Staying true to our values | Signs of circular progress | Leasing minerals | Sustainable living survey | Planet Critical
There’s a ‘value’ thread running through this round up of what I’ve shared, and what’s inspired me. Firstly, our personal values and principles, which guide our attitudes and actions; then my podcast interview with circular economy superstar, Walter Stahel, digging into how businesses can create more value with circular strategies, and how countries could think differently about the value of the commons.
I’ve included a few of my takeaways from a recent report on consumer attitudes and behaviour, by Consumers International. Finally, a podcast that investigates what’s keeping us stuck, where (and who) is destroying value, and how new ways of thinking can help us create deeper, richer value for humans, and more-than-humans.
Blog: Can staying true to our personal values accelerate circular change?
Most people’ deep-seated values support circularity and sustainability. But we misunderstand other people’s values, and that is holding us back.
The field of social psychology can help us understand more about how our personal values drive behaviour, and what that means for sustainability and the circular economy. How can we tap into our values to drive positive change?
Inspired by listening to Manda Scott’s conversation with Ruth Taylor of the Common Cause Foundation in a 2023 episode of the Accidental Gods podcast, I signed up for the Common Cause Foundation’s Values 101 course last autumn.
Over a few weeks, the course opened my eyes to the many links between our values and behaviour change, with some (for me) unexpected insights and ‘aha’ moments. I’ve written a short blog, summarising my key takeaways relating to circular economy behaviour change, and read on for a summary of my conversation with Ruth Walker in episode 126 of the Circular Economy Podcast.
Podcast #126 Ruth Taylor: closing our circular values gap
Ruth Taylor of the Common Cause Foundation guides us through the field of social psychology, to explore how our personal values drive behaviour, and what that means for sustainability and the circular economy.
As I mentioned earlier, I recently completed ‘Values 101’, a short course run by Ruth and her colleague Tom Crompton of the Common Cause Foundation. It opened my eyes to a whole new way of thinking about our behaviour and what motivates our choices, actions and interactions.”
The Common Cause Foundation works at the intersection of culture change and human values, and is driven by the belief that it is possible to design societies that magnify and strengthen the cooperative and caring parts of human nature. By doing that together, we can build ways of living that are equitable and just, and lie within our planetary boundaries. Common Cause Foundation’s work shows that balance can be restored by elevating intrinsic values instead – values like community, creativity and unity with nature.
Ruth Taylor has worked in the field of social and environmental change for close to 15 years. She is driven by the question of how more people can be encouraged to think, feel and act differently when it comes to the multiple and interconnected challenges we are experiencing globally.
Ruth explains what we mean by values, and how they impact our daily lives, and we talk about the Perception Gap – the mistaken beliefs we have about other people’s values, and why that matters. We ask why we might not always act in line with our values, and how we can overcome that.
We explore how engaging certain values could influence more sustainable and circular behaviours, and how it’s relatively easy for people to become interested in topics and actions that have similar underlying principles – for example, being passionate about women’s rights makes it more likely that you’ll be interested in supporting other movements for equality and fairness, both for humans and other-than humans.
We find out how values are like muscles, and can be strengthened, and we discover why we misunderstand other people’s values, and how that’s holding back our shift to a circular and regenerative world.
Shownotes and player here, or search your favourite podcast app.
Podcast #125 Walter R Stahel: signs of circular progress
Professor Walter R Stahel, widely acknowledged as a circular economy pioneer, talks about progress, barriers and missed opportunities. Walter is the founder and director of the Product-Life Institute in Switzerland, founded in 1982 and now Europe’s oldest sustainability-based consultancy and think tank. These days, his is a keynote speaker and author on sustainability and circular economy and says he has always been interested in what he does not know.
With over 500 publications since 1975, he holds a number of visiting professor and lecturing roles, and a long list of awards and advisory roles, including being a Full Member of the Club of Rome.
Walter sees the circular economy as a ‘changer of the globalised industrial game’, creating societal resilience and providing protection against disruptive events. Walter created the idea of the performance economy, as a way of extending the concepts of the circular economy, and says that many of the opportunities are either untapped, or criticised by those who benefit from the ‘rentier economy’. (If you want to know more about the problems of the rentier economy, have a listen back to episode 119 with Ken Webster.)
