A Climate Change with Matt Matern Climate Podcast

Recycling is not the answer in a lot of cases. It uses lots of chemicals, many of which can be harmful. Materials aren’t infinite. We can’t go on using stuff up forever and ever. There’s now 60 different materials classed as critical we’re using more and more, particularly around green technology and data centers for AI, green energy, all the rest of it, and we’ve seen what’s happening with tariffs and with China deciding it wasn’t going to export some of its critical materials.

We’re a still growing, vast population on a tiny planet with depleted resources. And once you start to get your mind around that and think of your business as part of a massive ecosystem, then I think businesses can start to think differently.

You’re listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern, your host. I’ve got a great guest on the program, Catherine Weetman. Catherine is helps business leaders, entrepreneurs and community groups use circular and regenerative approaches to help their organizations thrive. She’s got a new book out, the circular economy handbook, Third Edition. Great to have you on the program.

Catherine, thank you. Matt, yeah. It was great to be here and to have finally got this edition of the book over the line. Fantastic.

Well, tell us a little bit about your journey is in getting into the environmental space. What drew you into this area?

I guess, rather than a light bulb moment, it was kind of a creeping realization that lots was going wrong with the world, I guess, starting with food systems and what was going into our food and kind of getting more and more interested in all the environmental aspects of business in the kind of 1990s and early 2000s and I was just getting more and more uncomfortable with what I was doing.

I worked for DHL supply chain. So we were helping lots of big retailers and big manufacturers in all sorts of sectors, and I was just playing a tiny part in helping them get more efficient and effective at selling stuff that probably we didn’t really need. And so I kind of, you know, was getting more and more uncomfortable about that and worried as to why nobody seemed to be talking about what we should do differently. So I went off to investigate, you know, the size and scope of the problem, and kind of got really, really depressed.

And along the way, that was like a sort of eight or nine month research program, just to kind of get myself up to speed. And of course, every stone you lift up there’s something awful underneath around resources or health and impact of pollution and all that kind of stuff. And along the way, I was finding new bits of jargon and terminology that hadn’t come across, and the circular economy was one of those.

And when I went off to read up about that, that suddenly the light Bell bulb went on that, you know, here, was a solution that seemed practical, seemed doable, seemed like businesses could make profits doing this. It wasn’t all about wearing a hair shirt, and we’ve all got to have a lot less, because I could see nobody was going to buy into that.

So that kind of, you know, started the process, and within a couple of years, I decided I wanted to focus full time on that and kind of ditch my corporate career in favor of challenging people about why we weren’t rethinking things much more radically.

Well, tell us who, who’s doing the best job of this creating circular economies in terms of which countries, which businesses, which areas the world are seeming to adapt this most effectively over the time period you’ve been studying,

I guess, in terms of where in the world, then in Europe, lots of established businesses and startups are looking at this. Some of that’s probably driven by the legislation that’s that’s perhaps further advanced in Europe, though, doesn’t really go far enough in more developing economies, they’re probably practicing Circular Economy approaches and strategies like we all used to do 100 years ago, you know, we didn’t. We didn’t design things to be disposable.

We designed things to last, to be repairable, to be able to be remade. We shared a lot more so in a lot of countries, that’s still happening this. Despite the kind of marketing push from big global corporates trying to get everybody to adapt to this disposability and so called convenience culture in terms of businesses, the most interesting and forward thinking approaches that I see are from startups and disruptors, rather than big established businesses.

And I think a lot of those businesses are really just missing out on major opportunities. And it sort of feels a bit like the beginnings of the digital revolution, when some companies started to see that this was going to be a game changer, and got on board.

But others, like Kodak, for instance, couldn’t let go of the business model that was their existing cash cow. And there was a lot of, perhaps political influence inside the company trying to direct everything towards, you know, we can get on board with digital, but it’s all got to end up with printing film and getting people to print their photos, so you know.

And I think what Kodak failed to realize all along was that their customers wanted to share their stories, and once social media and smartphones came along, why would anybody bother printing photos so that they hadn’t really got to grips with what the value proposition should be all about.

Well, if you give us some examples of some of these startups and disruptors that you think are likely to be game changers or certain certainly add a lot of value in terms of making us a more circular economy.

Yeah, sure. So I’m talking to you through a remanufactured Dell laptop, which was remanufactured not by Dell but by a company called circular computing. So they they remanufacture high quality laptops from Dell, Lenovo and HP, and those laptops come out looking like new and they’re probably more reliable than new model, because every single laptop is checked, has things, has parts replaced, and then is is checked again before it goes on sale. Whereas traditional new laptops, they’re only batch tested, so more unreliable ones are going to going to fall through the net.

