Infinite feeds, autoplay and streaks are engineered for compulsion. The average 15-year-old spends 5h 20m a day on their phone. What would a kind, honest alternative look like?
Most ocean plastic arrives by river, and roughly 1,000 rivers carry 80% of it. It floats past towns for days before it hits the sea. Cheap sensors and a cleanup network could catch it upstream.
1 in 3 people over 75 in London eat dinner alone every night. It's linked to dementia, heart disease and early death — and it's fixable with proximity: neighbours, not programmes.
Four middlemen, zero transparency. A grower can be paid less for a kilo of coffee than a café charges for one cup. Direct trade works for coffee; why not for everything?
Screening ages, waiting times and follow-ups vary wildly between regions. Stage 1 bowel cancer has a five-year survival above 90%; stage 4 is closer to 10%. The tech exists; the access doesn't.
Same story every summer: 100,000 people, one park, and 30 tonnes of tents, cans and glitter by dawn. Councils spend a fortune; volunteers show up unpaid. Nobody coordinates.
Europe's summer of 2022 killed an estimated 61,000 people through heat, most of them over 65 and alone at home. Cities know which streets are hottest. They don't tell the people living on them.
Around 1.3 billion tonnes of food is lost or wasted every year — roughly 8–10% of global emissions. In rich countries most of it happens at home and in shops, which is exactly where it's easiest to fix.
Fraud is the most common crime in the UK: over 3 million cases a year and about £1.2 billion stolen. The calls target people who grew up trusting the phone. Banks and telcos each fix their corner and nobody joins it up.
In Germany the average wait for a psychotherapy place is around 20 weeks; in parts of England it's longer for a second appointment. People get worse while they wait. Some stop waiting.
Drug-resistant infections killed about 1.27 million people in 2019. No new class of antibiotics has reached patients since the 1980s, because a drug you're told to use sparingly is a terrible product to sell.
Every city has a handful of junctions that keep killing people. The crash data is public; the fixes are known — protected turns, longer green phases, no left hook. We keep laying flowers instead.
Office vacancy in many North American downtowns sits near 20% while rents for a one-bed hit record highs. Converting is hard — plumbing, light, floorplates — but it's not harder than building nothing.
The world produced 62 million tonnes of e-waste in 2022 and formally recycled about 22% of it. Glued batteries, paired parts and missing manuals mean a £30 fault bins a £900 phone.
Flying insect biomass fell by around 75% in 27 years across German nature reserves. Insects pollinate a third of what we eat. Most countries have no ongoing count at all.
Around 2 million children in England get free school meals. In the holidays those meals vanish for 13 weeks a year and food banks see the spike. Feeding them costs less than the catch-up later.
Low-income households pay around £480 a year extra for the same essentials — prepay energy meters, higher-interest credit, pay-as-you-go insurance. The people with the least money pay the highest prices.
US shelters euthanise roughly 390,000 dogs a year. Large breeds and seniors wait longest and are the first to go. Landlord rules, not people's hearts, are often the barrier.
About 7 in 10 ten-year-olds in low- and middle-income countries can't read and understand a simple text. Everything after that — maths, science, a job — is built on a floor that isn't there.
Outside London, bus miles have fallen by around a quarter since 2010. If the last bus leaves at 6pm you can't take an evening shift, a night class or a hospital appointment that runs late.