The man who helped invent the iPod and iPhone and co-founded the smart home company Nest was traveling around the world with his family and kept seeing the same problem: trash.
It was everywhere. Seas of garbage scattered across Southeast Asia, in his face every day.
“You see the trash. You see what global corporations do,” said Tony Fadell, now the Paris-based principal at advisory firm Future Shape. In Southeast Asia, he added, trash is not recycled, but burned or buried.
“As designers, we designed this world,” Fadell told attendees Wednesday at Fortune’s Brainstorm Design conference in Singapore. “We created this. We need to think much more broadly about where this stuff is coming from … and where it goes. Because we’re the only ones who are going to get us out of this.”
“We’ve got a real problem,” he added drily.
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