In 2022, Starbucks announced a company goal to reduce waste sent to landfills from stores and direct operations. The goal was to reduce waste by 50% by 2030. Part of Starbucks plan to minimize waste is to move away from single-use plastics and promote reusability to shift towards a circular economy. It is said that 40 percent of Starbucks’ annual packaging is attributed to disposable cups. Moreover, these cups account for 20 percent of its waste footprint.
The Starbucks plan to minimize waste focusses on reducing its environmental impact; the coffee company hopes to create a cultural movement towards reusables by giving customers easy access to personal or Starbucks-provided reusable to-go cups that can be used in their cafes, drive-thrus, and mobile order and pay.
The Starbucks plan to minimize waste includes several reusable programs to help achieve its goals. They have been testing these programs in phases since 2022. Their Borrow a Cup program allows customers to order their drink in a designated Starbucks reusable cup. The cups are designed to be returned to the stores after use, professionally cleaned, and then reused by other customers. This project is being tested in Seattle, Japan, Singapore, and London.
In 2022, Starbucks implemented 100% reusable operating models, eliminating single-use cups completely. They tested this in 12 stores in Seoul, which helped to divert more than 200,000 disposable cups from the landfill. In early 2023, Starbucks tested their 100% reusables operating models at stores at Arizona State University. They also implemented return bins across the campus near garbage and recycling bins to collect the borrowed cups.
The Personal Cups & For-Here-Ware initiative encourages customers to bring their own cups. Starbucks began testing this initiative at their experiential Greener Store in Shanghai. Furthermore, Starbucks has been developing ways to incentivize customers to bring their own cups. This includes offering free coffee or discounts to customers who bring their own cups. They’ve also partnered with the Ocean Conservancy to donate 1$ to the organization if customers bring in their clean, reusable cups. At their Arizona State University campus stores and cafes in O’ahu, Hawaii, they have started implementing washing stations so customers can have their cups cleaned before ordering their beverage.
Because disposable cups are still in circulation, Starbucks is looking at ways to make the cups more sustainable and out of better materials. They are working on doubling the hot cup recycled content and reducing the materials required to make the cup and liner. The paper used for their hot cups will be sustainably sourced and certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. Over $5 million has been invested to develop a more sustainable hot cup. By the end of 2023, Starbucks will have eliminated PFAS from all of their packaging. Starbucks has already switched from plastic straws to compostable ones in stores across the globe.
The Starbucks plan to minimize waste is still in the trial phases of its programs. It needs to address a few concerns, including the best ways to collect and wash the cups and especially to figure out the best ways to encourage bringing the reusable cups back and not simply throwing them away. Moreover, they need to figure out how to make the lids of their hot cups recyclable and compostable and to encourage people to throw the contents in the right places.
It is encouraging to see a big company like Starbucks working to reduce waste and be more environmentally friendly in the ways they do business. Hopefully, Starbucks’ plans to minimize waste will influence more coffee shops around the world tol follow suit and help us reduce plastic and disposable cups and promote reusable alternatives.
Google has today (4 October) opened a new accelerator called ‘Google for Startups: Circular Economy’ to applications from the US and the Asia-Pacific region.
The accelerator will provide startups and nonprofits with training, mentoring and technical support from Google’s engineers and other experts as they work to scale solutions that reduce waste.
Organisations working in the food, fashion, built environment and materials science sectors are being invited to apply to the accelerator before 14 November. They will need to be working on projects that reduce material use in the first instance, through innovative design or reuse solutions, or be developing recycling or compositing innovations.
Google said in a statement that it is “imperative we shift our management of materials towards a circular economy model” for environmental, economic and social reasons.
Bring it Back Fund
In related news, Starbucks UK has announced seven projects to receive a share of its £1.4 ‘Bring it Back’ fund, launched in a bid to support innovative reuse solutions for food and beverage packaging. The money has been raised through the coffee chain’s charge on single-use paper cups and environmental charity Hubbub has been assisting Starbucks UK with the fund allocation.
In the public and third sectors, funding will be provided to Keep Scotland Beautiful as it trials a large-scale reusable cup scheme in the Highlands. Charities RECOUP and PECT will also receive funding for research into perceptions around reusable packaging and practical barriers to adoption, with Peterborough as a base.
In the private sector, reuse-as-a-service startup junee will be supported to undertake trials with Mercato Metropolitano food market in South London and packaging cleaning facility network Again will test doorstep collection for takeaway packaging in central London.
