Ep 205: 2025 in review: unlocking the circular economy opportunity

[01:00:07.500] - Pippa Shawley

Welcome to the Circular Economy Show, and it's already time for our end-of-year review. I'm once again joined by my colleagues, Finn and Lou.

[01:00:15.160] - Lou

Hi.

[01:00:15.480] - Pippa Shawley

Thanks for joining.

[01:00:16.240] - Finley Phillips

Nice to be here.

[01:00:17.960] - Pippa Shawley

It's been an amazing year for the podcast and for the Circular Economy. I think we've recorded about 35 episodes. We've covered loads of stuff, and I've asked you both to pick out a few highlights there. I've picked out a couple myself.

[01:00:30.020] - Finley Phillips

Tough decision.

[01:00:30.980] - Pippa Shawley

Really hard, right?

[01:00:32.760] - Lou

I personally cannot believe it was a year ago that we were set here talking about the same thing.

[01:00:39.500] - Pippa Shawley

Well, I think it's moved on a little bit.

[01:00:41.140] - Lou

It's flown. It's literally flown.

[01:00:43.820] - Pippa Shawley

Yeah, it really has.

[01:00:44.980] - Lou

It's been a busy year.

[01:00:46.040] - Pippa Shawley

Yeah. Well, should we start by-

[01:00:49.000] - Finley Phillips

Let's get into it.

[01:00:49.320] - Pippa Shawley

Looking at Finn's first clip. What have you gone for?

[01:00:53.280] - Finley Phillips

Like I say, hard decision, really. There's been some great episodes this year, different formats as well, which is always interesting. I've gone for the final episode of our most recent series of "Why Circular Business Model Fail to Scale," with yourself, Pippa and Maddie, Maddie and Ella. The particular episode is about getting leadership involved right from the start. We'll hear a little bit in the clip about Ella talking about not just leadership from the start, but about how KPIs and metrics are optimised for linearity, really, not really telling the circular story in the best light and how we can change that. Then we get into some case studies, and Maddie explains a little bit about a retailer who tried a reuse model, and when scaling was attempted, the leadership team weren't really involved and didn't have that affection to the product. I think definitely recommend the full series. Let's take a look at the clip.

[01:01:51.320] - Ella Hedley

No matter how A Circular Business Model pilot or implementation project is, it's not going to scale unless leadership are involved and early. That's something that came up in every interview I think that we had. We had a lot of push from participants that that was a really crucial point that we had to talk to. There's something that we know about circular business models as they are going to require efforts from many different areas of an organisation.

[01:02:19.020] - Ella Hedley

We're talking about changes or iterations or evolution solutions to, in some instances, all departments, certainly if we're looking at a broad scale transformation. There's something about how we make sure that the leadership are brought in, and they have that as a priority, so they can carry on pushing for it, whatever new priorities surface. But also about how you can bring the different functions in on the journey with you and make them part of that story and make them really care.

[01:02:48.860] - Ella Hedley

Something specific that we found in this area, which was really interesting, was around KPIs. Often times, the standard KPIs of an organisation will actually massively impede your ability to make your circular business model scale. For example, if your sales team are working on a KPI that's all about volume of sales of new goods, if you bring in a model that doesn't speak to that, that success isn't demonstrated in that way, they're not going to sell it.

[01:03:22.880] - Pippa Shawley

I'm really glad you put that one out, Finn, because it really resonated with me. I think I said at the beginning of that series that we really focus on the successes and why we need a secular economy and all of that thing. But we don't take a big step back, and it's also quite vulnerable to talk about failure and the challenges. I think from looking at the feedback on that stuff, it's really resonated with the audience as well. My first clip speaks to the same thing as well. I'm going to take us back to the Arc'teryx episode that we recorded in spring and summer this year. That was a mixture of Seb speaking to Katie Wilson from Arc'teryx in Amsterdam in a really beautiful room.

[01:04:01.880] - Finley Phillips

Yeah, great. It was great.

[01:04:03.320] - Pippa Shawley

She should watch that on YouTube just to see the room setting, the glass windows, the carpet. It was beautiful. That's not why you should listen to it. That's not why I picked it out. I also went into the Arc'teryx flagship in London to actually see the tangible circular business model repair centre. That was really cool. But I've picked out a clip of Katie talking about the challenges of applying circular business models to their work, which Seb spoke to her about. Should we have a look at that?

