Sailing single-handed around the world, Ellen MacArthur had with her the absolute minimum of resources in order to be as light, and therefore fast, as possible. Stopping en route to restock was not an option, and careful resource management was a matter of life or death - running out of energy to power the autopilot means the boat can turn upside down in seconds. Having been constantly aware of the supply limits of her boat, after stepping back ashore she began to see that the world is no different. In her TED talk Ellen takes you through her journey from record-breaking yachtswoman to the founder of a charity with the mission to accelerate the transition towards a circular economy. Listen to an extract from Ellen’s TED talk.
The surprising thing I learned sailing solo around the world | TED2015
TED Talk excerpt provided by permission of TED.
Listen to Ellen MacArthur
A circular economy is based on the principles of designing out waste and pollution, keeping products and materials in use, and regenerating natural systems.
A transformation in our ability to make things changed society.
We’ve been at a turning point before. In 1684 Thomas Savery invented the steam engine and it changed everything. This invention kick-started the industrial revolution, which transformed our ability to make things. Raw materials and energy were seemingly infinite, and labour was readily available. For the first time in history, goods were mass produced.
We now have the knowledge and tools to build an economy that is fit for the 21st Century.
The current system is no longer working for businesses, people or the environment.
We take resources from the ground to make products, which we use, and, when we no longer want them, throw them away. Take-make-waste. We call this a linear economy.
The linear economy has to change.
We must transform all the elements of the take-make-waste system: how we manage resources, how we make and use products, and what we do with the materials afterwards. Only then can we create a thriving economy that can benefit everyone within the limits of our planet.
"We’re using mushrooms to create an entirely new class of materials which perform a lot like plastic during their use but are made from crop waste and are totally compostable at the end of their lives."
Ecovative produce packaging products that are fully compostable alternatives to synthetic materials. They are made of mycelium - the ‘roots’ of mushrooms - grown in and around agricultural by-products with low economic value, acting thereby as a glue, and can take any shape needed. At the end of use, the packaging can be composted at home.
Single-use packaging, which includes expanded polystyrene (EPS) protective packaging, forms a significant portion of the 8 millions tonnes of plastic that enter our oceans every year.
Ecovative offer an alternative to expanded polystyrene packaging. Their home compostable solution offers the same protective capabilities as EPS and is able to compete on cost.
The raw material used is agricultural feedstock - parts of plants that cannot be used for food or feed, therefore with low economic value. These are cleaned and inoculated with mushroom tissue. The mycelium grows in 5-7 days by digesting the agricultural by-product and binding into the shape needed. At the end of use, the packaging can be safely composted at home.
The minimal processing required reduces the cost of the product and enables its economic viability. Additionally, the technique can use multiple feedstocks, allowing Ecovative to use locally available crops. Since commercially launching in 2010, Ecovative has opened a new production facility and is supplying their packaging to a growing number of Fortune 500 companies.
Find out more on the Ecovative website.
"When our crop variations go up and down we have another outlet to manage the volume of sugar. This makes the plant more resilient, and can cope with variations in weather, sunshine and rain."
There are plenty of hot startups with a new technology that can accelerate the transition to a circular economy. Yet some of the best examples don't rely on new tech, but instead on the gradual evolution of processes and a precise understanding of energy and resource flows. Continual improvement, collaboration and systems thinking are the name of the game. At British Sugar’s Factory in Norfolk, these are very much on display.
Wissington is a beet sugar plant established in 1925, as part of British Sugar. The plant supplies 420,000 tonnes of sugar a year in various formats, extracting it from the sugar beet grown around the East of England. To produce all of that sugar requires 3.5 million tonnes of raw material much of which could be destined for landfill.
The team at Wissington have continually evaluated their operation to create value from previously wasted energy and materials. The result is a factory that doesn't just produce sugar, but 12 different saleable products, from valuable chemicals to food for animals and humans. For example, The soil and stone removed during processing isn't seen as waste, but is instead sold at a volume of 150,000 tonnes a year. Wissington is also home to the UK's first bioethanol fuel plant, where British Sugar - reacting to the supply and demand of their core product - use some of the extracted beet sugar syrup to produce around 55,000 tonnes of renewable fuel each year.
