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Home > Circular Economy Podcast > 80 – Evolving and scaling
Podcast: Circular Economy Podcast
Episode:

80 – Evolving and scaling
Category: Business
Duration: 00:37:25
Publish Date: 2022-06-04 23:01:00
Description:

Circular Economy Podcast - Episode 80 – evolving and scaling

If you are a regular listener, you’ll know that every 10th episode, I zoom in on one or two of the common themes from the last series of interviews.

In the last series, we’ve heard from 4 businesses and 3 social enterprises, based in Australia, The Netherlands, France, Spain, the UK and the USA.

What stood out for me this time was how circular solutions develop as they mature – that might be evolving to improve the range of solutions, to strengthen the offer or the business model, and maybe even having to pivot when a major barrier or issue crops up.

Businesses and community initiatives might also want to expand their scale, so they can make a bigger positive difference.

Podcast host Catherine Weetman is a circular economy business advisor, workshop facilitator, speaker and writer.  Her award-winning book: A Circular Economy Handbook: How to Build a More Resilient, Competitive and Sustainable Business includes lots of practical examples and tips on getting started.  Catherine founded Rethink Global in 2013, to help businesses use circular, sustainable approaches to build a better business (and a better world).

Stay in touch for free insights and updates…

Read on for a summary of the podcast and links to the people, organisations and other resources we mention.

You can subscribe to the podcast series on iTunes, Google Podcasts, PlayerFM, Spotify, TuneIn, or search for “circular economy” in your favourite podcast app.  Stay in touch to get free insights and updates, direct to your inbox…

Don’t forget, you can use our interactive, searchable podcast index to find episodes by sector, by region or by circular strategy. Plus, there is now a regular Circular Economy Podcast newsletter, so you get the latest episode show notes, links and transcript delivered to your inbox on Sunday morning, each fortnight. The newsletter includes a link to the episode page on our website, with an audio player. You can subscribe by clicking this link to update your preferences.

Links we mention in the episode:

Guests in this series

  • Rob Thompson of Odyssey Innovations
  • Gavin Fernie-Jones of One Tree at a Time
  • Tom Szaky of Loop
  • Charles Ross, specialist in performance sportswear design and sustainability
  • Food and community activist Helena Norberg-Hodge of Local Futures
  • Isolde de Ridder of Isolde de Ridder Sieraden
  • Stephen Haskew of Circular Computing
  • Colin Church of IOM3
  • Jordi Ferre of Alvinesa

Interview Transcript

Provided by AI

Catherine Weetman  00:00

Successful businesses keep on evolving, how to circular businesses evolve and make a bigger impact.

Hello, and welcome to the circular economy podcast, where we find out how circular approaches are better for people, planet, and prosperity. I’m Catherine Weetman, everything global. And I’ll be chatting to those people making the circular economy happen. rethinking how we design, make and use everything. We’ll talk to entrepreneurs and business owners, social enterprises and leading thinkers. You’ll find the show notes, links and transcripts at Circular Economy podcast.com, where you can subscribe to updates and to our monthly edition of circular insights.

Catherine Weetman  01:02

Welcome back, it’s episode 80. And thanks for tuning in to hear more stories about the circular economy and how it’s better for people planet and prosperity. If you’re a regular listener, you’ll know that every 10th episode, I zoom in on one or two of the common themes from the last series of interviews. In the last series, we’ve heard from four businesses and three social enterprises based in Australia, the Netherlands, France, Spain, the UK, and the USA. What stood out for me this time was how circular solutions develop as they mature, that might be evolving to improve the range of solutions to strengthen the offer or the business model. And maybe even having to pivot when a major barrier or issue crops up. businesses and community initiatives might also want to expand their scale, so they can make a bigger positive difference. And we’ll come back to that later. Let’s start with the bigger system scale picture. And think about what’s changing for the materials we use those resources that flow through our economy. In Episode 78, we spoke to Colin Church of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining, IOM3. The Institute and its work is evolving as more materials come into focus, including critical raw materials. Several governments monitor materials to assess their criticality to the local economy, as well as how their future supply might be affected by increasing global demand, lack of new supplies, geopolitical pressures and climate risks. The European Commission’s first list was in 2011, and included 14 different materials. By the time the fourth critical materials list was published in 2020, the list have grown to 30 materials, including lithium, cobalt, and silicone, as well as more surprising new entries like sand and rubber. Those once seemed abundant, but are now under pressure for different reasons, including climate and overuse. I’ve included a link to the European Commission’s list of critical raw materials in the show notes. The underlying issues for modern materials are complex. And so I asked Colin about how the hot topics for the 15,000 members of IOM3 are evolving.