So circular computing, if you like, are creating value from the unwanted assets of Dell, Lenovo and HP. They could be remanufacturing their own laptops and getting more value out of those machines. But instead, circular computing are doing it, and they’re one of their innovations has been to provide remanufacturing as a service. So if you’re a big business that buys a lot of laptops, you can say to circular computing, we’ve got these laptops are all two years old in a year’s time. We want you to remanufacture them for us, and, you know, give us the new laptops back so that we can keep them going for a few more years.

So it’s all about treating what comes off the production line as an asset. You know, we think of all sorts of other things as assets, machinery and equipment and so on. But why aren’t we thinking of every product and the packaging that goes out of the factory gate? Why aren’t we seeing that as a company’s most important asset and maximizing the value for the business and for the client?

What about in the domain of plastics, which is certainly a area that has caused a tremendous amount of pollution around the world, are there companies that are dealing with this issue to make the economy more circular? I personally think that taking plastics just completely out of the economy, as opposed to recycling them, because you’re just going to have, you know, probably more chemicals, regardless of whether they get recycled or not. It’s maybe less bad, but it’s still not ideal.

Yeah, I agree what I agree and that there are lots of complexities around plastics. So I guess, you know, we, we can think of lots of plastic products, or products with plastic in them, like that laptop, like anything that needs to be light and strong and to be made more cheaply than using metal and when, when it’s something that we’re going to keep in use for a long time, then we can use that plastic.

We can perhaps do more to make sure that that plastic doesn’t have off gassing pollutants and that kind of thing in it, so it’s safer for humans, and we can then recycle and remanufacture lots of plastic products to stay in use. I guess where the problem comes is. When plastic is designed for a very short life, designed to be disposable, and when it has lots of pollutants in it. And you’re right, recycling is not the answer in a lot of cases for two reasons.

Firstly, often it uses lots of chemicals, many of which can be harmful, and I worry that the petrochemical producers see plastic recycling as a get out of jail card. We’ll be making less virgin plastics, but if we’re selling petrochemicals for recycling, then you know, we’re quids in. And the other thing is that plastic degrades when it’s recycled, lots of plastic, some some are okay to be recycled over and over again. So pet that’s used in plastic drinking, you know, soda bottles and that kind of thing that can be recycled over and over again back into new bottles.

But unfortunately, pet is being seen as attractive for making recycled polyester for clothing. So that’s where all the PT is going into clothing, where it degrades more quickly than virgin polyester, it creates more microplastics than virgin polyester, and it’s highly unlikely, at the end of its use as a clothing item to be recycled back into new clothing.

So we’ve taken something out of a stream that could be used over and over again, and put it into a stream where it’s likely to be used just once, and on the way, it’s going to create more pollution, more health problems and so on.

Yeah, it’s kind of I guess I’ve become more educated in recent years of how bad the polyesters are, in terms of, every time you’re washing them, fibers are getting flushed into the water, and then those micro plastics are going downstream into our food chain, so it’s and Ultimately back into our bodies.

So it’s, it’s pretty horrendous how that’s happening, and it seems as though it’s, it’s one of those things that we should all be able to agree that that is not good. And there are other ways we can get around this, called natural fabrics that don’t have these problems. Why? Why the big pushback? And why can’t we get polyesters out of our supply chains?

Well, two reasons, I think, you know, fast fashion, fast tech, fast lots of market sectors, if you like. It’s all about persuading people to buy much more often than they need to, and to not keep things for very long, so everything’s treated as disposable, and recycled polyester fits nicely into that, that category.

And I think there’s a second thing, where recycled polyester, or any material, if you like, any recycled material, is part of what you might call a false solution, a kind of green washing, washing, circular washing, marketing strategy that it makes people feel better because it’s recycled and people aren’t really looking too closely or or have that people don’t have the time to kind of understand All the issues associated with that form of recycling.

So really, what we’re talking about is a cultural shift in terms of how we are using things in the economy and and reusing things. And is it sufficient to kind of focus really on this cultural shift outside of doing legislation, or do we need to have legislation that kind of pushes us in the direction towards a more circular economy?

Yeah, I think we need both. But I think what lots of companies are missing is that people expect businesses to be doing more from a sustainability point of view, and people are seeing through the kind of random acts of circularity, if you like that. You know, we’ve we’ve swapped in this, swapped this fossil fuel material for a biomaterial.

We’ve put some bio bio plastic in, in your packaging. We’ve made something more recyclable in inverted commas, and yet there’s no suitable recycling stream anywhere near you. So people are starting to see through that and lose trust in the brands that are doing that. And people want things to be affordable, accessible, really good quality. People want products that work, products that with a manufacturer’s guarantee standing behind it. Yes, we sometimes want the latest and greatest, but often things can be upgraded.

You know, here’s my fare phone, which I upgraded. I bought a second hand one, and I upgraded the camera lens. And. Five minutes with a part that I bought direct from Fairphone. So, you know, there are ways of designing things so that we can have the functionality and the, you know, the latest technology that’s out there. It doesn’t have to be that, you know, we’re all existing with old fashioned stuff that nobody really wants. And I think this is, you know, lots of brands are missing this opportunity to engage with customers and provide really good quality things that people love and that people want to give feedback on.

