campaign are running a tracker to show which brands are paid up, which haven’t. You can help you can write to those brands, you can tell them what you expect them to do, you can write to your MP, you can write to your MP about boohoo.com. You know, there’s lots of pressure to be applied, and now is the time to apply it and demand structural reform of this industry.

Katie Treggiden  

Yeah, I think that’s really important. I think I think for so long, the whole, ‘reduce reuse recycle’ message has sort of pushed the emphasis onto consumers. And at some point, we’ve got to push that back up upstream. Yeah. Yeah,

Lucy Siegle  

It’s a very deliberate thing. Yeah. And it you know, it’s one of the things that we see in plastics a lot, because you’ll see, great arguments about litterbugs, and people foaming at the mouth about people dropping litter, which I know is not funny when you see it. But honestly, it’s such a distraction. And the brands love it, when we get all… start fighting with each other about who’s a litter bug and how they should be dealt with. Because frankly, it takes the pressure off them, who are pushing increased volumes of plastic waste, you know, into our country, onto our countryside into our rivers, because they don’t have any plans for how they are going to collect and sort and supposedly reprocess it.

Katie Treggiden 

Yeah, absolutely. So I guess if that’s kind of what people can do, what people like you and I have to do is tell these stories and tell them in a way that’s engaging and convincing. Your new podcast, So Hot Right Now, available from all good podcast streaming services, is all about exploring how to communicate climate change. Your first guest was Sir David Attenborough. And before we get into the nitty gritty of the podcast, I have to ask you, what was it like to interview someone who was a hero to so many of us?

Lucy Siegle

It was brilliant. I mean, it was slightly strange, because it was, you know, locked down. And, you know, we were thinking, could we drop some kit off at Sir David’s house?Because I’ve interviewed him before at his home, I was gonna say I know where it is –  that sounds very sinister! But I do think everyone does. Anyway, we couldn’t obviously, because it was like, early stages of lockdown. And I don’t want to be responsible for spreading Coronavirus need such a living legend. So he said that he would speak to us via his landline, which you know, as a podcast maker throws up and a number of issues in terms of recording with three or four people on the line. So we found Alan, a sound engineer that Tom my co-host had worked with before and had worked with David a lot in the past. And he was up in Manchester or somewhere. And he went to a special storage facility and got some sort of old bit of kit that split the line. And then he was able to do really good job. So it actually sounds great. But I tell you what, when David rang through, and I was in my sitting room, and I put all the bins out so that no one would come down the path so the dog wouldn’t bark. So I built like this barricade, yeah. It was quite a moment just to hear his voice. Yeah. And our producer, you know, we had all these important questions about you know, what you know about how we communicate better and his career and everything. And then our producer kept – in the chat box – she kept saying, ‘Ask him what birds he’s seen during lockdown.’ And I was like, ‘I’m not asking David Attenborough what birds he’s seen during lockdown.’ And then at the end, I did – and I saw what she wanted. Because we got that amazing moment where Sir David Attenborough is doing full Attenborough, describing the birds, and it was genius.

Katie Treggiden

Amazing.

Lucy Siegle 

It was genius. But the thing that I really made me laugh most was that Tom and I had been up, you know, like, into the wee small hours the night before on Zoom, getting our questions ready. And the questions where we’d expended the most time and energy, he would go, he would normally say, ‘Well, I couldn’t possibly comment on that.’ But he was great. He was on great form. He was really like, you know, we made him laugh a few times. And you know, we did a cringy thing, which we probably shouldn’t do as professionals. But we just took the opportunity to tell him that we just loved him. And we thought he was great.

Katie Treggiden 

Yeah, he was so humble and so modest. The amount of times when you sort of said, ‘What about this thing you did?’ And he just sort of said, ‘Oh, I don’t think that was me, was it?’ Yeah, it incredible, and you just sort of….

Lucy Siegle  

I was like, ‘Well, it wasn’t anyone else, David!’

Katie Treggiden 

But it’s interesting when you talk to him about that sort of watershed moment in the plastics crisis during Blue Planet Two And actually, I was in the process of writing an essay for my Masters about the plastic crisis when that aired. So I had heard about it, but I hadn’t seen it. And then I subsequently sort of downloaded it and watched it. And it was really interesting because it was such a tiny segment of that huge programme, and really saying something that I felt like people already knew. So I did think it was quite interesting that that became such a pivotal moment.

