Circular Economy

Our vision for the circular economy goes beyond recycling: it requires an organisation to radically rethink its relationships with suppliers and end-users too, accessing new skills and developing new incentives, so that value is retained and regenerated as waste is avoided as much as possible and materials are re-circulated within the system.

For example, consumer furore around plastics has sparked a frenzy of activity in this space: improvements to recycling, inventing compostable alternatives, creating models for monetising and reusing plastic items like cups and bottles, spurring activism, such as the ‘plastic attacks’ rejecting packaging in-store, and cleaning up existing pollution, as well as a spate of business and government pledges.  Yet, our failure thus far to translate the attention into meaningful, widespread change shows the importance of taking a step back, looking at the root of the problem, and asking how we can restructure the whole system.

What are our goals?

• To help you understand the full set of risks and opportunities that a transition to the circular economy will pose to your business
• To help you develop targets and strategies that not enable your business to capitalise on these circular opportunities, while concurrently mitigating the associated risks
• To help you to imagine and then prototype new products, new businesses models, and broader innovations that allow you to transition to a more circular business
• Build ‘unusual’ yet powerful coalitions to conceive, develop, implement and scale-up the transformative solutions and interventions we need to reconfigure systems towards circularity

If you would like any further information on our work on the circular economy please don’t hesitate to contact Principal Project Manager, Martin Hunt. His recent article on the built environment can be read here.

We're tracking this challenge live on the Futures Centre, head over to see what #signalsofchange we're spotting.