People see that this might cost more, but it’s got some resale value, and so that might make me more confident about spending that extra money in the first place, because I know if I don’t want to keep it forever, I can sell this on eBay, or even return it back to the original brand and get some money back.

So when do you think we’re going to reach that? It’s a tough question. The tipping point, I think Malcolm Gladwell or one of the other popular writers talked about tipping points and and do you see us getting closer to that tipping point? What are the what are the kind of factors that you’re looking at that that indicate we’re getting closer or not getting closer to this tipping point?

Yeah, I think there are. I think there are two different tipping points. There’s the customer tipping point, if you like, but there’s also, there are also tipping points for the brands and manufacturers, and I think a lot of those are getting closer. People are starting to realize that, you know, materials aren’t finite.

Every sorry, materials aren’t infinite. We can’t go on using stuff up forever and ever. Just this weekend in the in the Financial Times, there was an announcement that the USGS has added another 10 materials to their critical materials list. There’s now 60 different materials classed as critical.

And why are they critical? Because supply and demand are in balance. You know that there aren’t necessarily new sources of those materials we’re using more and more, particularly around green technology, and you know the data centers for AI, green energy, all the rest of it, so lots of key materials are really under pressure, and we’ve seen what’s happening with tariffs and with China deciding it wasn’t going to export some of its critical materials, and that became a negotiating point.

So I think more and more companies are starting to realize that supply chains can be massively disrupted if you haven’t kept your eye on key materials, and suddenly, you know, like we were talking about with recycled PET food, manufacturers can’t afford to buy it because clothing companies have gone after it, and it’s a finite source. So companies are starting to realize that to have a future fit supply chain that’s not going to be affected by massive disruptions.

You’re better off having control of your materials, and that means having control of your products and making those products last longer. Sort of having this conveyor belt of new materials and products that we pump out and we try and kill them off as quickly as possible, isn’t really a very well thought through long term strategy, I would argue.

So say, who is the target audience for the circular economy handbook? Is it mostly students or general audience?

I’d say students and businesses. So I’ve tried to cover, I’ve really tried to cover the business model angle. So it’s kind of a tour through what you would need to do to embed a circular strategy at the heart of your business. And I go through three key strategies which can be used on their own or altogether.

So the first one is endurance, making products last longer. The second one is intensity. So finding ways to make the product worked hard, work harder that might be putting it into a pay per use scheme or a rental scheme, you know, like with higher cars. Instead of a car being parked up for 23, hours a day, if it’s out as a higher car, it might be used six, 810, hours a day. So we’re getting more utilization out of the same product, and more micro revenues for the company. Multi functional products and making by products also come into that intensity strategy.

So we should think of every molecule that comes in through the factory gate, how much more value could we be getting out of that? So that’s the second strategy. And then the third strategy is revival, so getting things back at the end of their first use cycle, to refurbish, remanufacture, and if that’s not possible, eventually to recycle. But it’s about getting more value out of. Of out of products that have had one use cycle.

So how do you see companies picking this up? What are some of the disruptors you’ve named a few say in the energy sector, which to me seems like a critical sector in terms of replacing fossil fuels so that we can bring down emissions, whether they be CO two or methane. What are companies that you see are addressing those issues?

I guess I would criticize the energy sector for not doing enough to think about the design of things like solar panels and wind turbines. They don’t have all that long a design life, and yet, a lot of them have put onto the market without any thought as to how they’re going to be refurbished, remanufactured, or even recycled.

And we’ve got lots of critical materials going into those in terms of other ways of producing energy, then energy from waste is kind of the lowest level of the circular economy. It’s the thing that we want to do, least of because it means we’re burning useful materials and useful molecules. So we might do bio refining to recover chemicals and metals and minerals out of something before it goes to energy from waste. But again, that’s kind of the lowest, lowest level of the circular economy. So I think really it’s about companies thinking about the longer term.

And I know that Google and some of the other major data center users have started to think about, we want a longer design life for all our servers, and we want them to be suitable to be remanufactured, repaired, and so on. So they’re starting to get the head around that, that it’s, you know, it’s ridiculous, having this equipment that’s only got a design life of five years, and then we write it all off, and we have to buy, buy new. So I think there’s, you know, change is starting to be happening, but I wouldn’t say the energy sector is perhaps at the forefront of that.

Yeah, I guess in terms of AI, there’s a huge disruption. You’ve addressed some pieces of it, and the amount of energy that’s going to be required to run all these data centers is going to be ginormous. Do you see companies that are trying to figure out a different way and a model that would be less energy dependent?