Further North, in Bradford, returnable packaging system Green Street will be supported to expand to more cades and restaurants and to trial a digital rewards platform. And, finally, in Edinburgh, Reath Technology will receive funding for their next-generation reuse tracking software using RFID technology.
Hubbub’s co-founder and director Gavin Ellis said: “The winning projects offer a strong mix of innovative solutions, from brand new reuse system trials to behaviour change research and funding developments in technology. With this funding, we will be able to test and learn from real-world trials and hopefully demonstrate that reuse systems are safe and easy to use, and can benefit the food and drink industry, consumers and the environment.”
Starbucks UK’s general manager Alex Rayner added: “It is important for us as a company that we continue to drive industry-wide innovation, as we work to increase reusability and inspire greater reusables uptake in local communities across the UK.”
The world’s population is growing steadily, and with it the demand for raw materials and resources. But all too often these are not infinite and are slowly becoming scarce. Our consumption ensures that we gradually exceed the capacities and limits of our planet.
The circular economy is intended to help save resources and pave the way out of the vicious circle of the throwaway society. The idea is quite simple: existing materials and products are shared, borrowed, reused, repaired, refurbished, and recycled for as long as possible to extend the life of the raw materials used before they finally reach the end of their useful life.
Thus, waste generated is kept to a minimum as all components are kept in circulation in the economy for as long as possible.
Sustainable investments have peaked at $30 trillion globally – a 68 percent increase since 2014. Quite a few financiers have committed to climate neutrality goals and expect the same from their business partners
The circular economy not only helps to operate more sustainably, but it also reduces the threat to the environment, increases security of supply and has a positive impact on our climate.
For many companies, the transformation towards more sustainability and climate neutrality also has financial reasons. It has been noted on several occasions that sustainable products grow significantly faster and enjoy greater popularity than non-sustainable products.
Unilever, for example, stated that its sustainable brands grew a full 46 percent faster than others, accounting for 70 percent of the company’s sales growth. In addition, McKinsey has found that a focus on environmental, social, and governmental goals can significantly reduce rising operating costs for raw materials or water, for example.
Investors are also increasingly looking for forward-looking and innovative companies. Sustainable investments have peaked at $30 trillion globally – a 68 percent increase since 2014. Quite a few financiers have committed to climate neutrality goals and expect the same from their business partners.
The pressure on companies to operate in a climate-neutral manner and to advance measures such as the circular economy is therefore coming from all sides.
The urgency for a circular economy is growing
From returnable bottles to car sharing, consumers have had a growing range of options for living more sustainably for some time now. Half of Germans are willing to buy refurbished devices, according to the latest Bitkom study.
As demand for more sustainable products continues to grow, online retailers are also following suit by increasingly contributing to and sourcing from the circular economy as well. According to a consumer study by Mirakl, more than half of online shoppers surveyed are more likely to choose vendors with sustainable practices.
In addition to consumer goods, many B2B industries are also embracing the circular economy
In addition to consumer goods, many B2B industries are also embracing the circular economy. In the automotive industry, for example, the use of remanufactured parts creates tremendous environmental and economic benefits for insurance companies, auto body builders and car manufacturers.
According to an analysis by the VDI, remanufacturing a compressor saves 89 percent CO2 equivalents compared to new production. Procurement costs are also 40 to 70 percent lower, which also benefits insurance companies because they have to pay lower sums in the event of damage.
The automotive sector can become a pioneer of the circular economy
Aniel, a leading French B2B retailer of car body parts, has recognised the signs of the times. The company recently expanded the offering of its online marketplace, which already lists more than 65 million listings for over 15 million products, to include remanufactured body parts.
By centralising its product offering, Aniel is making it easier for its customers to access remanufactured products for which they would otherwise have had to search laboriously and time-consumingly for specialised third-party suppliers.
This significant expansion of the product offering in the marketplace has enabled Aniel to strengthen its positioning as a “one-stop store” for bodybuilders and automotive manufacturers.
The potential benefits of the marketplace model are enormous and can help a company become more agile, larger and more profitable. According to Mirakl’s new Enterprise Marketplace Index 2022, revenue growth in enterprise marketplaces is more than double that of e-commerce overall – for the second year in a row.
Online marketplaces like Zureli have the advantage of providing a large and centralised catalogue of offerings right in one place, helping to establish a resource-efficient approach to supporting the circular economy
When developing a marketplace strategy, B2B companies should focus on specialisation because they know their own ecosystem best, and customers rely on enterprise expertise.