British Sugar are clearly motivated to develop a diverse business that can run all year round and is resilient from external shocks. Producing such a wide variety of outputs provides multiple profit creation opportunities. Additionally, treating waste as a useful resource means costs such as landfill taxes are reduced.
Read more about British Sugar’s Wissington plant on their website.
"We don’t worry too much about the crop itself - we take care of the whole ecosystem"
The executive vice-president of the Balbo Group, Leontino Balbo Junior, made the bet that restoring natural processes and modifying machinery in order to regenerate the ecosystem could revive ailing crops and land, as well as boost profitability.
Traditional industrial methods of crop cultivation rely on expensive pesticides and fertilisers and often lead to natural degradation. Those conventional methods focused primarily on crop extraction, inhibiting naturally-occurring features that are crucial to soil health and long-term resilience, such as mulch, humus and microbial and fungal networks.
Regenerative agriculture, which is inspired by natural processes aims to return organic matter to the biosphere, thus enhancing soil and avoiding the need for costly chemicals. The aim is to rebuild soil quality and natural capital, rather than deplete it.
The farm has developed its own harvesting equipment with low pressure tyres to avoid harmful compaction, that simultaneously cuts cane and shreds by-products returning them back to the soil. Potentially harmful chemical fertilisers were replaced by a unique Integrated Organic Fertilisation Programme. Pesticides were exchanged for a natural pest and disease management system, which uses naturally resistant crop varieties, a biological control programme, and cultural control methods to inhibit pests and weeds.
The farm produces 75,000 tonnes of organic sugar annually – 34% of the world market – and 55,000m3 of organic ethanol each year from a crop of approximately 1.2 million tonnes of cane. The Balbo Group produces 100% of the energy it needs to process around 6 million tonnes of sugarcane per year in thermoelectric power plants running on sugarcane bagasse (the pulpy residue left after the juice of the sugarcane has been extracted). Beyond that, thanks to its investment in cutting-edge technology, Balbo has generated enough extra power to supply a city of 476,000 inhabitants.
Read an expanded version of this case study.
"At the end of the day, we are here to try and make the best jeans we can and not the most jeans we can"
The Hiut Denim Company was founded by husband and wife team, David and Clare Hieatt. The name is a combination of the first two letters of their surname and the first two letters of utility, and their owl logo represents the family of owls who nest in the barn opposite the ‘chicken shed’ in which they started the business. They are based in Cardigan, Wales, on the Irish Sea coast and began after the closure of a local factory that had been producing 35,000 pairs of jeans a week.
The New Textiles Economy cites more than half of fast fashion produced is estimated to be disposed of in under a year. The fast nature of this type of industry places associated pressure on natural and social systems. The economic costs of these negative externalities is difficult to quantify, but thought to be in the region of USD 192 billion.
Hiut make approximately 120 pairs of jeans each week - each pair is skillfully made by a highly trained ‘Grand Master’ and takes about 1 hour 10 mins to make, compared to the 11 minutes of some bigger factories. Hiut offer free repairs on the wear and tear of their jeans, keeping them in use for many years.
Designing clothes that are built to last and repairing them when necessary ensures they are kept in use and helps to address the disposable nature of a linear system which frequently results in clothes ending up as waste. Hiut’s more direct relationship with their customers also means they maintain better margins which they can invest in their business and the Grand Masters.
Hiut sell direct to customers online and offer wholesale accounts to independent denim shops who have a similar outlook on quality and design. The business continues to grow with a requirement now for more space.
Gerrard Street headphones is a startup based in the Netherlands who have embraced two key building blocks of the circular economy. The design of their products is modular and no glue is used so they are easy to disassemble, repair or add new hardware. The components are durable and standardised, so that up to 85% of can be looped into new models. The headphones are offered to customers as a subscription rather than a transactional purchase.