We talk about the business case for the circular economy, and Walter highlights some of the aspects that are often missed, especially for the future value of materials. We discuss the opportunities offered by platforms, digital twins and passports for products and materials, and why we need better ways to assess the remaining life of expensive products and components.
We discuss the need to shift from a mindset of owning to using, and the need to change how we frame things for customers and businesses. Walter describes how we might rethink designs to minimise risks and liabilities, and how caring for our things opens up lots of interesting career opportunities, especially for young people.
Shownotes and player here, or search your favourite podcast app.
Interesting reads #1 – leasing minerals
In our podcast conversation, Walter Stahel mentioned Andrew J Hagan and his research colleagues, who published a paper proposing that countries could lease metals to corporates, rather than selling licences for extraction and mining.
In looking at current policies & their economic drawbacks, the authors ask whether resource-producing countries are being paid a fair price for the sale of their non-renewable resources. They note that currently, resources are not sold but, depending on a country’s mining law, governments give away, sell or lease rights for exploration or mining on certain land to companies.
Instead, they propose a new policy framework for the leasing of metals, helping to enforce a circular economy with blockchain technologies helping to track the assets.
This is one of the policies that could fund the Universal Basic Dividend proposed by the Club of Rome, as outlined by Ken Webster in Episode 119 podcast. The principle is that minerals, metals (and lots of other resources) are really part of the Global Commons, and levying a fee on using these resources could be used to encourage those assets to be used more intensively (more productively, for longer, for more cycles), to fund regeneration of the commons, and to provide better standards of living for all.
However, it’s worth noting these approaches could also be used by both governments and corporations to restrict access to resources – either by increasing the cost of leasing, or by choosing to lease only to ‘friends’.
Read the research paper here.
Interesting reads #2 – Consumers International research on ‘sustainable living’
In researching attitudes and behaviours for my next book, I came across a recent report, Global Consumer Archetypes to Foster Sustainable Living, published in December 2023 by Consumers International, in collaboration with GlobeScan.
Consumers International is the membership organisation for consumer groups around the world, and believes in ‘world where everyone has access to sustainable goods and services’. The study, with feedback from people at organisations IKEA, Vodafone, Rabobank, UNEP, SITRA and the WRI, is a bespoke segmentation analysis using data from almost 30000 consumers across 31 markets, together with ‘deep dive’ interviews with 31 households in Brazil, China, India, Kenya and Spain. I’ve included a link to the report below, and here are my key takeaways:
Noting that up to 70% of greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced through interventions focused on consumption, Consumers International sums up the challenge and the changes needed to accelerate ‘action on sustainable living, consumer rights, and the nature of consumption during a time of crisis and transition’.
Priorities are changing. The study ‘shows the vast global demand for change: a green transition is desired by the majority of consumers’ and 94% of people support ‘making the green choice the default choice.’ Over three-quarters felt that a shift to a green economy would have a positive effect on their lives.
Intention does lead to action. Although the gap between intention and action remains high, nearly two-thirds of people are open to reducing their impact by changing what they buy. However, even those who consider themselves environmentally conscious may prioritise other factors over the ‘lower impact’ choice, such as not taking public transport where it is felt to be inadequate or unsafe.
Sustainable by default. People are under no illusions. This means system-scale change, and they expect governments and businesses to build sustainable marketplaces to meet society’s needs for affordability, accessibility, and safety.
Full report downloadable from Consumers International here.
What I’ve been listening to…
Investigative climate journalist Rachel Donald’s podcast, Planet Critical, covers global oil depletion, economics and degrowth, psychology, rewilding and much, much more. You’ll find it on your podcast app, and it’s on the web, here: https://www.planetcritical.com/podcast (click ‘no thanks’ to the Substack sign-up so you can see the info on recent episodes).
You can also follow Rachel on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachel-donald/
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I believe businesses thrive by making a better world, for people and planet. I focus on supporting those who want to explore how circular and regenerative approaches create value and shrink your footprint. I aim to help you clarify what to do (and why), convince your stakeholders, and make a solid business case.