Online marketplaces have the advantage of providing a large and centralised catalogue of offerings right in one place, helping to establish a resource-efficient approach to supporting the circular economy.
On average, an auto body shop serves more than 30 vehicle brands and thus receives supplies from dozens of different suppliers, including specialised dealers, from multiple locations. By centralising purchases and accessing a wide range of products, Aniel’s marketplace model saves shops a lot of time.
Continuous innovative thinking allows Aniel to strengthen the circularity of the automotive sector, secure the supply of spare parts and meet the challenge of internationalisation.
What’s next in terms of sustainability
Environmental awareness within companies is growing, and the sustainability of products is playing an increasingly important role. This includes optimised supply chains, sustainable materials, and fair working conditions. 86 percent of consumers even think that increased sustainable action can give B2B companies a decisive competitive advantage.
But there is still a lot of catching up to do when it comes to sustainability, both for consumers and for companies. While interest in sustainable products is growing, understanding of how the circular economy works still needs to improve. Only then can benefits be truly understood and changes implemented.
Through transparency, companies can demonstrate that the sustainability mindset is present and being advanced. The marketplace model provides a good foundation for the circular economy through its interconnectivity and numerous sales and comparison options, but companies must be willing to rethink their current concepts and processes. Only then can the circular economy become a reality.
Construction and home renovations are notorious for the amount of waste they create. Think of how many times you’ve seen hulking construction dumpsters sitting in front of a house, brimming with wood scraps, drywall, old carpet, and all kinds of odds and ends that are almost guaranteed to end up in a landfill. They won’t be sorted or separated for recycling or compost — those dumpsters are nearly always upended in the nearest landfill Construction & Demolition area. Not only will this cost you a pretty penny, but that waste will negatively contribute to the ecology around the landfill, too.
So, what can you do? Lots! Depending on the type of renovation you’re looking at doing, there are many ways you can save money and be green. If you’re already used to reducing waste and being environmentally conscious, this is another excellent area to put your expertise to good use. If it’s something you want to get in the habit of, this is a great way to learn how to live more green overall.
If you’re planning for a larger renovation, do an online search for eco renovation companies in your area. This issue is coming to the forefront of homeowners’ minds, and as a result, contracting companies are adapting to their environmentally aware customers. They’ll be able to walk you through how they dispose of different materials from your reno, sustainable source products, or salvage from other job sites.
The 3 R’s – Relevant in Kindergarten, Relevant Now
Most of us will remember hearing the phrase, “Reduce, reuse, recycle!” bandied around schools, workplaces, or on TV at some point in our lives. This was always a good practice to follow and still is during your home reno project. Here’s how you can apply that old-school mantra now.
Reduce the amount of waste upfront. It’s staggering when you get an inside look into the amount of waste that many contractors consider to be just the price of doing business.
Why is this? There are a few main reasons. Most contractors learned their trades when construction materials were significantly less expensive than now and waste from off-cuts and scraps was less of an issue. In addition, the environmental movement has been gaining momentum over the past couple of decades, but it wasn’t always a consideration. Finally, the blunt truth is that it’s just easier for contractors to order more material and not optimize every piece that they’re using. This isn’t to say that they all do this, but it is a common practice, which is why it’s good to interview your contractor before you agree to work with them to get an idea of what their procedures are in this regard.
This requires a bit more time investment on your part, but it will pay off in savings and help you keep needless scraps out of the landfill. Asking questions about how many board feet your builder will need and comparing that to what they’re ordering can be an excellent way to track this. While it’s mostly impossible to make sure that every piece of every board or pipe is used, you’ll be able to monitor if the level of waste is reasonable. For example, if you’re putting in a 10-foot long, non-load bearing interior wall with studs 16 inches apart and a 9-foot ceiling, that’s about 120 total feet of 2×4 that you’ll need. If your builder suggests that they need to order 20 10-foot long 2x4s, you know that they’re over-ordering and not planning to optimize their use to reduce waste at the site. You can then ask them to do that, to find another area to use that 80 feet of off-cut, or order pre-cut material that fits your space and won’t generate any waste. These options will depend on your budget, builder, and your project and space specifics. This simplified example gives you a place to start thinking about questions to ask and how to approach this — we’re not contractors!
