O que vem a seguir para a economia circular em 2026? (10)

[00:00:00.340] - Seb Egerton-Read

Welcome back to Circular Snapshots. I'm Seb, and this is your monthly tour of the story shaping the circular economy. It's been a busy month. A new report that puts a price tag on our throwaway economy, the EU's big Circular Economy Act is making progress, and Mexico passed landmark legislation earlier this year that didn't get nearly enough coverage. Let's go.

[00:00:23.210] - Seb Egerton-Read

Every year, Circle Economy publishes the Circularity Gap Report, every year the story is roughly the same. Around 7% of the inputs into the global economy come from recyclable or reused sources. The truth is it's not really cutting through. A percentage just isn't a business case. This year they did something different. They asked a different question. Not how circular are we, but how much is it costing us not to be circular?

[00:00:53.490] - Seb Egerton-Read

The answer they came up with is €25.4 trillion per year. That's the value gap, their estimate of the economic value destroyed annually by the way we currently make, use, and throw things away. To put that in context, it's roughly €1 in every €3 generated by the entire global economy. Gone. Every year. The biggest culprit? End-of-life waste products discarded before their value is used up. That alone accounts for around €10 trillion per year.

[00:01:29.030] - Seb Egerton-Read

Now, Circle Economy are upfront that this is a first attempt and the methodology has real limitations. But the significance here is the framing. It's a framing we're seeing more and more of, translating circularity into the language of economic risk and lost value. This report is another example of that shift in action.

[00:01:49.740] - Seb Egerton-Read

Now to Europe, where the EU Circular Economy Act is gaining momentum. Last month, Brussels hosted the big annual conference of the European Stakeholder Platform, where the EUC Act was front and centre. The conversation has moved from whether it's happening to what is it going to contain. What is it trying to do? The Act aims to create a genuine single market for circular solutions: recycled materials, refurbished products, and other circular alternatives that can move freely across the entire European Union.

[00:02:25.490] - Seb Egerton-Read

Right now, what counts as a valuable resource in one member state is often treated as waste in another. That kind of fragmentation kills circular business models before they can scale. The Act is meant to replace that patchwork with a coherent rulebook.

[00:02:41.610] - Seb Egerton-Read

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation has published a paper where we frame it around 3 levers: building a true EU single market for circular products and secondary materials, using price and demand signals to make circular solutions the more accessible choice for buyers, and treating circularity as a core industrial strategy. This is why this has such significant support from multinational businesses such as IKEA, SAP, LEGO, and many others, who are calling for the most ambitious Circular Economy Act possible.

[00:03:15.510] - Seb Egerton-Read

The next story is from earlier this year, but it didn't get as much attention as I think it ought to have done. In January, Mexico passed the first Circular Economy General Law in the country. This is a big deal. It's a legally binding nationwide framework, not a strategy, not a vision, not ambition, but an actual law. The central mechanism is Extended Producer Responsibility, and here's how it works. Once Mexico's Environment Ministry designates a sector, every company that makes or imports products in that category has to produce what they're calling a circular management plan.

[00:03:56.250] - Seb Egerton-Read

The plan has to set out how the company will take responsibility for its products across their whole life. Not just when they become waste. That responsibility starts at the design stage. Durability, repairability, recyclability—these are now legal considerations, not optional extras. It's a progressive rollout, sector by sector, so the obligations don't all kick in at once.

[00:04:22.490] - Seb Egerton-Read

But what's striking is how the law is being framed, and this will sound familiar after the EU story. The National Circular Economy Programme that will guide implementation has to align with Plan México, the country's $277 billion national development strategy. This is circularity as economic and industrial policy, not just environmental policy. Same argument, different continent.

[00:04:50.750] - Seb Egerton-Read

We've got time for four more quick stories. First up, HP has partnered with a startup called Mint Innovation to recycle old HP computers and printers into copper and use that copper in new HP laptops. It's the first closed loop of its kind from a major PC maker. The process uses biology rather than furnaces to extract the metal, which also makes it cleaner and more traceable. Scaling it is going to be complex. But this is what taking responsibility for your supply chain starts to look like in practise.

[00:05:25.560] - Seb Egerton-Read

Next up, WRAP launched the UK Packaging Pact last month. A hundred founding signatories including Tesco, M&S, Unilever, and Biffa, committing to a 10-year programme to transform the UK's packaging system. It's the successor to the UK Plastics Pact from 2018 but expanded to cover all packaging materials, not just plastics. It's running in parallel with a new packaging EPR regime that came into force in January. The ambition is right, delivery is what now needs watching.

[00:05:58.340] - Seb Egerton-Read

Meanwhile, the Fashion Pact and Fashion for Good, with design input from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, have launched a new initiative called the Circular Fibre Collective. The goal: get fashion brands to make collective commitments to buy textile-to-textile recycled fibres so that recyclers and suppliers have the demand signal they need to invest and scale. Right now, less than 1% of global fibre production comes from textile recycling. The target is 8% by 2030. Classic chicken-and-egg problem, this is one attempt to break it.

[00:06:37.290] - Seb Egerton-Read

Finally, secondhand fashion and ThredUp's annual report landed recently. The headline is that the US resale market grew nearly times faster than mainstream retail last year. But the interesting detail is why. The report is clear that for a growing number of shoppers, this isn't a choice driven by sustainability. It's driven by cost. Resale is shifting from optional to essential. That's worth sitting with. The circular economy often gets told as a story of conscious consumers making better choices. This data suggests the real driver right now is economic pressure.

[00:07:15.080] - Seb Egerton-Read

That's a more complicated story, but arguably a more durable one. That's all for this episode of Circular Snapshots. I hope you enjoyed it. Thanks for joining us on the Circular Economy Show. Links to everything will be in the show notes, and we'll see you in a few weeks.