Colin Church  03:35

The sustainability issues climate crisis, biodiversity crisis, very high on a number of our members agendas. And but in terms of more specific things in terms of materials, minerals, and mining and circular economy type issues, I think there are a number of things that people are worried about specifically. One is what we call critical raw materials. So those materials, which for some reason or other, are at risk in global supply chains, but are essential for the kind of society we either have now or want to have in the future. People are also very much concerned about the future of what we call foundation industry. So the Heavy Industries of making steel and cement and chemicals and plastics and paper and glass. And in particular, how we’re going to decarbonize those to live within our net zero targets going forward. All engineers and scientists when you talk to them will also tell you that they’re always worried about skills supply. And increasingly that gets bound up with inclusion and diversity issues. Although you know, there are separate aspects as well. So skills is a big issue for us. And one particular area of skills. that’s of concern to I am three at the moment is the looming dearth of skills of people who understand geology and applied earth science. It’s really not a popular course it’s at school or university and And there used to be a very active community of of mining engineering courses across the UK there are now undergraduate level, and he that we’re actively recruiting. And I think we’ll probably go on to talk about it. But you know, not having the skills to find an extract material properly and sensibly is going to be an issue for us going forward. Our members are also involved in packaging issues, for example. So here in the UK, there are some big changes coming along to the rules of how one pays for and handles packaging into end of life. And that’s a big issue for our for our members as well. So quite a few of the issues are very closely related to sustainability in lots of different aspects. And really, the members of our industry are fundamental to a lot of those transformations.

Catherine Weetman  05:51

The issues include the complexities of modern long distance supply chains, and Colin highlighted how difficult it can be for those responsible for extraction or production, to know how those materials will be used at the other end of the supply chain. There can be so many tiers of suppliers involved, that the producer might not even know which industrial sectors will use it. Even lifecycle analysis doesn’t necessarily simplify things. I mentioned a case study I’d done on Fairphone. And the difficulties they’d had even trying to establish which country the raw materials came from, and whether it was a fair mind process are not.

Colin Church  06:32

Absolutely, and I think that that whole area of transparency, labelling certification through the chain is really important. And people are very excited about things like blockchain technology, but even blockchain it’s not a it’s not a silver bullet. And be it has its own potential downsides because it can be very energy intensive, for example. So is is a lot of iron ore mined in Australia and tracked by blockchain better or worse than some iron ore mined in Sub Saharan Africa and not tracked by blockchain. Because it’s, you know, you’ve got all sorts of different factors. And it’s really important to try and look at things like lifecycle analysis, but even there, it can be really difficult. So I was doing some work with one of my members last year sometime. And he was saying that he was looking at a dataset for lifecycle analysis around a set of different metals. And what he found was that the data that the world was using to identify the lifecycle impact of a particular metal was based on one mine in the middle of Africa, which produced maybe 10% of the global production. So that’s, you know, substantial. But there’s 90% is produced elsewhere. And we all know that the climate and social and other constraints and opportunities in Sub Saharan Africa will be different from say, the southern tip of Argentina or the centre of the US or you know, pick any other country that you might want to pick. And so even using a tool that could be so rich as lifecycle analysis to understand some of these impacts, and some of these supply chain issues, can be confounded by the data not being good enough in the first place. It’s a huge challenge. But it’s vital that we get on top of it to the extent that we can.

Catherine Weetman  08:23

from a systems perspective, these complexities also go beyond individual companies, supply chains, and even beyond industry sectors, particularly when we’re thinking about decarbonizing and technology for the fourth industrial revolution. We talked about geopolitics and the issue of fair shares…

Colin Church  08:43

We like to say that our role our own three is to support professionals in materials, minerals and minerals to be heroes of the transition to a low carbon and resource efficient society and not villains. And actually, you know, when you think about it, so much of this transition to a low carbon and resource efficient, circular, more circular economy in society depends on stuff, materials, things, whether it’s lithium for batteries, or silicon power, for solar power, or new forms of composites to lightweight vehicle in all sorts of different things. It’s all about material stuff, things. And we’re moving from a world which is using fossil fuels to transfer energy to a world that’s using metals and minerals to transfer energy. So even more important in the future will be stuff.

Catherine Weetman  09:34

Absolutely. And we’re realising that the demand of all these new renewable technologies probably exceeds supply and certainly I was just reading something from Green Alliance, saying that the projected use of renewable electric vehicles, what else was in there solar, solar panels and something else, just those three things that the UK exceeded its fair share of key minerals. So there’s that aspect of it as well isn’t there not just what’s available, but how to distribute it fairly.