Re-use existing materials instead of purchasing brand new ones. You’d be shocked at how much building material gets ripped out during a renovation just to be heaved into a dumpster and then replaced with the same thing, only new.
For example, if you’re taking walls out, you’ll have 2×4 studs that will likely be somewhere around 8 feet. While you won’t want to reuse these as studs again necessarily, they’re perfectly good for use in other areas, like back framing.
Insulation can be reused as well — just know that as it ages, the R-value (the level to which it insulates) will decrease.
Even drywall can be reused if you’re keen enough or are working with a contractor that’s willing to spend some time on it. That goes for most of the ‘Reuse’ category – you have to have that conversation with your builder ahead of time because they won’t all be willing to do this. It takes more time to reuse old material than it does to send it to the dumpster and use neatly stacked, equal-sized 2x4s, and some builders just won’t want to take the extra time, even if you’re willing to pay for it.
Reusing items isn’t just for your building materials, either! Your interior decor can be upcycled or repurposed with a bit of gumption and some online tutorials, and who knows, you might love the DIY life and get into it regularly.
Recycle home renovation scraps instead of sending them to the landfill. This is another area that takes some dedicated time from you or agreement from your builder that they’ll handle this for you.
Recycling needs to be sorted, and this is the area that takes work in renovation projects. If you pull out a wall, for example, you’ll need to be sure to sort metal by separating the nails out of the studs and the electrical boxes and cable from the wood and drywall. The same goes for vinyl flooring, old carpet, and anything else that ends up coming out.
Once the sorting part is done, you’ll need to know where to dispose of everything properly. This will vary based on your location and the rules in your area, but you likely won’t have more than two or three stops to make to ensure you’re recycling instead of throwing out your construction waste.
What To Keep In Mind For Yourself, Or Communicate To Your Builder
Having stated goals is super important in keeping on track. That goes for you and for someone you hire! It also applies to your day-to-day efforts to live greener, not just in your eco renovation project.
Here’s our list to get you started:
Minimize the demolition work.
Use salvaged building materials.
Plan for deconstruction — meaning you can easily remove building parts during the next renovation.
Using materials that reduce waste during installation or use (that minimize packaging, adhesives, finishes, etc.).
Reduce and recycle waste during construction.
Use prefabricated components and materials prepared in a factory (such as framing) to reduce off-cut waste on your site.
Use standardized components that fit the dimensions of your house to reduce off-cut waste on your site.
Use materials and products that are durable, low maintenance, recyclable or reusable.
Products By Room To Keep Your Reno Eco-Friendly
If you plan ahead when you’re in the early stages, before you begin your eco renovation project, you’ll be able to think through what materials are coming out of each room and what you can use to build and redecorate to keep your materials environmentally responsible.
Painting – choose eco-friendly paints
Kitchen – reuse/repurpose kitchen cabinets, tips to save water, sell old appliances and fixtures
Living room – buy recycled furniture, upcycle your current furniture, save window hardware and screens, repurpose carpeting, etc.
Bedroom – salvage flooring, sell or donate doors
Remember that as you’re planning what you can do and what you need a contractor to do, there’s also a middle ground, and that’s your friendly neighborhood handyman. It’s a great option to call a handyperson to paint, assemble or disassemble furniture, or help with installations. These aren’t tasks a builder will do, but you can take some work off your plate using a handyperson!
Embrace a Zero Waste Lifestyle
This is your chance to make a significant impact on how much waste you produce — don’t let that stop with your eco renovation! Reducing daily waste is something that adds up quickly and makes a more significant impact than you might think, especially when that’s compounded over your lifestyle as a whole.
It takes some planning and coordination, but with a bit of extra thought and effort, your home renovation can be a great refresh for your life without having harmful impacts on the environment. You don’t have to be a DIY master to reduce, reuse, and recycle!
In 2019 the global economy consumed over 100 billion tonnes of materials.
The Circularity Gap Report highlights how moving to circular economy can reduce consumption levels and help mitigate climate change.
These 21 changes to how we make, keep and discard things can build more sustainable systems and a circular economy.
Never before has humankind made and consumed so much stuff. In 2019, for the first time, the global economy consumed over 100 billion tonnes of materials.
Already five of the nine planetary boundaries have been transgressed during humanity’s short presence on Earth, driven by a throwaway culture that too often exploits nature. Our economy has become inherently linear, and it may be difficult to reimagine how we make, use and discard things unless we shift toward a more regenerative and inherently natural system.