Not that I’ve seen so far now, think they all seem to be kind of racing for the, you know, we’re, we’re, we’re, we’re leading on this. We’re going to be investing the most in it. So, you know, put all your, your investment, sort of hopes in our model. And clearly they can’t, can’t all win.

You know, I think, I think there are some really interesting things to come out of the AI and kind of data sharing platform apps and that kind of thing. And we’re starting to see quite a bit of that happening now. It’s kind of enabling technology to give us a better translation engine between the assets on your books and the assets on another company’s books, and find ways to match up people who need something with people who have that asset, so that we’re keeping everything in use instead of it just, you know, lying dormant in in the corner of a storeroom somewhere.

So in terms of AI optimism regarding the circular economy? What? What ways have you seen AI used to to make our economy in any way more circular?

Yeah, there’s a couple of apps I’ve come across recently, one called fair Cardo sits in the corner of your browser. And if you’re looking to buy something online, whether that’s from a retail store or even, you know, from an existing second hand site, it will look for similar things, and it’ll pop up with with second hand options that you can easily compare.

And then there are lots of platform apps helping people either find what they’re looking for, or, you know, find, find the optimum source for this. And I think it’s, you know, it’s got lots of potential, particularly in terms of machine learning and getting better at responding to the exact nature of somebody’s query,

so in terms of some degree of hope that you could communicate to people out there as to that this is working or. Going in the right direction, or picking up steam, or anything like that. What are your What are your signs that there are there’s some reason to be hopeful.

Yeah, I’m conscious I do sound a bit a bit cynical about quite a lot of things. I guess, thinking back about the different editions of the of the book sitting down to write the first one in 2016 was when the circular economy had sort of been heard of by a few people, but it certainly wasn’t mainstream. And I spent ages looking for credible examples across a range of sectors, and really struggling to find things that you know kind of seemed credible.

I even, I remember there was, there was one from Ford and Heinz about using waste tomato skins to make a material for the upholstery and Ford cars. And I even went back to look at the date of the press release to make sure it wasn’t April the first because that kind of seemed a bit, you know, it was possible, but was this? Was this going to be real?

And sure enough, when I came to write the second edition in 2020, I went back to find out what had happened to that there was nothing beyond that first press release. So I was glad. I was glad I’d kind of, I think I even put a bit of a note in the introduction to say I was slightly apprehensive that it was going to go anywhere.

But yeah, the second edition, my challenge then, was how I could fit all these brilliant examples in that I’d been cataloging. You know, I’ve now got well over 1000 in in my own database. And when it came to the third edition, I was kind of expecting to just, you know, be able to include some of the brilliant examples that have featured on the circular economy podcast and from other people that I’ve come across.

And this time, I realized that actually what I’d been collecting was loads of new research, particularly around behavior change, around things like the psychology of ownership, about customer journeys, as well as about making the business case. So yes, there were lots of new examples, but now more you know, thought leaders and academics and people really interested in this were finding ways to help businesses integrate this properly into their strategies and make it something that helps a business be much more resilient and profitable and to engage really deeply with its customers.

Well, that’s great that you do see some momentum gathering and and more players entering the field. And, of course, the more minds we have working on this, the better. So that’s that is positive in terms of, well, you have a popular podcast yourself, the circular economy podcast. How did that evolve? When did it start and and how’s it going?

Yeah, it started in 2019, I think, when I’d had a few conversations at conferences and things like that with businesses and realized that particularly the disruptive businesses, weren’t really getting air time, and I wanted to really find stories that I could share with the general public to spark ideas in existing businesses, for them to hear something and think, Well, we could be doing something similar to that, or to hear, well, this, this is something that works in fashion.

Why couldn’t it work in tech? Or why couldn’t it work in, you know, hardware, things like product as a service, and, you know, making by products out of your your existing products, all those kind of things. So it’s kind of just moved from there. I try and set the bar quite high, so I’ll only cover circular materials if I think they’re really game changing, and hardly ever cover recycling.

So it’s all about the core strategies, or its conversations with people, highlighting some of the issues of staying on the path that we’re on around plastics and pollution, around health, that kind of stuff, things that perhaps aren’t getting much coverage in the newspapers.

I don’t know if you have heard of or interviewed, Joshua Spodek, who is a sustainability guru out of New York City. He’s got a podcast as well, and he put out a recent book, sustainability. I don’t know if it’s simplified. I’m not sure the exact name right off that my head. But anyway, he lives in Manhattan without any connection to the grid, which is kind of challenging, but that are we? Are you seeing more people? Like that kind of take the jump to actually live this sustainable life.