Globally we throw away 15 million kg of headphones every year either due to simple mechanical faults or because of technology advances. How can we capture the value that is being lost in this discarded material?
Gerrard Street Customers get both an affordable high quality product and a high level of service and support. Included in the monthly subscription fee, is a guarantee that if the product is damaged or an upgrade is available then the customer returns the old headphones and is sent a replacement.
Gerrard Street has designed beautiful, high sound quality headphones that are modular and easily disassemblable to facilitate easy repair, refurbishment or upgrade. The use of a subscription business model allows them to recover headphones at the end of their use and 85% of components are ultimately reused.
Combining durable design with a subscription business model means that Gerrard Street can increase its revenue through maximising the use cycles for every pair of headphones produced. The focus on standardised parts, repairability and reuse reduces costs as fewer virgin materials are required. At the same time, the company can form a closer relationship with its customers, and has a more reliable and predictable material supply chain.
"I told Philips, ‘Listen, I need so many hours of light in my premises every year. If you think you need a lamp, or electricity, or whatever – that’s fine. But I want nothing to do with it. I’m not interested in the product, just the performance. I want to buy light, and nothing else."
Philips designed a circular lighting service that provides guaranteed lighting performance with regard to energy, light level and uptime. Philips retain ownership of the lights and take care of the reuse, refurbishing or recycling to ensure customers get maximum value from the lighting system.
The current linear economy operates on a take, make, dispose basis reliant on selling as many products as possible to consumers. To shift to a circular economy, businesses need to explore new business models that allow products to be used again and again and again.
Philips offer a service option allowing you to pay for the light you use, rather than an upfront investment in the materials. For customers this results in potential maintenance cost savings of 60% and 20% more cost effective upgradability.
The principle of light as a service is simple: instead of buying the light fitting, you buy the light. When the contract period is over, the customer has the option to extend the contract, upgrading the existing lighting or opt for new lighting. By retaining ownership of the fittings, Philips is incentivised to design long-lasting fittings that allow for fast repair or replacement.
This light as a service business model began as a collaboration with architect Thomas Rau. It has since been developed into a commercial offering from Philips that has been used in places such as Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam and the National Union of Students in the UK.
Find out more on the Philips website.
A balanced supply of nutrients is essential for healthy plant growth. In the absence of human activities, natural processes such as biodegradation as well as symbiotic relationships with other species in the local ecosystem provide sufficient nutrition for the plant life cycle, albeit in an environment of healthy competition. Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies, a Vancouver-based company, has taken a systemic approach to managing nutrient flows. The result is an innovative wastewater add-on process and a pure fertiliser product that creates revenue for the business.
The current linear approach to agriculture removes important nutrients from the soil, passes them through a value chain and discards them in a way that can lead to unproductive soil and negative environmental impacts. There are finite reserves of many key resources and in some cases, such as phosphorus, there is no synthetic alternative.
Ostara has developed technology that can be incorporated into wastewater treatment plants allowing phosphorus and other nutrients to be recovered from industrial and municipal wastewater streams. The product can then be marketed, distributed and sold to blenders, growers and farmers as a pure and effective fertiliser, produced from resources that would otherwise be wasted.
Ostara also avoids negative impacts to the local aquatic environment, contributes to positive urban-rural connectivity and reduces carbon intensity associated with agriculture. In global terms, greenhouse gas emissions are reduced as each tonne of recovered fertiliser eliminates 10 tonnes of CO2e compared to equivalent standard fertilisers. If scaled up, this could be an important contribution to reducing the carbon intensity of the agricultural sector, which is estimated to be responsible for 17% of emissions.
Ostara’s nutrient recovery system provides financial benefits to farmers, utility companies and shareholders. Utility companies are financially better off, as an additional revenue stream has been created through fertiliser sales. Besides these extra profits, their operational costs are also lowered as less chemicals are needed to manage struvite deposits, and there is a 10-20% reduction in leftover sludge requiring disposal.