[01:04:30.440] - Lou

Yeah, definitely.

[01:04:34.440] - Katie Wilson

I think the challenges are, they're interesting. They could be quite boring in some ways. It's things like having a point of sale system that allows you to manage a SKU, a single SKU from a product that was brought into a store, so you can resell it. That was a blocker for us for a long time. It's just having the head counter capacity to go out and rebuild the system we've got in North America in another region because you have to start from the ground up. What are the warehouses? Who are the providers?

[01:05:18.660] - Katie Wilson

There's not a globally scaled and consistent experience. Sometimes we're doing it ourselves, and sometimes we've got partners. Replicating that globally is a different challenge. Then I think it's looking at what are those revenue streams? Where's the legitimate revenue stream coming from? How are we making this? There's things like repairs which we offer. Is there a revenue model in there or is free the way to go and build loyalty? If we say no to revenue and repairs, that's shutting down a whole revenue stream in the circularity space. Really teasing those conversations up and down. The way I've operated in the business is really quite opportunistic. We just keep riding the waves. Then, when we hear things move favourably, try to strike.

[01:06:32.360] - Pippa Shawley

Lou, onto you. What was one of your stand-up moments of the year?

[01:06:36.480] - Lou

Definitely two powerhouses in the room, Jonquil Hackenberg and Lindsay Hooper, who was from the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership. Sorry, I struggled to get that one out.

[01:06:50.840] - Finley Phillips

It's a big one.

[01:06:51.120] - Lou

It's a big one.

[01:06:52.160] - Pippa Shawley

Jonquil, who's Adam MacArthur.

[01:06:53.480] - Lou

Our CEO. Talk about to women of power. The conversation was actually riveting. It's actually one of the longest podcasts of this year because when it came to trying to edit it, I kept thinking, no, that's too good to go. That's too good to go. I mean, you could get the sense that these two might become bezzers in real life. They both said they'd love to meet. I don't know if they have met up in person since then. But, yeah, talk about gel. I've picked a clip. They focus, excuse me, specifically on market transformation. This bit is where John Quill asks Lindsay what NGOs, such as ourselves, can do to enable the mobilisation of that transition.

[01:07:46.880] - Pippa Shawley

In this repositioning, what role can NGOs like ours play in moving and shifting goalposts around for market transformation, would you say?

[01:07:57.940] - Lindsay Hooper

If we talk about market-wide change, no single business can do this. We can't rely on a small group of heroic businesses to somehow take leadership and hope the rest will follow or to somehow be sufficiently compelling and persuasive enough that they will tilt whole markets. It will require more and more beyond the usual suspects to engage. I think building pre-competitive coalitions who've all got a vested interest in change, who can all say, Look, this is just good for business. This is good for the economy. It's good for society. If governments were like, we're ready to invest and innovate for the future, I think some of that orchestration in that pre-competitive space.

[01:08:41.180] - Lindsay Hooper

I think there's also a role in supporting some of the market making within value chains. In some sectors that absolutely need to transition, it's incredibly fragmented. Some of the work to actually bridge and create the acceleration infrastructure between the macro where we know it needs to change in this high-level analysis or policy, and the huge range of potential solutions that are all around us.

[01:09:08.620] - Lou

That was just a taste of the rest of that episode. I mean, it was absolutely engaging.

[01:09:15.220] - Pippa Shawley

Lindsay was so good. We had her on the podcast twice this year because the insights were-

[01:09:20.080] - Lou

Yeah, incredible.

[01:09:21.760] - Pippa Shawley

Fimbo, what was your second fave of the year?

[01:09:25.420] - Finley Phillips

Slightly easy decision, actually, because this was my first in-person interview, actually, since I've been working on the podcast. We all went up to London, didn't we? We hired a studio up there, and I spoke to Deb Caldo from Diageo and Rachel O'Reilly from A Sentry Song. This was part of our marketing play book work. The specific episode was about marketers role in scaling the circular economy and what they can do and what they can provide.

