What's better than solving a problem? Solving lots of problems at once. Deborah Dull is here to tell us about how to reconfigure our manufacturing processes to solve for trade, climate, and human rights risks all at once! Sound crazy? Listen in and decide for yourself.
Justin: Welcome to the responsible supply chain show where we explore the world of responsible sourcing and resilient supply chains. I'm your host, Justin Dillon. In every episode, we dive into real stories from some of the world's best business, government, and thought leaders protecting people, planet, and profits. Let's get in. Episode 11.
Look. I don't like to play favorites, but this one this one might might be my favorite. There are lots of different kinds of intelligence or intelligent people out there. My favorite kind of intelligence is the kind that gives and doesn't take. I have found that people who really need me to know they are intelligent, they just wear me out.
I don't know if you know these people. Maybe you know, I'm sure it's not you, but maybe you know these people. I like intelligent people who make me feel smart and curious, who give and don't take. They're not just trying to extract my attention and affection. They are actually interested in sharing their intelligence and making me smarter.
That's exactly who we have on the show today. Her name is Deborah Dull. She's going to talk about circularity in supply chains and how it just might be the right formula to get us out of all of our problems. Every problem you have in the world, circularity might fix it. You just rub a little circularity on it, when that that red spot, and it's gonna get it, it's gonna get it right out.
No. She is gonna tell us about circulating a topic that before this episode, I have to be honest, I knew nothing about. But first, I need to make an announcement. Freedom, who's our parent company, it's the company that I run. It's my day job.
Just had its its quinceanera. It's a bar mitzvah. It's a pick your life event. We have we've moved out of our childhood phase, and we have formally moved into teenage years, our our our adolescence. Freedom is no longer freedom.
We are wait for it. Freedom AI. I'm not kidding. It's the truth. Go.
Go to freedom.ai and you'll see check out our new look. You'll never guess why we have, you know, changed this. I I I understand that, you know, everyone's saying putting AI on everything like it's ketchup, and I get it. And we're probably not any different. But for years, we have not years, I should say quarters, maybe the last year, we have been, working with AI.
We yes, you know, we are I I heard a couple weeks ago that, you know, companies founded after, 2021 or 2023 are, like, post AI and, you know, before a pre AI. I mean, my my goodness, they're treating AI like the second coming, pre and ADBC. Listen. We applied AI to what we are doing because we saw a way to be able to help our customers better. And I would think of it more as like a brand collab, Freedom and AI, like Warby Parker and Google, or based on current news, Meta and the Defense Department.
I mean, think of it think of think of Freedom and AI as that. We're more of a collab. We've what we get to do in the way that we're embedding it and solving our customers' problems, oh, man. What a great time to be in a tech company. It is bananas.
It is so fun, so cool to see the types of problems we can solve at scale. So, yeah, we're doing that. And speaking of solving problems, let's get on to our guest. Deborah Dahl is the founder of the Circular Supply Chain Network and managing partner of Trillium Digital Services. Go check it out.
She has authored books, and speaking of checking it out, she's authored tons of books. One's called Circular Supply Chain, 17 Common Questions. Again, trying to make the rest of us smart. And Sustainable Supply Chains, Unlearning for a Better Tomorrow. Just the titles of her books tells you that she wants to make all of us smarter.
So let's get to it.
Deborah: Thanks, Justin, for having me on. I'm in San Diego today. I'm trying to be here more, I'm wrapping up several years of a nomadic lifestyle so I'm attempting to have a base but then I started a company and so I am very rarely home. I did. I did.
I did all over the world. Perfect. I'm ready. Totally! It's like an inception situation you know you're like wow let's dig in!
So the simplest idea is this: we have discovered that inside of the planet is not an infinite space and we have a limited amount of metal that we can pull out from inside the planet and use to fuel our supply chains. In fact, it's less than fifty years of known minable metals like gold, silver, platinum, tungsten, the elements that run our world. There may come a time that we find more that we can mine, and this is sort of why this asteroid mining conversation is going. But I think, call me crazy, I think we have options easier than asteroid mining. And that's where we get into this idea.
