O que vem a seguir para a economia circular em 2026? (12)

[00:00:00.000] - Catherine Conway You can't just be one node in the system and expect things to change.

[00:00:03.440] - Ingrid Irigoyen It's all about early champions, it's about leaders who are willing to think differently, who are willing to think strategically, and think longer term.

[00:00:14.260] - Kate Daly I see circularity is the only path forward, and it's one where there's a huge amount of opportunity for creativity, for innovation, and for creating something better.

[00:00:23.720] - Lou Waldegrave A truly circular economy requires a foundation of shared infrastructure, and trying to buy your way in if the supply chain infrastructure doesn't exist yet can see businesses facing massive roadblocks. Welcome to the Circular Economy Show. Today, we're going from grocery aisles, to shipping fuel, and shopping bags, to hear how Catherine Conway from GoUnpackaged, Ingrid Irigoyen from ZEMBA, and Kate Daly from Closed Loop Partners have all faced the same challenges. These challenges led these three pioneering women to create the shared motorways that will allow everyone else to drive their own vehicles forward. Here we are again, Finbo. Welcome back to the studio.

[00:01:15.620] - Finley Phillips Always a pleasure to be here, Lou.

[00:01:17.140] - Lou Waldegrave Yeah, and you survived the Isle of Wight Festival okay?

[00:01:20.050] - Finley Phillips Yeah, feeling refreshed and ready to go.

[00:01:21.850] - Lou Waldegrave Looking as fresh as a daisy as well, my friend. Really looking forward to this episode because today we're hearing from three pioneering women who are absolutely leading the charge on building infrastructures that, up until now, quite frankly, did not exist.

[00:01:39.720] - Finley Phillips Let's get into it. We're going to start with Catherine Conway, who's the Director and Reuse Lead at GoUnpackaged. Catherine has become one of the leading voices in the world of return and refill. Her work with the Refill Coalition really has been able to demonstrate that scaling reusable systems is possible. Let's hear from Catherine now on why individual trials weren't enough, and what it took to bring the right people to the table.

[00:02:04.220] - Catherine Conway GoUnpackaged has been working in this space for nearly 20 years, helping with this transition away from single-use packaging. Recently, we've been focusing on really high-impact work, so we led the Refill Coalition, which was working with a coalition of retailers to test scalable reuse systems. The Refill Coalition came about because we'd worked on a lot of individual trials with supermarkets, and we could see that they weren't scaling. To us, it was obvious that we needed to create a scalable idea, and bring in the right partners to drive that from the design process to implementation.

[00:02:38.880] - Catherine Conway We're passionate about redesigning the packaging systems, because it just makes so much more sense. Our evidence shows that reusable packaging systems can run at less cost than single-use systems, whilst achieving massive environmental benefits, whether that's emissions reductions, less resource use, or less waste at the end. It makes so much more sense, and it makes sense to start that transition now, because it's going to take quite a while to change from what we have now to where we need to get to. Through the Refill Coalition work, we managed to bring together a group of retailers, and a group of suppliers throughout the supply chain that were going to deliver the services.

[00:03:12.600] - Catherine Conway It's been really hard to build a business case because individual trials and pilots are often not designed for scale. We worked with Aldi on an in-store refill solution, and then we worked with Ocado on an online returnable solution. We know it's a difficult business environment at the minute. So, if you can show businesses that by working together, they get further and faster, then that becomes the rationale for them to work together.

[00:03:37.060] - Lou Waldegrave There we have it. It's the classic market paradox. Everyone wants a scalable solution, but no one can afford to take the risk, or wants to do it alone.

[00:03:51.620] - Finley Phillips As Catherine said, the evidence is there. Reuse systems can run at the same cost as single-use systems, all while delivering those environmental benefits that we always talk about on this podcast. The question now really is whether the industry can move towards scale. But, should we go from groceries to global shipping?

[00:04:09.120] - Lou Waldegrave Yes. It's the same challenges prevail across all of these industries. It's how do you shift the system to move in a movable market? I'm going to have to refer to my notes. Sorry for those of you at home, I cannot afford to get this wrong. Ingrid Irigoyen is the Senior Director for Ocean and Climate at the Aspen Institute. She is also the Chief Executive of the Zero Emission Maritime Buyers Alliance, which is called ZEMBA.

[00:04:43.560] - Finley Phillips Smashed it, Lou. Should we get into it?

[00:04:45.100] - Lou Waldegrave Yeah, thanks.