[01:09:49.780] - Finley Phillips

I think one of the things I found interesting was just how powerful marketers can be in communicating the circular economy and really bringing it to the consumer. In this particular clip, you get a nice back and forth between Rachel and Deb because Rachel gives a nice consumer angle with the work with the Sentry Song. Then Deb, as the episode goes on, gives you a bit more of the behind-the-scenes reality of getting internal buy-in for a circular solution. We know that that's not easy. We've spoken about the circular business models failing to scale, and internal buy-in is a huge part of that. I really enjoyed the episode. I think people will love it. Definitely check out the full episode, and here's the clip.

[01:10:28.040] - Rachel

Marketers, if I can be so bold, are one of the, if not the, driving forces behind sustainability. If you think about what marketers have always done, they've always convinced people of something to fall in love with. That's their job. I think when it comes to sustainability, suddenly we lose our minds because we stop thinking about that. We start going very technically, we think about risk and how we can suddenly convert people to do something they're not doing. But if you ignore all that and go back to the basics, marketers are there to help sell stories, to talk about stories, and that's what sustainability is at its core. I think they're absolutely fundamental.

[01:11:08.560] - Finley Phillips

Nice. Deb, anything from you on that?

[01:11:10.480] - Deb Caldow

Yeah. I couldn't agree more that whilst it might not be obvious to most marketers at the moment, that actually there is a real role, a real role. It's about what you're talking about there, which is the ability to take a bit of a leap, help consumers take a bit of a leap, and also make things desirable. When we talk about circular solutions that are good for the planet, we also need for them to be desirable for consumers. That is what marketers should do by their very nature and apply it now to a big question with the world.

[01:11:42.860] - Finley Phillips

Inheritably, by doing that, you get the benefits of fostering longer term relationships with the brands, more points of sale. Okay, so we've identified the opportunity, how do we then market those innovations? Rachel, if you could give us a consumer angle to that.

[01:11:57.980] - Rachel

I think what's been really interesting when we've been doing our research, and that's with people who often left off out of the sustainability conversation, people are innately circular and sustainable in their behaviours. It's very innate to try and circulate crop rotations, for example. It's very innate to look after the things that we care about.

[01:12:18.000] - Pippa Shawley

I think what that shows really nicely is how many people and how many different departments and groups you have to have involved to scale the circular economy.

[01:12:25.990] - Finley Phillips

Definitely, yeah.

[01:12:26.560] - Pippa Shawley

Maybe this is a slightly awkward segue to lose next clip, but you have picked one with an actual producer who's the coal face. Maybe that's not the right phrase to use in the circular economy of that transition. Tell us about that.

[01:12:40.780] - Lou

Chloe Stuart from Nibs, et cetera. I spoke to her, and I actually recall saying to her in the podcast, because it was back at the beginning of this year, you are so inspirational to listen to. She's only young and as Fimbo pointed out earlier, she is firing on all cylinders on socials. She basically makes upcycled granolas and healthy snacks. I guess I started with asking her the obvious question, because I'm sure most people, when you go to the supermarket and see upcycled on your packet of granola, you're probably not sure what it means, right? Here's Chloe eloquently explaining exactly what she means.

[01:13:25.360] - Chloe Holland

I guess I want to start with maybe talking about the difference between recycling and upcycling. Recycling, you would take a material, a plastic or metal, for example, and you'd break it down to its original components, and then you turn into something similar to what it was or slightly less lower quality than it was. Typically, with plastic, you can never make it quite the same quality.

[01:13:47.340] - Chloe Holland

With upcycling, this is how I like to think of it, is you're breaking ingredients down, or you're taking something that has been considered waste or a sidestream or a by-product of something else. It's a secondary item, secondary product or ingredient. Then you would add things to it Then that finished product would then become something more than what it was. You're lifting it up within the system that it's come from.

[01:14:17.980] - Lou

There you go. Chloe was actually one of the successful Big Food Redesigners who ended up with her products on the shelves of Waitrose.

[01:14:26.900] - Pippa Shawley

I did actually go into a Waitrose store, and it was so exciting to see the stuff there, so I bought it.

[01:14:31.600] - Lou

Nice. Was it nice?

[01:14:33.320] - Pippa Shawley

It was tasty.

[01:14:34.040] - Lou

Yeah, good.

[01:14:34.830] - Finley Phillips

Amazing.

[01:14:35.500] - Lou

That upcycled good.

[01:14:36.780] - Pippa Shawley

Which it says on the side of the box as well.