So if the problem statement is we're actually going to run out of the materials that we need in order to do everything in society. And so if we can't get our materials from the planet, we need to get it from someplace else. And that someplace else is another supply chain, which then means our supply chains are going to start feeding each other in ways, bigger than what they do today. And so then we look at how can we do this with the best margin. And the best option is to take a finished good, do as little as we can to it, and have somebody else pay us for it.
And an example that we've all probably participated in is a used car. Thirty years ago, you were crazy to buy a used car. What a terrible you know, it's like, oh, bad quality. Now the OEMs are actually doing certified pre owned, so they put their mark of quality in their guarantee, and now all of a sudden, a certified pre owned car becomes a really good deal because it's about half price for us. They don't put a lot of money into it.
Happy day, everybody wins. And so the idea is first we start with a finished good, can't do that. Then we start taking it apart. So refurbish it, maybe get the parts out of a car, remanufacture, and as a last resort, we'll recycle. The reason why recycling is the circle of last resort is because it takes a lot of time, money, energy.
It often degrades the material. And so some people put recycling and circularity in the same bucket, but really, there's a lot more that we can do, to add value and get products back to our value chains. And so the easiest way to think about this is we need to fuel our supply chains with something. So we need to go find another source. And a lot of times you'll start to hear terms like urban mining, where we can take materials from cities.
And so I think in the next probably twenty years, I actually think it's faster than that, we're going to be mining landfill. So if you think about everything we throw away, it's a lot. So that stuff is just sealed up and sitting there. Not a lot happens to everything that we've thrown away for the last fifty years. And so there's a lot that we can, start to mine and use that to feed our supply chains.
So I'm going to leave it there. Yep. Yep. Sure, totally. One of my favorite, innovators in this space is a company called Moog out of DC, and they're an automated disassembly robot arm.
And they can take a server apart in three and a half minutes. Why does this matter? As the cloud, the internet, AI tech advances, which is doing very rapidly. The hardware that supports all of the fancy math that we use every day, is moving rapidly as well. So it's getting more and more efficient, so we need less and less, server space to accomplish the same amount of compute.
Therefore, servers need to be upgraded. And so option one is you scrap the whole server, which is often what we've done. You actually throw the whole thing into a huge shredder and use magnets to do the best we can. However, what we can do instead is take that server apart, change out the pieces that we need to, like modular design, and put it back together again all in the same line or in the same building. And what that does, of course, is prevents us from being to buy, transform, move, and assemble all those pieces of a server that we can actually reuse.
So this is an example of remanufacturing. So it's not quite refurbishment, but it's remanufacturing, which is happening today. All the hyperscalers are doing this because it costs less and they can upgrade faster. Correct. Oh, we're certainly there.
We're certainly there. A lot more is happening than people realize. It's just that they don't often say the word circular. And so we have a whole world of operations who choose a circular strategy without calling it that because it's the best, most robust way to build resilience into our operations. That community has no idea that they're contributing to a circular economy.
The circular economy community tends to, and I don't mean to be overly critical, but tends to look at today's linear economy when we've had one hundred years that we've actually built our economy based off of consumption. So we know that one hundred years ago, first time was decided to actually decrease product quality so that consumers had to buy twice as many in order to make sure that those companies stayed in business. So we have we always think, oh my gosh, nothing lasts as long as it used to. It doesn't, and that's real. And that's one hundred years' worth.
And so as we start to say, what are different ways that we can transition? The circular economy too many tends to say all things today are linear. Therefore we need to find a net new approach. And again, I'm being overly critical here. The challenge that that has is that these two communities aren't talking to each other.
The circular economy community either doesn't have the language or the connections or know to go and check out large infrastructure. So, for example, I work closely with a company called GXO. They have over 400 warehouses in The United States. They're already doing industrial repair, disassembly, refill programs for CPG, steaming programs for luxury textiles for clothing rental companies. They're already doing all of that at scale at 400 locations across The United States.
And the idea with circularity is you really want it distributed and local because you don't want stuff shipping all over the place since that kind of defeats the whole point of reuse and increasing utilization of individual goods. But that type of infrastructure and capability is often not on the radar of the circular economy community, and the folks at GXO often don't know that those are actually promotable services to the circular economy community. So there's a lot more that's happening now. There's also a whole conversation happening on what we might call material sovereignty, supply chain sovereignty, as in from a national security perspective, can we run our country