How can we build a circular economy?
The latest edition of theCircularity Gap Reportexplores the concept of a circular economy and investigates its role in climate mitigation and in cultivating more equitable societies around the world. Ultimately, the model will require a systems shift: radically rethinking how we use resources to fulfil our needs and wants. The report presents a range of circular solutions, based on four key principles of the circular economy: using fewer resources, using resources for longer, recycling resources and regenerating resources.
The report applies these strategies to “key societal needs and wants” – such as housing, nutrition and transport – to transform how resources are fed into the economy. If applied globally, this could result in a 28% reduction of resource use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of 39% – keeping the world on track to reach its goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees. Here we outline 21 strategies that can be applied in daily life, to businesses and at local and national government level. Importantly, these are not only grounded in energy policies – they go far beyond and span economic policy, industry, business and individual consumer behaviour.
Feeding the world and the circular economy
Providing nutrition to the world is an extremely resource and emissions intensive task: accounting for 10 billion tonnes of GHG emissions and 21.3 billion tonnes of resources a year. It’s also extremely inefficient as more than 30% of all food produced is thought to be wasted. While a massive proportion of the global population are malnourished, many others are overweight. Nutrition for all can be delivered with a fraction of the resources currently pumped into the linear food systems. The current model is ripe for change to a circular economy.
Build a circular economy through food sufficiency and cutting excess consumption.
1. Enough really can be enough
It’s extremely impactful to first slash excessive consumption before increasing production to tackle food shortages and scarcity. The words “no” and “refuse” are important in the circular economy.
2. Put healthier, satiating foods first
Let’s make cutting excess consumption tangible through food sufficiency: bringing the per capita caloric and protein intakes of high-income, high-emitter countries (such as the US or many in the EU, see the Shift profile on the right) down to match healthy levels – 2,000 calories a day for a typical woman. This can be done by reducing the material and emissions footprint per calorie of foods by prioritising healthier and more satiating foods over foods with low nutritional value. Think here of sugary beverages and refined, heavily processed items that require resources and energy to be produced, but their “empty calorie” effect on our stomachs means they are a wildly inefficient diet choice.
3. Embrace a plant-based diet
Animal-based proteins are yet another inefficient way to reach our daily calorie quota: 25kg of grain and about 15,000 litres of water is needed to produce only 1kg of beef – inputs that could instead be used to nourish humans. In some parts of the world, where a variety of other high protein, nutritious options are available, ditching animal proteinscan be one of the most impactful individual actions for the climate. Eating a primarily plant-based diet could slash global emissions by 1.32 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents.
The role different countries play in reducing waste and building a systems approach for the circular economy.
4. Shop your fridge and cook creatively
Circular shifts will also deliver secondary benefits such as less packaging needed for food – a massive win in terms of reducing single-use plastic – reduced obesity and healthier overall communities. It could also help to reduce food waste, also a strategy in itself needed to make our food systems more circular. Try doing this at home by not only cutting excess consumption, but planning your meals ahead, looking up innovative recipes to make use of your broccoli stems or fruit peels, shopping your refrigerator before heading to the market and skipping impulse buys if possible. Food service can employ the use of AI apps, such as Winnow, which has been found to cut kitchen waste by 50% or more.
5. Check for certifications
Choosing food that is sustainably sourced – meaning it comes from ecosystems that are managed according to environmental standards that enable regeneration – is a strong circular choice. A range of sustainable and carbon-neutral certification schemes aim to provide this ethical stamp to consumers. Nowadays, even cheese can come with a PAS2060 certification, the international mark of carbon neutrality.
Eating a primarily plant-based diet could slash global emissions by 1.32 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents.
—@circleeconomy
6. Support local
Sometimes we need to look to the past to learn lessons for the future. Practising the habits of our grandparents by going local and regionalwhen picking our ingredients can have substantial environmental plus points. This often reduces the need for hot-housing vegetables, which equates to a reduction in fuel inputs, plus fewer food miles and lower transportation impacts. Supporting or practising urban, organic and precision farming modelscan also eliminate harmful synthetic fertiliser use, a huge source of emissions on its own.
In the UK, interest in allotments soared during the COVID-19 pandemic as home-grown food caught on. Lastly, backed by carbon-neutral biomass certification, using food waste and losses as animal feed – instead of the usual soy-based feeds – is an age-old tradition that will support the growth of secondary markets, take a chunk out of livestock emissions and help to avoid deforestation. While it’s not legal in the EU, it’s a successful practice in Japan and South Korea, where about 40% of food waste is used as feed.
