(L-R) Prof Karen Johnson, Cosmo Sheldrake, Dame Giuliana Furci, Merlin Sheldrake, Dr Anna Kryzwoszynska

Last Thursday, I went to a celebration of all things fungal in Durham at a World Soil Day event organised by my partner, Prof Karen Johnson, and featuring the rock star of fungi, the wonderfully druidically named Merlin Sheldrake (although his brother Cosmo is the actual musician and weaves natural sounds into electronica). The panel session was fascinating and my main takeaway was Giuliana Furci, founder of the Fungi Foundation, saying “we’ve got to stop talking about ‘decay’.”

What she was getting at is the misconception that if you leave an apple in your fruit bowl, it rots. It doesn’t, it gets eaten, often by fungi. And this is the basis of Sustainability in nature – nothing goes to waste, everything is food for another part of the supply chain. And this should be one of the basic principles of Sustainability – there can be no waste, just raw materials for another part of the system.

This is why I have a bit of a problem with people who try to reconcile the waste hierarchy with the circular economy. The waste hierarchy is about waste – ie a problem to be dealt with. To me, the circular economy is about everything in the economy being food for another part of the economy. That’s about raw materials, not waste.

People often look at me askance as if I’m splitting hairs on this, but the terminology is important psychologically. When I was running the Tees Valley Industrial Symbiosis Project 20 years ago, I lightheartedly threatened to ban the word ‘waste’ from our workshops. This became a running joke with a serious edge – when we stopped talking about waste, we found much better uses for materials that were currently being wasted. Language informs our psychology and psychology determines our decisions.