Colin Church  10:08

Absolutely. And then of course, tackling as they’re tackling climate change is a global issue. And even if the UK totally decarbonize, which we need to do, if we in decarbonizing the UK economy, stop another economy from decarbonizing because we’ve taken all the materials necessary for that process, then there’s still too much carbon dioxide in the air or too many greenhouse gases. So absolutely, that that fair share argument is, is it’s not just ethical, it’s also deeply practical.

Catherine Weetman  10:40

And it really brings home the need to move to more circular ways of doing things so that we’re designing things so that if something better comes along, we can get all the key resources out of the first product, instead of discarding them and get them get them used again. Also on the subject of materials, this time for performance textiles used in outdoor clothing and gear. In episode 74. We heard from Charles Ross, who specialises in performance sportswear design, and sustainability. Charles and I discussed how biodegradable textiles are evolving. With people realising that we need to use waste from food, agriculture, or forestry processes, not to create materials that need crops grown specifically for them. We talked about the need to focus on keeping things in use for longer, so we can slow the flow of materials through the economy. And of course, reduce the waste and pollution created by all this ever growing production and consumption. brands will have to pivot and rethink the business model, helping people have access to products that lasts for longer, that can be easily repaired, and have a healthy resale value once someone’s finished using it. But my feeling was that so far, most brands in the outdoor gear space are not getting clear on the problem of overconsumption. Let’s hear from Charles.

Charles Ross  12:09

So you’ve asked me what the biggest problem is. I don’t know there’s a whole array of problems. And I would not say that that our biggest problem is actually the cheapness of textiles, just like food. Because they become cheaper. We now own twice the amount of garments that we did at the millennium, which had doubled from the 1970s. So to me, the biggest problem is the overconsumption of textiles on potentially an overpopulated world. But that is extrapolated because we have extended supply lines. I have just been talking about Spring, Summer 2023 trends, and we’re still in 2021. And the only way to make sure that you don’t run out of stock is you over produce soup, because if you lose the famous shelf space, it’s your rival brands that will move into that area. So our biggest problem to me is the cheapness of textiles and the model that we’re having to push them through, which is a really depressing answer. Sorry, Catherine.

Catherine Weetman  13:31

Moving on to recycled materials. In episode 76. I talked to a circular jeweller Isolde de Ridder, who’s another of the entrepreneurs based at the Upcycle Centrum that had a rocky told us about back in episode 63. It sold her set up her business in 2017, creating high end jewellery using Fairtrade metals. A couple of years later, she found out that the fairtrade certification scheme was pulling out of supply in the Benelux countries, because it wasn’t profitable enough. It sold to look for alternatives and found out about fair mined metals, but looking into that raise more ethical questions about whether it was helping local communities around the mines or just benefiting wealthier white people involved in the supply chains.

Isolde de Ridder  14:23

So that’s when at the end of 2019, with the research I was doing, I came to the conclusion that I was not okay with being a part of that anymore. So I came to a turning point. Do I want to keep on doing the work I do? Or am I going to go in a completely different direction because this doesn’t sit well with me at all. And this is not how I want to contribute to to earth, and the people inhibiting it. So I started puzzling on how to not use fair mind, not use new materials, because that might be considered even worse. And the only conclusion I came to is there’s so much jewellery in everyone’s possession just lying around doing nothing. And it’s so easy actually to renew the metals and make new stuff out of it. And I saw this as my only option to keep on doing what I love doing.

Catherine Weetman  15:43

So it’s older evolved by deciding to pivot from Fairtrade to circular materials. When Isolde joined the entrepreneur Support Programme at the Upcycle Centrum, she’d planned to focus on reusing precious metals from E waste. But it turned out to be pretty complicated…

Isolde de Ridder  16:02

That that’s, that’s been my main focus for the past almost one and a half year, because I thought, since there is quite some precious metals in E waste, I would extract it and just take that and make it into new jewellery. But the precious metals are so embedded in impossible to regain access to them in a small business way. Of course, there’s the big E waste companies that process it and,

Catherine Weetman  16:49

yeah, and have having equipment worth hundreds of 1000s of pounds. They’re setup to do it.

Isolde de Ridder  16:56

Yeah, set up to do it. And for me, I found it super challenging to take it back into circulation because it’s a very thin layer or of silver or gold on top of another material which has a very similar melting point. So I thought I had hoped that it would be possible to thermally remove the precious metals and discard the rest. Sadly, that was not as easy as I had hoped. And in the past, more than a year,

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