Lucy Siegle

Yeah, I mean, it was only 14 minutes of the entire series was about plastic. And yeah, it changed. It sort of changed everything. Yeah, it’s I think, you know, I think Sir David explains it, you know, better than anyone can in our podcast (You go and have a little listen – So Hot Right Now!) But he, you know, he basically said, ‘You know, sometimes the, everything just aligns.’ And, you know, I talked to lots of people after Blue Planet Two, obviously. And they said, Yeah, but if Friends of the Earth hadn’t done, you know, 20 years campaigning if Surfers Against Sewage hadn’t run, you know, all of these different activist… very sort of like popular things, it wouldn’t have had that effect. You know, it was, what does Malcolm Gladwell call it a ‘tipping point’? Yeah. Yeah, sure. And but I think I think what’s really interesting for me, and perhaps this speaks to why it worked was that it was a moment of authenticity in natural history, filmmaking, which is something we talk about a lot on So Hot Right Now, because my co-host Tom Mustil is a very, very good natural history documentary maker filmmaker. And it was the moment as James Honeybourne, the executive producer of Blue Planet Two, has described it, where the ocean was so chock full of plastic that you couldn’t remove it from the lens. Not very long before, the protocol would have been to move the plastic, keep the lens clear, and shoot the ocean, because the the mandate for those programmes is to photograph natural environments in all their wonder and create this appetite. You know, Jacques Cousteau said, ‘You can’t save what you don’t love.’ So there is an environmental mission, but it’s very low. It’s very in the distant, in the future went in with those products usually. What this did was was to say, we can’t move this from the lens. So we’re going to keep it we’re going to shoot it. We’re going to shoot through the plastic soup, and we’re going to explain what the hell is going on. And that was a moment of revolution. So it seems small to you and I who have been activists on this for years and years and years or writing about it. But in terms of natural history filmmaking, it was a revolutionary moment that changed everything. Yeah. And it also was good and bad, because then you get the response to that. It’s like, what the hell have these people been doing? Why are they so late to this conversation? Which is also legitimate…

Katie Treggiden 

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. but better late than never. I hadn’t thought about it in that way, actually, in terms of it being such a revolutionary film for for natural history, filmmaking.

Lucy Siegle  

So when you see what we’re doing with So Hot Right Now is we are… we talk to the gatekeepers. And if we can’t talk to them, we at least analyse what’s been going on with the gatekeepers. And this is a gatekeeper moment. And that changes everything. So then when the next big series is commissioned, was it called Seven Planets, after that, filmmakers had become emboldened. And as I understand it, I hope I’m not thinking of turn here, commissioners, the main producer, or director for that series had said that they wanted to go and film you know, glaciers falling or whatever, whatever it was, it wasn’t glaciers falling, because that’s a bit controversial, but it was it was something else showing the effects of climate change. And the commissioner had said, ‘No, we don’t want that. We don’t want it.’ I think that the idea was that it was too much for the audience at that time, and it would be too elegiac and too painful to watch. And they wanted something that was more along normal Natural History lines. As I understand it, the director or the team went out and shot it anyway. And they brought it back and the commissioning editor was in tears and said, ‘This needs to go out. Wow.’ So Blue Planet Two starts its own kind of cascades. And the commissioning process starts to change. Yeah. And there’s definitely a case to answer there, especially at the BBC, I’m afraid because we have a later episode in So Hot Right Now with George Monbiot. And he talks about what was essentially a moratorium on climate coverage, right. And that is something that we do need to talk about, and we need to make sure that that form of censorship doesn’t happen again.

Katie Treggiden  

Yeah, yeah, I think that’s really important. So on a slightly lighter note, the podcast is all about communicating climate change and I came across a wonderful quote in Devon Life about your method of communicating. The journalist said when she met you, ‘It was a bit like being bowled over by a gigantic and gorgeous, enthusiastic brown-eyed puppy, wielding a couple of PhDs in environmental ethics and consumerism’. It was in Devon life in 2015. And I just wanted to talk to you about that balance of kind of education and enthusiasm, kind of the warm, engaging conversational style that you have coupled with the kind of cold, hard facts and how important that is to getting this message across.