For more details please view this video
For us, the digestate is a better fertiliser than raw manure, as the nitrogen is converted into a form which is easier to uptake by the plants.
In the foothills of the Alps, spread out on the southern bank of Lake Geneva is a very important 35 sq km area of land. The Plateau de Gavot is the water catchment for Danone’s Evian brand. A core concern for Danone is preserving the purity of the natural water supply, but this needs to be balanced against the other activities on the plateau. The land uses over the catchment are predominantly natural: grasslands, wetlands and forests; but there are also a number of villages and farms.
One of the biggest potential risks to water quality relates to dairy farming. To provide winter feed for their livestock, farmers on the Plateau cultivate grass using raw manure as fertiliser. It was observed that one method of manure application entailed concentrated manure being applied on specific grasslands or during bad weather conditions, which through accidental spills and runoff poses both a risk to surface streams as well as, through soil percolation, to Evian water’s purity.
Danone initiated the Terragr'eau project: a collection scheme and an anaerobic digestion plant that produces biogas and converts hazardous raw manure to benign but regenerating bio-solids. At the heart of the project is the methanisation unit that produces energy and digestate out of local agricultural effluents.
At the heart of the circular economy is the ambition to collaborate, create prosperity (both locally and globally), regenerate natural capital and design out waste. Terragr’eau is a great illustration of systems thinking, allowing all of these ambitions to be achieved. Through this project, water contamination risks are eliminated, meadows are naturally fertilised and 1 million cubic metres of bio-gas is injected into the local gas grid.
The Terragr'eau project has been a co-operation involving a number of different stakeholders including the Evian Country Community (CCPE), 41 local farmers, Danone and the Danone Ecosystem Fund. Revenue from the gas sales covers the manure collection and the operating costs. The energy value of the gas produced is 9200 MWh which is enough to heat 900 houses.
For a video presentation of the project.
A small-scale, organic farming system in Japan is currently providing a rice yield that exceeds industrial rice systems’ harvests by 20-50%. The higher yield combined with the production of a variety of other food stuffs, grown synergistically with the rice, means that with just six acres, Japanese farmer Takao Furuno sometimes eclipses the gross income of a typical 600 acre rice farm in Texas.
Small margins on agricultural produce, means making a decent living from farming often requires large scale production. However most farmers around the world only have access to a small plot. Can these farms still make healthy profits?
Using none of the fossil fuel fertilisers and pesticides traditionally required to grow high-yield monoculture crops the farm, which has been modelled on complex dynamic living systems, produces an impressive range of food products, including rice, duck eggs, fish, duck meat, vegetables, wheat and figs.
The complex multi-species farm, which is completely independent of any outside farm inputs, first requires rice seedlings to be set into flooded rice paddies, before introducing a raft of ducklings. Insects that normally feed on the young rice plants, provide food for the ducklings. Mr Furuno then introduces loaches, which are a variety of easily cultivated fish, and Azolla, a water fern, which fixes nitrogen from the air providing a natural substitute for artificial fertilisers. Its growth is kept under control by the grazing ducks and fish. The fish and duck droppings provide additional nutrients that the rice needs to flourish.
Cost savings from eliminating fertilisers and pesticides and increased yields mean Furuno can market his rice at a 20-30% premium over conventionally grown rice in Japan. This very successful, organic synergy now sees Furuno enjoy an annual income of USD 160,000, while his methods have been shared and employed by 75,000 small-scale farmers in Japan, as well as South Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, China, Taiwan, India, Cuba and Bangladesh.
Further information can be found in this video.
It’s a new way to design, make, and use things within planetary boundaries.
Shifting the system involves everyone and everything: businesses, governments, and individuals; our cities, our products, and our jobs. By designing out waste and pollution, keeping products and materials in use, and regenerating natural systems we can reinvent everything.
With new ways of thinking we can redesign the system. Continue learning about the circular economy and the role that you can play in accelerating the shift.
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