[01:14:38.180] - Finley Phillips

Can't beat it, can you? A bit of upcycled good.

[01:14:41.280] - Pippa Shawley

We're on to the last clip, which is one of mine. It's another one of Seb's interviews, actually, which is with Ke Wang from the World Resources Institute. I wanted to pick this out because I'd say if there were two words that had really emerged this year from the chats that we've been having in our offices, it's critical minerals or critical materials, because that seems to be a real moment behind it at the moment.

[01:15:06.860] - Finley Phillips

Definitely.

[01:15:07.400] - Lou

That's one of our major missions now, isn't it?

[01:15:09.980] - Pippa Shawley

Yeah, exactly.

[01:15:10.660] - Lou

Next year era of implementation. Big time.

[01:15:14.100] - Pippa Shawley

I picked out this clip because Ke talks about the case for recycling copper and recycling is a bit of a dodgy word in the circular economy, but she goes on to talk about why it's important, and we talk about keeping materials at their highest use, and she articulates that really well. I wanted to share that so that people could go back and check out the episode which went out earlier this year.

[01:15:38.460] - Lou

Brilliant.

[01:15:42.800] - Ke Wang

We are indeed looking to copper recycling. You might ask why. It sounds old-fashioned. It's because we really think copper is a sweet spot where circularity can demonstrate and deliver short-term benefits for the critical minerals challenge. Why is that? First of all, it's because the demand trend is robust. Copper, we currently produce and use about 25 million tonnes a year, and it's forecast to grow to 40 million tonnes by 2050, which is a huge growth. That's because copper is needed by all the clean energy technologies I mentioned, whether it's EV, solar panel, wind turbine, grid, they all need a lot of copper. It's also needed by other sectors, building environment or electronics. The demand is robust and it's harder to substitute. That's why both Europe and US, as well as many other countries, have listed copper as a strategic material because it's important for the economy.

[01:16:58.980] - Lou

If you guys want to know more about critical minerals, in the next few weeks, I've got a podcast coming up with Wen Yu, who leads our mission here at the foundation.

[01:17:08.760] - Pippa Shawley

Really looking forward to that because I think when this is quite new territory, it's quite useful to have reinforced information as well. Things are changing so quickly that it's useful to hear it again.

[01:17:19.800] - Lou

I've had to really read into this to wrap my brain around it. Hoping when you're going to open up a whole new chapter for us.

[01:17:29.300] - Pippa Shawley

Yeah, great. I'm really looking forward to that. Finn, what are you working on at the moment? What to look forward to from you?

[01:17:35.010] - Finley Phillips

Yeah, a bit of a sprint finish, isn't it, for us, Lou? Because we've got another film in the pipeline that we're looking to finish towards the end of the year. We haven't really discussed it on this episode, but the commercial collaboration work that we produce this year is something that we're really proud of and something we can really relate to. Yeah, we're working really hard on a case study style short film. For those that listen or watch on YouTube, they'll look forward to that in the new year. We're going to really sprint towards finishing that and get it done, and we're looking forward to finishing it for sure.

[01:18:01.580] - Pippa Shawley

It's been a while in the pipeline. It'll be really great to get that over the line. I think also I'm trying to get some more North America episodes out because we have really travelled this year.

[01:18:12.960] - Finley Phillips

Yeah, definitely.

[01:18:13.680] - Pippa Shawley

Literally over Zoom. But as you mentioned, Finn, we've been to London, we've been to Amsterdam, we also came from New York Climate Week. We're going to try and get some more North America stories out. I'm currently trying to finalise all of that for some New Year inspiration.

[01:18:30.960] - Finley Phillips

Yeah, nice.

[01:18:31.610] - Lou

That's great. Are we going to go more into the global south as well, do you think?

[01:18:34.720] - Pippa Shawley

I think we will. I think we'll try and get our tentacles into every corner of the Earth.

[01:18:40.210] - Lou

That's great. Cool.

[01:18:41.530] - Pippa Shawley

Yeah. Well, Lou, Finn, thank you for joining me. Thanks for all your work this year and to all the other contributors. Thank you for listening or watching at home. I really hope you've enjoyed the episodes from this year. If you did, then leave us a comment on Spotify or YouTube, or leave us a review on Apple podcast because it really helps us get the word out. We'll see you soon.