No, I guess, I guess more people are struggling with the discomfort that comes from living in this take waste society. So I’m seeing more people wanting to spend time researching companies that are doing things better, or, you know, a different, a different way of either buying clothing or traveling or having holidays and so on. So I don’t, I don’t see a whole load of people, kind of, you know, stepping off entirely, but I am seeing more interest.

nd I think every change that somebody makes makes them feel better. You know, deeply we’re doing something that connects with our values. You know, we we don’t really want to be buying things that somebody’s made on a less than living wage, or somebody’s had to work in incredibly unsafe and toxic conditions to make something just so we can have it cheaper. You know, once we think about that, we don’t really want to be putting our name to it, do we?

So I think it chimes with more people’s, you know, deep seated values, and I think that’s what’s spurring people on. And the more you do, even though it can feel effortful as soon as you’ve changed that habit, you now feel empowered to go on and do the next thing. And I think people are struggling with eco anxiety, whether consciously or not. You know, it’s it doesn’t seem like the world’s getting better anytime soon.

What people are worried for their children, and the more you can do to have agency around something, the more empowered you feel to kind of, you know, either vote for something or speak up about something, or just vote with your wallet and make sure you’re supporting companies that really share your values.

Well, that’s I appreciate that I always like to focus on what we can do today and doing something today, other than the examples that you mentioned, which are all good examples, like voting and voting with our wallets and doing something to be more sustainable. What are anything else that you kind of offer up to people that you think can leverage this change to help us become a more circular society in years to come.

I think just be thoughtful with purchases. Maybe pick something that you you feel particularly interested in, whether that’s fashion and clothing or food or tech or whatever, you know, pick one thing that you can really get energized about, and then think about how you can make a better choice next time something needs renewing or comes up, and then talk about it with family and friends and get the conversations going, and try and make it normal that way. Don’t make it a kind of, you know, tree hugger type thing, or, you know that we’ve all got to wear a hair shirt.

Find something that’s better and talk about why it’s better. And and, you know, like we, like we mentioned, you know, who’s making this and are they paid a living wage, and who’s paying tax on it, and is that helping my company’s tax receipts? Or actually, is this company offshoring all its profits? And you know, I’ve just helped them do that.

Those are all good ideas. Many companies claim to embrace the circular economy, but you’ve said that most are still operating in a linear mindset. What’s the key difference between a true circular thinking and just recycling better?

It’s got to sit at the heart of your strategy. You’ve really got to think about, you know, what’s coming through the factory gate. What are all these materials, some of which will be on the critical materials list, and how can we really maximize the value of those for ourselves as a business, and for anybody who’s going to use them. And so it’s it’s a complete shift in mindsets. It’s really starting to acknowledge that the business landscape has changed forever.

You know, if we look back 2030, years, nobody was really talking about critical materials. Nobody was really talking about regular supply chain disruptions. And, you know, people weren’t really thinking about carbon emissions and pollutions in everyday pollution in everyday products and so on. So recognizing that, you know, there are no new horizons now where we can go and find new resources, new markets or sources of cheap labor.

You know, we’re we’re a still growing, vast population on a tiny planet with depleted resources. And once you start to get your mind around that, and think of your business as part of a massive ecosystem, you. Then I think businesses can start to think differently. But this isn’t a quick fix, you know, the the low hanging fruit are not going to make a difference. And doing things like, you know, making things more recyclable, or swapping some materials is probably just going to add complexity and cost, and it’s not really going to, you know, make a business case for the for the company going forward.

So I think it’s really about thinking long term and thinking, if everything carries on going in this direction, you know, next time there might be 100 materials on the critical materials list, the cost of everything’s gone up, what could we be doing differently to make sure that our business is more resilient against that and in a more future fit position, you know, hitting a window of viability, if you like, between efficiency and resilience.

So why do you think so many established businesses limit their circular strategies to just circular materials, instead of redesigning the business models around reuse, repair or sharing, because it is complex, isn’t it?

It’s, you know, redesigning your business model is not something you can do in in a few months. And I think a lot of companies are dealing with being in this, you know, volatile, unpredictable world where we have, you know, tariffs popping up, we have climate disruptions, we have, you know, key shipping routes being blocked, all that kind of thing. And often companies are kind of thinking, well, let’s deal with this hurdle.

Or at the moment it might be Now, let’s get AI into our strategy. Let’s deal with that, and then we’ll come back to sustainability. Because people aren’t really looking at the big picture and the long term. It’s, you know, it’s, it’s all about short term. What do investors want short term? How do I get the next quarter’s results in?

And that really is a, you know, an immense pressure on business leaders, as I’m sure lots of your guests have talked about, and so it’s hard to kind of say we need to look at the long term. Otherwise we might not be here in five years time. We might be a stranded asset.

Yeah, things are moving so fast, one needs to really be thoughtful as to where we’re all going. How can companies make that shift from product based models to service or access based ones, and what barriers are standing in the way?

Yeah, I think particularly around moving to product as a service, it can be difficult. There’s a big cash flow implication, so some companies are struggling to fund that, and I think you have to get really clear on the value proposition for your customer, whether that’s a business to business customer, or, you know, somebody sitting at home.

