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Circular Economy Podcast

Circular Economy Podcast Episode 68 Kresse Wesling – Elvis & Kresse

Episode 68 Kresse Wesling – Elvis & Kresse – luxury products from discarded materials

Kresse Wesling, CBE, is a multi-award winning environmental entrepreneur. After first meeting the London Fire Brigade in 2005, Kresse launched Elvis & Kresse, which rescues and transforms decommissioned fire hose into innovative lifestyle products and returns 50% of profits to the Fire Fighters Charity.The company now collects 12 different waste streams and has several charitable partnerships and collaborations across a number of industry sectors.

Circular Economy Podcast Episode 67 Megan O'Connor Of Nth Cycle

Episode 67 Megan O’Connor Of Nth Cycle – a big leap forward for metal & mineral recovery

Megan O’Connor is co-founder and CEO of Nth Cycle, a metal processing company that has developed technology to enable a clean, domestic, and streamlined supply of critical minerals for the clean energy transition.
Megan tells us how she came up with the idea for using electro-extraction, a technology developed by her co-founder for a completely different application, and how she then pivoted the entire focus of her PhD to develop this.

Circular Economy Podcast Ep66 Alyssa Couture - Healthy Fashion

Episode 66 Alyssa Couture – Healthy Fashion is better for all of us, and our planet

Alyssa Couture is the author of Healthy Fashion: The Deeper Truths. Alyssa’s book is all about fashion for mental health, physical health, spiritual health, and energetic health.
Alyssa brings a radical new perspective to fashion, looking at everything from the textiles and dyes we use, to how our clothes can improve our mental and physical health. Alyssa’s work shows how all of this is connected to our environment and improving sustainability.
We’ll start by asking Alyssa to share some of her research on textiles and dyes, and then discuss a few of the insights from her book, including what ‘unhealthy fashion’ is, and how fashion can evolve to be circular and healthier for us, and our living planet.

Circular Economy Podcast Episode 65 Charlotte Morley – thelittleloop – the UK’s first shared wardrobe for kids

Episode 65 Charlotte Morley – thelittleloop – the UK’s first shared wardrobe for kids

The UK’s first shared wardrobe for kids – Charlotte Morley founded thelittleloop to offer a solution to clothing waste with convenience, choice, quality and value. Charlotte grew up being an advocate for sustainability, and found becoming a parent was a watershed moment. But, when it came to dressing her children she couldn’t find a satisfactory solution to the waste that rapidly-growing mini-humans create. Hand-me-downs were haphazard and offered no choice. Buying new then trying peer-to-peer resale was incredibly time consuming and didn’t recover much of the original cost. Charlotte was intrigued by how to incentivise children’s clothing brands to create garments that would last. Shocked by the problems of under-used clothing and frustrated by the lack of convenient solutions, she decided to solve the problem by working with children’s clothing brands to create a rental service, thelittleloop, offering a solution to clothing waste with convenience, choice, quality and value. The little loop works hand in hand with brands, who take a share of the rental revenue, sharing responsibility for the lifespan of the garments, and receiving data to help improve their production standards. Charlotte’s business is already winning awards, including from Marie Claire and Junior magazine, and was featured in the Guardian last month.

Circular Economy Podcast Ep64 Pierre-Emmanuel Saint-Esprit of ZACK

Ep64 Pierre-Emmanuel Saint-Esprit of ZACK

Pierre-Emmanuel Saint-Esprit is the co-founder of ZACK, France’s leading company enabling the second life of electronic products, through recycling, repair, resale and donation. Last year, the TECH FOR GOOD report by the Presidency of the French Republic named ZACK as one of the top 3 French circular companies.
Pierre-Emmanuel explains how his MBA in entrepreneurship at Berkeley, California, helped him create a business to fight climate change, and reduce our pressure on natural resources. We find out how ZACK creates social value too, helping people build the skills and confidence to secure employment.

