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152 Markus Terho: the Lifestyle Test

Markus Terho tells us about the Lifestyle Test, a web-based app for anyone who’s concerned about global warming and wants to be a part of the solution by adopting a positive and sustainable lifestyle. It’s already available in 10 countries across the EU and has 350,000 users.
Markus describes himself as a corporate responsibility veteran, with over three decades in the industry. He is the CEO of Sparkter, a boutique sustainability consultancy to help simplify and make sense of sustainability. Before that, Markus was the chief sustainability officer at Nokia and has been a director at the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra.
Markus is passionate about helping people to find their own way to build a good life that is also sustainable.
Almost 70 per cent of Europe’s climate emissions and almost all of the damage to nature can be traced back to people’s everyday lives – how we eat, live, move around and consume. In less than 10 minutes, The Lifestyle Test gives you clear and tailored tips about simple positive and sustainable lifestyle changes that can help you save time and money and improve your quality of life.
Markus explains how the test was first developed and how it’s evolved since, and explains some of the ways it’s been shaped for each different country it’s in. He goes onto explain what kind of things it covers and how it works from a user’s perspective, including the high proportion of circular economy suggested actions.
Markus highlights the way conversations about climate often result in feelings of guilt and shame, and how the app is designed to help us feel we have agency, with some insights from well-established models for successful behaviour change.
And we hear what’s in the pipeline for future developments, including ways to link more sustainable behaviours to other primary motivators, such as health or convenience.

Artwork for Circular Economy Podcast episode 151

151 Clarissa Morawski of Reloop Platform: practical policies for circular packaging

Clarissa Morawski, CEO of Reloop Platform works with governments, industry stakeholders and NGOs to develop policies for a packaging circular economy. Clarissa brings nearly 30 years of technical, analytical and communications experience in waste reduction operations and policies. She started her own consulting business in 1998 and co-founded the Reloop Platform in 2015. As CEO, Clarissa works with stakeholders and partners to develop smart, practical and effective policy frameworks and operational recommendations, and combines her no-nonsense communication skills with science to make the case for ambitious policy.
Reloop Platform’s mission is to accelerate the global transition to a circular economy by working at the centre of policy-making with governments, industry stakeholders and NGOs. Reloop’s primary objective is to prevent waste, by reducing production and consumption, re-using packaging wherever possible and collecting materials properly for closed loop recycling.
We talk about a recent report, the Global Recycling League Table, that Reloop produced in partnership with Eunomia; and Clarissa highlights key elements of the recent EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulations.
Clarissa shares some insights on how to make sure policies actually make a difference and don’t get sabotaged by various vested interests; we hear how mindsets are changing, and brands are starting to see litter as a real issue.
We discuss Deposit Return Schemes and which ones are seen as best-practice, and we cover some of the issues affecting the safety of virgin and recycled packaging materials.

Artwork for Circular Economy Podcast episode 129 with Alex Holland of SolarPunk Stories

129 Alex Holland: SolarPunk Stories for a circular future

How do we draw people towards a deliciously sustainable future?
In this episode, we’re going off at a slight tangent: to explore how we can bring people into this world, to feel they have agency and to see an exciting, meaningful future where we do better, with less.
We’re going to hear about a way of telling stories – that could be fiction to help people understand circular solutions, or it might be stories to help them imagine how circular products and services work in real life, helping them see how that’s more fulfilling than buying yet more stuff and adding to the problems of waste and pollution.
Alex Holland is the Founder of SolarPunk Stories, and has worked as a journalist in the UK, Venezuela and India.
Alex has an MA in Leadership for Sustainable Development and created the world’s first Tea Pub which was also Crowdcube’s most-shared startup.
SolarPunk is a much more optimistic genre than dystopian fiction – it’s more like the Thrutopian concept set out by Professor Rupert Read in an article for the Huffington Post, a few years ago.
Utopias are too fantastical, whereas dystopias can be useless, even dangerously doom-mongering. Instead, we can create thrutopias: stories that help us see a way through the challenges we face, that help us build a vision for the future we want to be part of: a regenerative, fair and inclusive future that we can be proud of. Stories that help us to imagine, to feel what it would be like, and to design the political and economic systems to get us through.

Values Groups from the Common Cause Foundation Values Map

Can staying true to our personal values accelerate circular change?

Our values guide our attitudes and actions, and 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?

Artwork for Circular Economy Podcast episode 125 with Walter Stahel

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 ep 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.

Artwork for Circular Economy Insights #40

Circular Insights #40 – Pathways to a circular future

Here’s the latest round-up of what I’ve shared, and what’s inspired me. This time, there’s a travelling theme – a mobile circular ‘shed’, digital mapping for waste streams, choosing different pathways to the future, and a story to build a ‘golden path’ to a brighter future.

Image of the Wonderful Circles of Oz book

Book Review: The Wonderful Circles of Oz

My review of The Wonderful Circles of Oz: A Circular Economy Story, by Ken Webster and Alex Duff.
Ken Webster, one of the circular economy’s leading thinkers, and creative writer Alex Duff teamed up to offer us a different way of looking at the problems of our modern economy unset out ideas for a restorative alternative. It’s an intriguing, thought-provoking book that tackles key issues including the use of personal data, digital currency, the rise of the ‘rentier class’ and the future of food.

"We are the people we've been waiting for" - Navajo medicine man's saying

Dreaming our way to a fairer, thriving world

Millions of us are dreaming of a brighter, fairer, healthier world. And yet, we are held back, by those who want us to keep believing the false promises of consumerism. It’s time to break free, to choose a better way: a Giant Leap towards sustainable, prosperous and equitable wellbeing for all.

Circular Economy Podcast Episode 19 Asa Stenmarck of IVL

Episode 19 – Åsa Stenmarck of IVL on how to create circular behaviour

We talk to Åsa Stenmarck, of IVL, the Swedish Environmental Research Institute. Åsa works on projects that aim to create more sustainable consumption (including reducing consumption overall, sharing, waste minimization, recycling and so on), and she is particularly interested in plastics and food. We talk about return systems for food containers, food waste, behaviour change, ‘weasel words’, and how people expect both governments and companies to make ‘good choices’ easy for us.

Rebound – is it undermining the circular economy dream?

We know the circular economy aims to reduce, reuse, remake and eventually to recycle – but what if there is another R – rebound – opening the door for companies to adopt circular strategies and still drive growth in consumption (and pollution and waste)? We explore rebound, ask how to avoid it, and suggest we should be aiming instead for a regenerative economy.