So how is this service going to be better for them? How are you removing the burden of ownership from them? What else can you provide because of your expertise around this product, that they either couldn’t do themselves, or that if they’re going to do it, it’s a lot more expensive. You’ve probably heard of the Rolls Royce power by the hour example, which is one of the longest standing examples, where Rolls Royce don’t sell their engines to aircraft users.

They sell the function of that engine on an hourly basis. And both the customer, the airline, and Rolls Royce have perfectly aligned objectives out of that. Everybody wants maximum uptime, maximum safety and value for money, and by selling power by the hour, that’s what Rolls Royce are able to do. And they’re using new technology, new digital technology, technology, excuse me, and so on, to monitor performance so they can do preventative maintenance.

And, you know, really keep on top of both the costs and the efficiency and effectiveness of that engine. And there are other examples. There’s a company called care in Singapore that’s doing air conditioning as a service and providing all the consumables, and, you know, really optimizing the outputs of air conditioning.

That is fascinating. I did not know about the power by the hour. By Rolls Royce, how long have they been doing that,

since at least the 1990s and I think it’s the airline industry is quite interesting in that they airlines don’t really buy anything. Apparently, even, you know, seats and cabin equipment, it’s all leased.

So it’s very much in the supplier’s interest to make something that can come back and be refurbished and go out again, maybe to a low cost airline or something. So it’s, it’s, you know, it’s really helping normalize that model of Operation across a whole range of suppliers and customers.

So what are some of the most what are some of the most exciting examples you’ve seen of organizations creating circular value beyond materials, perhaps through collaboration, design innovation or community partnerships?

Yeah, so there’s a company called Tulu, t, u, l, u, and they’re providing the kind of equipment that people use every day. Well, not people every day. People use regularly, but not enough to have to want to own one so things to help people cook, clean. Do I do DIY? Maybe host a party?

So it might be a carpet shampoo, or it might be a barbecue, it might be, you know, some disco equipment, something like that. So Tulu were providing that equipment in housing units across the United States and in about another 15 countries now, I think, and as a resident in the building, you go down, you book what you need, and you pay for it, and then you take it back.

And so Tulu were using products provided by big brands, and they’re able to provide data back to those brands to say how this is performed in a kind of multi user environment. What do people like about it? What did people dislike? Was it easy to use? And that model is so popular with the residents that if people move and go to another another block of flats or another city, they’re asking the landlord, before they move in, have you got Tulu you know, can you provide the to lose service.

Because this is really good. Why do we want to try and why do we want to have to buy a bigger flat to fit all this stuff in and pay for it and for it to sit there depreciating, when we could just go downstairs and, you know, rent it by the hour or by the day? It’s just such a much, much better service

that is fascinating. So for some smaller legacy businesses without big an R and D budget, what’s a realistic first step towards true circularity?

Yeah, I don’t really think it’s about R and D. I think it’s about, you know, looking at the business model and how you could change this. And I think a first step would be to imagine what would happen if you gave a lifetime warranty on your products. You know, how is your product performing if you’ve been making something for a long time?

Then does it last as long as it used to? You know, if we, if we think about washing machines, laundry machines these days, we probably think we’ve done quite well, if their last five years, but if we go back 40 years, we’d have expected them to last decades. Now, does a washing machine actually do anything that much different? It might have got more complicated, but that’s at the behest of the manufacturer, not of the of the user.

You know, we probably all use about three programs, and we’d be quite happy just turning a dial to get the program that we need and having something that’s easy to repair when the bearings go, not for us to be told, Oh, you’re going to buy a whole new drum, and that’s two thirds the cost of a machine. So, you know, we kid ourselves that innovation is essential, but it’s, you know, it’s not always heading in the right direction.

So I think imagine if you were giving a lifetime warranty. How would you design things differently? How would you make it more repairable? How would you put repair services in every city? Would you partner with somebody to do that? How would you get good information from people as to what was going wrong and and what they found annoying?

You know, there’s that adage isn’t that, if you provide a faulty product and you don’t sort out what went wrong with it? That person, that customer, tells about 10 people, whereas if you’ve managed to resolve the problem, that customer gives good feedback to many more people. And you know…

On your I was gonna, sorry about that, your circular economy podcast features change makers from around the world who are putting circular ideas into action, which guest or conversations have shifted your under your own understanding of what’s possible?

Yeah, well, quite, quite a lot, actually. And I think the ones that I found most interesting are the ones that have sort of approached it with a different, a different way of thinking. So ulex, again, in the in the United States, they’re trying to replace, replace problematic materials, primarily plastics, with something that’s better.

And they started out with neoprene. So. Using a natural latex material to replace neoprene in wetsuits and so on. And one of their sort of key, the key parts of their ethos was, how can we make this as easy as possible for every manufacturer of neoprene?

