Can bees help us to design sustainable supermarkets
Transcriber:
Reviewer: lisa thompson
Have you ever thrown out
a bottle of runny honey
because it was taking too long
to squeeze that last bit out?
I’ll admit it, I’ve definitely
done that before.
But I recently found out
that the average worker bee only produces
about 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey
throughout its entire life.
Those last few drops that I could not
be bothered to squeeze out
equate to the lifework of dozens of bees
just wasted.
That really struck me.
We rarely think of the backstory
of our food when we shop for it,
and I think a lot of that relates
to the places in which we shop.
As an architectural
researcher and designer,
I’m really interested in how spaces
are designed for disconnection
and the social and environmental
implications of this.
This disconnection between people, food
and place is a relatively new phenomenon.
That’s because early cities
would have evolved next to areas
of fertile land called a hinterland.
And it was within this zone
that nearly all the city’s food was grown.
As the city and hinterland
were physically connected,
these early settlements
were circular in nature.
Food would have been produced
and consumed locally,
and waste would have been collected
to produce more food,
while packaging would have been
continuously reused.
Where circular systems help resources
to move in continuous loops,
contemporary food supply chains
are longer and much more linear.
Due to advances in refrigeration,
packaging and logistics,
today, our hinterland
is the size of the whole world,
and we encounter it every time
we zoom through our local supermarket.
Here in the UK, supermarkets
are the primary interface
between us and those global supply chains.
Amazingly, just nine retailers control
over 95 percent of the grocery market.
And I have to admit,
supermarkets do provide us
with a convenient shopping experience.
But this comes with huge
and largely unseen environmental cost.
Firstly, around 45 percent of our food
is imported from outside the UK.
Moving food around the world
means that it’s difficult
to avoid single-use packaging,
and most of our food
is still wrapped in it.
And despite the value of packaging
to lengthen shelf life,
still, around a third of all food
produced is just thrown away.
This cannot be acceptable.
As our climate changes
and resources become scarcer,
we urgently need
to reconnect with our food
and consume more sustainably.
To do this, I think we need
to look again at supermarkets.
As a researcher,
I’ve spent the last few years
really trying to understand
this complex problem.
And as a designer,
I’ve also become interested
in testing some supermarket-led solutions.
Looking back to the early city
and its relationship to hinterland,
I started to think about
how the principles of circularity
might help supermarkets
become more sustainable.
I thought to myself, What would
a truly circular supermarket look like?
How would it operate?
The only way that I could begin
to answer some of those questions
was by designing one.
So I did,
and I imagined it
to be a bit like a beehive.
You see, bees can only source
as far as they can fly.
It’s back to that idea
of city and hinterland again.
A truly circular supermarket
would have to start
by radically localizing food supply again.
In doing so, it would no longer
be a node along a global supply chain;
instead, it would be more like a hub
or a beehive hosting
a mini food system inside it.
You see, this supermarket
wouldn’t just be a place to buy food,
it would also be a place to grow it,
to preserve it, to package it,
to cook it and to even eat it.
This supermarket would also help to close
waste streams in its local neighborhood.
A worker bee mobility fleet would deliver
and collect from local homes,
bringing waste back to the supermarket
to produce energy and food.
This whole system would be underpinned
by a separation of food and packaging.
That means no more single-use plastic
and a return to either biodegradable
honeycomb or a reusable honeypot.
A bit like a library loan scheme,
shoppers could check in and out packaging
so that when it returned to store,
it could be cleaned for reuse.
This circular supermarket
would rely heavily on a renewed culture
of sharing within neighborhoods,
sharing of packaging as well as mobility,
energy, food waste, time and skills.
The store loyalty card would be reinvented
as a platform for shoppers
to share with each other
as well as the supermarket.
But for any of this to work,
local people would have
to buy into a hive mentality
and play their part
to make food systems more sustainable.
How would this new food system be more
sustainable than the one we already have?
Well, by localizing production
and consumption,
food and packaging waste
could be eliminated
and food miles could be reduced
from a journey across a continent
to a journey across a city.
Vitally, by bringing
the hinterland into the city,
this system would enable people
to reconnect with food again.
This circular supermarket benefits
from a big dose of blue sky thinking.
Of course, it’s radical,
and it’s certainly
not grounded in today’s reality.
But …
in a climate emergency,
we need big ideas
because we know that today’s reality
won’t look very much like tomorrow’s.
We can no longer
just patch up broken systems.
Instead, we need to imagine new ones,
ones that enable reconnection
with our environment and each other.
If we want a more sustainable supermarket,
if we want a more sustainable future,
we need to think like bees
and design it, together.
Thank you.