[00:04:47.640] - Ingrid Irigoyen ZEMBA is a buyers group. That means we are a collective of corporate freight buyers who are seeking to get new products and services into the ocean transport market. We had this idea that we were stuck as a sector, and really needed to do something catalytic to break these new solutions into the market. For us, the ultimate goal is to have a measurable impact. We want to get greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, we want to get these long-term solutions robustly supported in a competitive market. These big ships are currently running on high-emission fossil fuels. The entire industry is configured to be able to refuel anywhere they need to. The challenge is that those fuels aren't available right now. You can't even buy them in the market if you are a freight customer. What we do is we aggregate demand from those customers, and we run essentially what we call a forward procurement. We take that aggregated demand, we put it into the market, and we seek proposals from suppliers.

[00:05:56.920] - Ingrid Irigoyen We launched it in 2023. Within one year, we had completed our first collective procurement. We got a new fuel into the market that got our companies a 90% emissions reduction. We had 17 contracts signed with the winning ocean carrier as a result of that. We were able to get about 82,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. That was a good start, a modest start. What it did is it showed that this approach works.

[00:06:29.809] - Finley Phillips I think ZEMBA's success really does reflect a broader trend. We often hear from companies on this podcast who really have pulled together to accelerate innovation in different industries. I spoke last week to Beto Bina, who's the CEO of FarFarm, talking about how we can really make the most of materials like rubber, cotton. I think this model really does bridge the gap. We're helping companies aggregate future demand, we're building the business case for suppliers, all while reducing costs through coordinated procurement.

[00:06:58.460] - Lou Waldegrave Well done. Thanks for taking those notes. As we both know, for a circular system to really work, it takes societal infrastructures as well. That's the operational mechanisms, and the consumer habits. If global shipping is the macro infrastructure, how do we then get that, and build micro infrastructure right at the checkout counter, you ask? Entrée, the humble shopping bag, and massive efforts to rewrite habits, retail habits from the ground up.

[00:07:37.808] - Finley Phillips We're going to hear from Kate Daly, who's a managing partner at Closed Loop Partners, and head of their Center for the Circular Economy. Let's have a look.

[00:07:45.920] - Kate Daly The Consortium to Reinvent the Retail Bag was launched in 2020. Target CVS, and Walmart joined us in the initiative. Over time, 13 additional retail partners joined the effort, all with a goal of reinventing how customers get their goods home. We led it as an approach that can serve multiple goals, so it can provide waste reduction strategies for the stores, and for the customers, but then also offer operational savings, where the stores no longer need to give out a single-use bag for free.

[00:08:19.880] - Kate Daly With our campaigns, we work hard to make sure that we're meeting people where they are, and understanding their needs, and not just creating some top-down campaign. Our goal isn't to shift behavior once or twice, but it's to build entirely new habits that feel convenient and normal to each of us as customers. The work that we did in Denver and Tucson, where we did city-wide messaging, customer nudges by cashiers in stores in more than 375 retailers, we found that there was a lot of enthusiasm. With the consortium model, we can test, we can iterate, we can do in-market pilots, leading to in-market permanent launches, leading to scaling.

[00:09:04.680] - Kate Daly We found that there was this momentum that built the more that different retailers of different types came on board. The consortium brings together, not just the major retailers who are the consortium partners, but also stakeholders across every stage of the value chain. That's manufacturers, mom-and-pop stores, other retailers, and of course, the customers. That collaborative approach absolutely derisks innovation for our retail partners, and also allows each of them collaboratively, to achieve scale faster than they would if they were acting on their own. We heard feedback from customers that when they went from one store to another, and saw the same campaign, to them, it gave them confidence that this was legitimate, and that they trusted that the stores that they visit regularly would only do this if there was some value to them as customers.

[00:09:58.256] - Lou Waldegrave Brilliant. We have seen through these case studies how collective action between people who are even direct competitors can accelerate innovation, and shift consumer behavior at scale.

[00:10:13.620] - Finley Phillips In order to really and truly scale the circular economy, it demands that foundation of shared infrastructure.

[00:10:19.353] - Lou Waldegrave Yeah. Look at what we've seen today. We've gone from global maritime shipping.

[00:10:23.920] - Finley Phillips We've done reusable systems in Aldi and Ocado.

[00:10:26.760] - Lou Waldegrave We've taken on the humble shopping bag.

[00:10:29.270] - Finley Phillips We've been to Tucson.

[00:10:31.065] - Lou Waldegrave Exactly. Thanks so much, Finbo. I've loved being here with you again today, and I hope we do another one again soon.

[00:10:39.250] - Finley Phillips Always a pleasure, Lou. Thanks to the audience for watching. If you enjoyed this episode, please remember to like and subscribe, leave us a review, and we'll see you next time.