Circular Economy Podcast Episode 63 Hede Razoky – The Upcyclecentrum

Episode 63 Hede Razoky – The Upcyclecentrum

As the account manager for the Upcyclecentrum in Almere, in the Netherlands, Hede Razoky has a strong focus on creative entrepreneurship and making connections, for a shared goal of a ‘world without waste’.
The Upcyclecentrum has three elements: [1] it’s a recycling centre for local citizens, [2] it has an ‘experience room’ made from upcycled materials, for use by local businesses and community groups, and [thirdly] it has a brilliant entrepreneur incubation programme… providing facilities, materials and other support to artisan businesses that turn local waste materials into desirable, high-value products.

Episode 62 Malin Orebäck Circular Design at McKinsey

Episode 62 Malin Orebäck – Circular Design at McKinsey

Malin Orebäck is leading McKinsey Design’s work in sustainability and circular economy. McKinsey Design is one of the world’s leading design agencies, and Malin shares a wide range of insights and gives us a masterclass introduction to circular design for products and services. Malin explains how she helps her clients get started with circular, and overcome linear ‘lock-in’.

Circular Economy Podcast Episode 61 Astrid Wynne – IT Sustainability expert

Episode 61 Astrid Wynne – IT Sustainability expert

Astrid Wynne is the Sustainability Lead at Techbuyer, a global sustainable IT solutions provider, which specialises in product life extension. She is also head of partnerships at Interact, a software tool that optimises energy and carbon usage of servers.
Astrid has co-authored a number of academic papers including ‘Optimizing server refresh cycles: The case for circular economy with an aging Moore’s Law’, which looked at how past generations of IT can provide a net positive on use-phase energy, economic benefit and retaining precious materials.
She is a board member at the Free ICT Europe Foundation, chair of the Sustainability Special Interest Group at the Data Centre Alliance and represents Techbuyer on the Interreg-funded research project CEDaCI, and we hear about some of the work at these collaborative and open-data projects.
This episode follows up on a previous conversation with Techbuyer, and digs into some of the perceptions around refurbished and remanufactured tech hardware, including reliability and performance. We hear how a remanufacturered server is able to outperform a latest generation machine, and why they are at least as reliable as new machines, too.

Circular Economy Podcast Episode 60 – Turning off the tap

Episode 60 Turning off the tap

Every 10th episode, Catherine Weetman looks back at recent conversations and round up some of the insights we’ve heard:
The theme for this episode is turning off the tap. What do I mean by that? One of my favourite metaphors for the linear economy – our system of taking materials, making stuff, using it and then throwing it away. We’re pushing lots of resources in at one end of the pipe – but it gushes out at the end, and there are leaks all the way along the pipe with pollution going into the atmosphere, air, water and soil.

And all of that, of course, is undermining our ability to thrive on this planet.

So what can we do? We’ve got to radically rethink business as usual, to turn off that flow of resources and waste. We need to be regenerative instead of destructive and wasteful.

We need a different approach, so we have products with a life of their own, not just serving a single user. We need objects designed for reuse and resale once someone no longer needs them, or objects available in multi user systems with customers sharing or renting when needed.

In this episode, we unpack this to understand how it works, and why it helps to separate the benefits of products and services from their cost to the global commons.

Circular Economy Podcast - Episode 58 Rae Stanton - Lush Cosmetics

Episode 59 – Rae Stanton of Lush

Rae Stanton is the Earthcare Retail Lead for Lush Cosmetics UK and Ireland, using Permaculture principles to provide environmental best practice insight and guidance on packaging, sourcing regenerative ingredients and much more.
We find out how Lush embeds Permaculture and regenerative agriculture approaches into its business practices, and why Lush realised it needed to ‘own the packaging solution’ instead of relying on municipal recycling collections. Rae explains how Lush engaged its customers in designing ‘bring-back’ solutions, including asking them how much the reward should be.