Lucy Siegle 

Yes, I mean, that’s my own personal mission. My own personal style is not for everyone. And no doubt some people find it a bit much. But the thing I will say is, it doesn’t matter whether you are reporting on packaging, I think that you need to have an enthusiasm, which is giving you a deep knowledge. So I don’t have a PhD, nevermind two. I’ve got rather minimal education, actually. But I do read everything. And I talk to everybody, because I’m so deeply interested. And I do like talking to scientists, by and large. And in the old days, I would have said, ‘Oh, yes, my job is to humanise the science.’ Well, I find that scientists are rather good at humanising their own work now, so I’m slightly redundant on that level. But I do find that I like to communicate my enthusiasm for these things. But I also like to listen. And actually one of the main things I’ve done in my career is I got an opportunity to be a reporter for The One Show in about 2007, which is a primetime BBC magazine show. And actually, until fairly recently, obviously, lockdown has kind of brought an end to going out and making VTs with members of the public all around the country. But most of the thing that I did was to go out and talk to people. And listen, actually, and I was not necessarily used as an environmental reporter, because there wasn’t enough environmental content. But I would be spending time with people and I’ve made films with people who were coming to the end of their lives, you know, they might have spent one of their last, you know, 10 days with me. Wow, you know, it’s a real… it was a real privilege. But it was also, you know, something to adjust to, and, and hearing what people have to say at that moment. And making a film about it is, you know, very, very important. And a lot of these stories are human stories, even if they’re about the stuff that we use, and own and make, and they’re about materials, and they’re about emissions, and particulate pollution, and the stuff that’s connected to them. They’re always really about people. And I am, to use terrible cliche, a people person, and I like to talk, listen and work with people. So I don’t know what that will be like going forwards. Because you know, we’re a nation that’s increasingly divided, we one that’s in the grip of a global pandemic, you know, there are lots of things that suggests that it’s going to be quite difficult to maintain those sorts of relationships going forward, we’re also going to have suffered a lot of budget cuts in the way that we do programmes and stuff like that. So there’ll be far less opportunity to go out and make these films. So I don’t know what the future holds. And I think you know, for me, I worried that we are going to do more reporting on nature and climate. But we are going to do it. Not superficially. But without really talking to people and hearing people. And you can’t just broadcast this information at people. You need it to be embedded within them around them, and they need to feel part of it. And that’s a very, very big job. And that takes different skills and different experience to writing highly technical information, or filming great wildlife shots. It takes something slightly different for which I would say that, I don’t know why, but I am quite qualified to do that for some reason.

Katie Treggiden 

No, and I think you make a good point that listening is as important as talking and that enthusiasm and education aren’t two different things. I think too often we see this kind of very serious, worldly professor and then the sort of brown-eyed puppy dog, as Devon Life put it, as very different. But actually, you’re right learning is a is a process of enthusiasm and passion. I think those things are very intertwined. So if you worry for the future of environmental journalism, What do you think the future holds for the environment? I mean, this decade is incredibly important in terms of climate change, biodiversity, many of those nine planetary boundaries, is there hope?

Lucy Siegle 

Well, I think we’ve got real opportunities, because I think what we have got is a large evidence base to suggest that what we were doing before wasn’t working very well, if I can use the understatement of the year. And I think that what we’ve done very, very recently, and what we’re starting to do is join the dots between poverty, deprivation, racism, and environmental outcomes. And I think that we rather than siloing everything we are starting to understand, you know, this great word that people involved in nature know ‘interconnectedness’. And I think for me, one of the things one of the schisms has always been so part of the time, you know, my family lived in South Devon and I grew up near Totness. And I didn’t really when I was growing up, I didn’t really like all that stuff. It was all quite, you know, I found it quite sort of exclusive. It was like Dartington, Schumacher, ‘we’re all really spiritual’, you know, as a suburban child with patent shoes, and pedal pushers, maybe a bit of ClothKits. But you know, that was my natural instinct. And, you know, it was a bit, it was all a bit like, ‘We’re really important special people’. I always felt quite sort of alien to that, you know, real green world, even though it was all around me. And now, as we’ve progressed, I think that we’ve started to get an evidence base, which is not based on mysticism, and spiritual identity, but it’s based on environmental science. And that’s really powerful for me, because that’s what I was always slightly missing. I’m very into environmental science. And I find the science compelling, because it is. I’ve always found the science compelling. And I even noticed, you know, in Totness for many years, they’ve had a really, really strong transition town network, which is run by Rob Hopkins. And it’s like, you know, it’s where I grew up. And that’s where I can go back. And I can see a lot of the principles and ideas that around in the 1980s, but given a proper firm foothold, both by pushing the right legislative levers, but by creating resilience, so they’re using social science and using environmental evidence and science, about growing and crop cycles, and you know, all the stuff that was kind of missing. So for me, it’s a no brainer now that we change our systems into resilient systems, and we call it the Green Recovery. Now I’m chair of the Real Circularity Coalition. And we work with people like you know, Sharing Economy UK, are part of our coalition, Surfers Against Sewage, you know, so these kind of vibrant networks and coalitions that are taking the not just the theory, but the application and saying. ‘This is what we need to do. This is where we need to invest our energy. And this is where we need to invest our money. And these are the systems that we need to build in order to realise net zero and beyond’, because net zero, the way it’s described should not be the end goal by a long chalk. And it’s about creating a Green Recovery and building a green structure for us to live within, but also one that is just and one that works, you know, for people and planet, and we have a lot of the solutions Christiana Figueres was a another guest on our podcast. And she made a lot of very good points. But one of the things that she said was, you know, when her and Tom Carnac were writing there, but the Future We Choose, which is definitely worth a read, if anyone hasn’t read it, you know, they’re basically she pitches it that we are at a crossroads, we can go back into the fossil fuel business as usual quagmire. I don’t think there’s any mandate to do that. And especially we look at some of the polling that’s coming out from the UK public, they want a green recovery, or we can go green recovery. But there’s a lot of narratives about what the bad thing looks like. And there’s not enough narratives about what the good thing looks like. So part of our job as communicators is obviously to talk about that. I can’t remember your question. Sorry. I’ve gone down that road.