So how if we look at it from a systems thinking point of view, how little can we do to help them adopt this so they don’t have to invest in new machinery, they don’t have to suddenly work out how on earth to make this and that kind of ethos, I think, is really interesting and has really helped them get a foothold in lots of different manufacturing businesses, because all you’ve got to do is swap the material.

Everything else carries on as it was before. So the barrier to entry for those, those people taking on the new, you know, slightly left field material, is suddenly a lot lower, and so things like that. That’s what I was talking about in terms of sparking ideas and helping people think about, if we were doing this in our business, you know, how would we use that ethos? How could that help us lower the bar the, you know, lower the barriers to entry for collaborators that we need?

So the term regenerative economy is gaining some traction. How do you see it differing from or expanding upon the circular economy concept?

Yeah, I think it takes circularity and a necessary step further. So when we think about where we are today, we know that we need to do an awful lot of restoring, of repairing, of regenerating, of both finite materials. You know, if we we can’t, if we can’t find new sources of something, then we’ve got to regenerate, say, from landfills even. And we know that biodiversity is really struggling that, you know, we don’t have more land, so we have to regenerate land. We’re seeing societies that have been left, left behind because they’ve lost jobs.

So can we regenerate communities by providing circular economy jobs involved in repairing, remanufacturing and so on. So the whole regenerative mindset, I think, is really helpful, and it’s a way for companies to think, How can we really make sure we’ve got a positive impact on society? You know? What? How do we earn our license to operate? How do we do something that’s really helping people and planet over the long term?

So is the title to your next book, The circular and Regenerative Economy Handbook?

Yeah, or maybe I’ll go straight for Regenerative. Yeah.

So looking ahead, how might AI data sharing or digital project product passports impact the transition to a circular and regenerative economy?

Yeah, I think we, we touched on this earlier. So data sharing and AI can really help matching those who have with those who need, you know, finding sources of materials, finding a better product, finding a even, finding, you know, who, who can give me a remanufactured Dell, all those kind of searches are going to be a lot easier with with AI in terms of the process of remanufacturing or refurbishing, then AI can perhaps help with the diagnostics around what actually needs replacing. How do we do this in the most effective and least cost, way and product passports.

They’re coming in across the EU. Unfortunately, they’re more about a passport for a batch of products. So for you know, a kind of given batch of cars or children’s push chairs or whatever, you would know what materials were in there, what should happen to it at the end of its life and so on. But you wouldn’t necessarily know for your particular car, what repairs have been done, what remanufactured parts it has, who owned it before? You all that kind of stuff.

So I think you know that can go further to really help products have a much longer life, and for the user at that product to be confident in what’s gone into the product, and you know where it where it came from, from, like a 30,000 foot view.

Do you see any movement towards decoupling our economies and national policy makers, from looking at GNP to something that it’s a metric that is measures circularity and regenerative economy values?

Yeah, that’s a great question. And the I guess it’s one of the the myths that I think is really. Holding us back this myth that success is all about growth for companies, growth of revenue, selling more stuff to more people every year, and for governments, growth in GNP, but none of that actually has any bearing on on well being.

I’m sure you’ve had people saying before that. You know, wars increase gross national product, gross domestic product, as do you know, disasters and all that kind of stuff. So we don’t necessarily want more of those. And one of the interesting reports, a report that comes out every year called the Circularity Gap Report, which is put together by a consultancy called circle economy, in partnership with Deloitte, so they were measuring at a country level, the extent of recycling, which has gone down every year since they started measuring it.

So on that basis, we’re getting less circular. And what they’ve started to realize is that maybe they should be focusing on a more impactful measure. So they’re comparing things like the United Nations Human Development Index with gross national product per person to say, actually, there is no metric that says the richer per person a country gets, the happier and more fulfilled its population is there’s kind of a, you know, a ceiling.

So those kind of metrics could be quite interesting to governments. And I think, you know, the there are, Bhutan is one government that measures well being. I think I don’t see why more governments aren’t, aren’t getting to grips with that. It feels like banging your head against the wall to keep hoping that the economy is going to grow when growth isn’t actually helping your population, and it means, you know, just going to be extracting more stuff and hoping, hoping to dispose of it as soon as possible so people buy yet more stuff.

Well, has there been any movement in any country other than Bhutan to kind of create a well being index versus a GNP index, even if it doesn’t Co Op the GMP entirely, just that it would be running side by side, so that we can measure these things along with GNP and see what’s really the better one to use.

Well, the the measurements are there, already provided by the United Nations, so people can go off and look for the human development index and see what their country is doing. I think Costa Rica is getting pretty interested in in using that. And then obviously some of the political parties in in other countries are pushing to start including more than just GMP, GDP, in the in the in the kind of key measures. But, yeah, it’s not, it’s not, it’s not something that I’ve gone off and done a lot of of research on.