Katie Treggiden

You answered it very well. I was asking you about whether there’s hope for the future.

Lucy Siegle 

Yes, definitely, definitel, definitely. And I think like, yeah, the Green Recovery is absolutely of fundamental importance. And one of the things that I’ve been quite hopeful about taking a totally unscientific sample group of people who I’m in contact with on social media, is how angry a lot of people were when the Prime Minister suggested that people should get out and shop as lockdown lifted to save the economy. People were spitting,  they were fuming. And that, you know, the point was made, didn’t need to be made by me, although I did make it was that we are citizens, we are not consumers, which goes back to thing you said about us having agency and and all the rest of it. And people want to apply that. And I do think that black lives matter. And the way that there was room for people to join that protest, and that conversation, even when you are white, even when you are part of the problem, you could join and you could… you were given time to educate yourself given resources. You were given LinkTrees, to do lists, all of these things percolated through social media. Now there’s an example of a lot of people who were previously part of the problem coming to be co-conspirators and working on structural and systemic change. This is what we need.

Katie Treggiden 

And I think that intersectionality, that cross disciplinary collaboration, that inclusiveness, I think all of that stuff is so important towards finding a Green Recovery.

Lucy Siegle  

I think totally. And I mean, if you look at what’s happened so far, in government record rhetoric around Green Recovery, I mean, it’s a joke. So, you know, there was a mention of jet to zero, the non-kerosene plane, which is not going to happen for 40 years, and carbon capture storage, again an unproven technology. So these ‘silver bullet’ technologies – that cannot be where our hope is based, it’s not where my hope lies. Those are hope-less. So, unfortunately, it’s obvious that we are going to have to… civil society is going to have to do the work there. Because we’re not being heard properly. And we’re being given sort of ridiculous crumbs off the table. Because anything that’s advocating for business as usual response to this crisis is not green.

Katie Treggiden 

I couldn’t agree more. Yeah, yeah. Thank you so much, Lucy. I really appreciate your time and conversation.

Lucy Siegle

When are we going to be able to read your book?

Katie Treggiden

It is coming out on the 8th October.

Lucy Siegle

I should put a note in my diary. Thanks, Katie.

Katie Treggiden 

Thank you, Lucy. I really appreciate that.  If you enjoyed this episode of circular with Katie Treggiden, can I ask you to leave a review and perhaps even hit the subscribe button? Those two actions really help other people to find the podcast so I would be very grateful. Thank you. Thank you to Lucy Siegle, Gordon Barker for the edit, October Communications for marketing support, Sound Compound for the music – and to you for joining me. You’ve been listening to Circular with Katie Treggiden.

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P.S. I am recording Season Two of the podcast now and the theme this time is repair. I really believe that people who make and mend with their hands hold the keys to helping us move from a linear ‘take-make-waste’ model to a more sustainable ‘circular’ economy. If you do too, I am looking for likeminded brands to help bring the meaningful conversations I know I’m going to have on this season of the podcast to a larger audience. Email me and I’ll send you more info on how you could get involved as a brand partner.