Yeah, it’s pretty remarkable what Costa Rica has done in terms of, I think most all of their power is now, you know, from renewable sources and and their economy is doing quite well, and they don’t have an army either, so they hit on a lot of different metrics. What’s, what’s one Circular Economy myth that you wish every CEO CEO would stop repeating?

I guess you know that that we can carry on growing, and we just need to focus on some circular materials and you know, and that will get us started. I think the danger of doing that is that it’s costly, it’s complex. It doesn’t really achieve anything, and it can switch people inside the company off the circular economy altogether.

So I think it really has to be looking at systems thinking and getting to grips with what the picture is out there, you know, what the market conditions really are, and how they’re going to pan out over the next 10 to 15 years and thinking, Well, you know, okay, we’re starting from here. But what do we need to do differently to make our company more future fit?

Well, just kind of asking the question from a shareholder value, if I’m a shareholder in one of these companies, am I going to be wary of it becoming a circular economy focus, versus a making me money concern?

Yeah, I think that is a valid concern, and companies need to be able to make a robust business case. And this. Means, you know, piloting things, getting to really understand how this is working, if it’s not work, if it’s not getting take up, or if it’s costing more than you thought. Or, you know, there’s some unforeseen consequences.

Then if you’re piloting things, and really, you know, taking slow steps through it. You can see what’s going well and what’s not going well, and you can tweak accordingly. But I think you know, coming back to the myths, one of the biggest myths, really, is that when you hear people, people in companies, saying, our customers don’t want this because they’ve kind of got a vision of the circular economy that, you know, it should be the same price as what we’ve got now, but you know, suddenly last longer and be more recyclable.

So it’s about finding out what people really want from their products and starting to deliver that, maybe through an as a service model, maybe through something that has an agreed take back price. So you know, you keep it three years, and if you don’t want it any longer, then you sell it back to us. So really putting the brand and the brand promise behind the products that are going into the market.

Now, if every company adopted one circular economy or regenerative practice, what? What are the ones that you think would make the biggest impact,

making things more durable and extending the warranty? You know it’s it really is about putting your money and your reputation behind what you’re putting into the market and moving away from this mindset that, you know, we want people to be buying as many as possible and replacing them as quickly as possible, that’s that really is a kind of race to the bottom and self sabotage.

So I think it’s, it really is about seeing every molecule of materials that comes in through the factory gate as precious and finite and thinking, how can we get the most value out of this while it’s under our control?

Is there any app out there that would rate products to tell a consumer whether it’s a circular, regenerative product or just green washing.

There are a few apps that I think are trying to do that, but, yeah, maybe that’s something that AI could help with in in a year or two’s time.

Yeah, I guess it is pretty challenging. You have to kind of look in the supply chains as to whether or not the product is being sourced from, from really good sources, or whether or not there’s a lot of dirty materials that are being used downstream. So yeah, maybe there’s some hope the AI can help bring some clarity to these issues, so that as a consumer, I can just look at it, scan the code and say, up, this is a bad product, or this is a good one.

And that’s what the digital product passport could do going forward, as long as the information is good, you know, we we see examples of very well known brands, don’t we being called out because suddenly their supply chain has been found to be, you know, non compliant, and somebody subcontracted to a company that that nobody’s ever heard of and that hasn’t been audited. And everybody goes, oh, you know that wasn’t supposed to happen, but it does, right?

That’s great. ny book or film you’d recommend to those overwhelmed by climate anxiety these days?

Yeah, well, obviously I’d like people to buy my book, but I think a slimmer, much slimmer version, and something a bit different, is a book called The wonderful circles of Oz, as in The Wizard of Oz, by Ken Webster, one of the founding thinkers and thought leaders in the circular economy, and Alex Duff, so the wonderful circles of us, by Ken Webster and Alex Duff, and that takes the circular economy into the economy level and looks at how, how We could be living very differently, if our economy itself, not just the products and services, but the economy itself, was circular.

So it’s really a really interesting read, and, you know, should spark lots of ideas for people as to how we could live differently.

It’s almost like a science fiction book as to examining or imagining a future that doesn’t exist, but that’s one worth having, so a good use of our imagination. Catherine, great to have you on the program. Everybody should go out and check out your book, the circular economy handbook, and also tune into your podcast on the circular economy, where can they find your book and where can they find your podcast?

So people can find the book at any good bookseller, and I can send you a discount code afterwards to buy direct from the publisher, which ships free worldwide and has a quite nice two for one bundle. So ebook and print for the same price as one book, and then the podcast on any good podcast platform. So it’s called The Circular Economy Podcast.

Well, thank you for your great work and your leadership in this area, and glad to see that we are making some progress there. Though, a lot more needs to be done. So everybody go out there and do something today and be a part of this change.

Thank you again, Catherine.

Thanks Matt, and thanks for a really interesting conversation.

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