7. Cook clean
Finally, cooking with polluting fuels is a silent killer: nearly 4 million people die a year from illness related to the associated pollution. Food preparation resources can also be made more circular, and safe, by replacing polluting traditional biomass and black carbon producing stoves with clean cooking apparatuses, including advanced solar-electric stoves. Increasing access to clean and sustainable energy around the world will be key to making this circular act available to those who most need it.
Homes and buildings and the circular economy
Providing shelter for the world is the most intensive “need” in terms of resources and emissions. Buildings are often developed without regard for the ecosystems of which they are a part. And in our civilisation’s history, we have built a lot: the mass of human-made things, from pavements to apartments to phones, now outweighs all natural biomass, such as trees and animals. Using circular economy strategies to lessen the load of our housing needs on the environment, and building with (rather than over) nature is imperative. Fulfilling the global economy’s need for housing is currently responsible for nearly 40 billion tonnes of resources and 13.5 billion tonnes of GHG emissions a year.
Multi-purpose buildings reduce the overall floor space needed and optimise resource efficiency, and also deliver proportional savings on heating and cooling.
—@circleeconomy
8. Design flexible, multi-purpose homes
To make our need for housing circular, we must ultimately call for fewer, but better, new houses to be built and make using them for multiple purposes the norm, especially in higher-income countries where we have masses of stock already built up. To make the most of the buildings we already have, they should be used flexibly and be able to adapt as time and needs evolve. Imagine a hybrid building that is used as a flex-work office space, a community centre and an evening school. Such spaces can be payment-per-use, such as the cross-industry collaborative building Dutch Mountains in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Multi-purpose buildings reduce the overall floor space needed and optimise resource efficiency, and also deliver proportional savings on heating and cooling. These savings will be further boosted by cuts in energy consumption that can be practised by anyone: lower room temperatures, smart metering and improved thermal insulation.
9. Use existing homes for longer
To continue making the most of the buildings already gracing the Earth, we must prioritise extending the lifetime of existing stock. Up until the 1960s there were strong traditions of reusing and sorting building materials, but this began to change as the construction industry in Europe moved from lime mortar to cement mortar, building materials became cheaper, and there were fewer requirements regarding the service life of buildings. Supporting and urging government interventions that ban building with virgin materials and policies to cap new construction in line with available volumes of secondary materials for building can reduce the need to extract finite materials from the Earth. Ultimately, waste from demolished buildings can be processed into new building materials, such as concrete mix or building sand. These options massively boost resource efficiency in production and performance.
10. No building left behind – or empty
Core circular methods must be practised at all levels, from the consumer to the national government. These include renovation, refurbishment, retrofitting and modular design. Modular design allows us to easily adapt buildings over time to suit changing needs and carries the potential for deconstruction, relocation and reuse of elements (or even whole buildings). Underused and disused buildings should also be occupied – in a time of resource scarcity buildings should not be sitting empty. Only with these methods can we try tomeet the global housing demand within our global stock limits.
11. Nature-based solutions and renewable technologies
Nature-based solutions (NBS) can also lower material and energy demand for housing. We can be inspired by low-energy approachessuch as Passivhaus design (this minimises the requirements for mechanical space heating, cooling and ventilation), while also applying renewable technologies such as solar photovoltaic or thermal, air-source and geothermal heat pumps to shrink the carbon footprint of a property. The Mahali Hub in South Africa are modular homes built with upcycled and locally available materials and a range of sustainable additions such as rainwater harvesting and passive cooling, resulting in net-zero homes.
We need to see the widespread use of low-carbon construction materials, material lightweighting and local sourcing to help to cut embodied energy in the housing system. And to add some regenerative power, the use of natural or renewable building materials, such as wood, straw and hemp, can boost biodiversity and regenerate ecosystems, while also generally slashing material footprints due to their lightweight character. Green roofs and living walls are all examples of NBS interventions with regenerative benefits, at least in terms of thermal performance, water management, biodiversity and air quality.
To dive into these 21 circular solutions that can bring us back on a 1.5 degree pathway, and understand the key role local and national governments and businesses play in driving the circular transition, download the Circularity Gap Report 2022.
Consuming and producing goods and the circular economy
Fulfilling the societal need for consumables – a diverse group of items ranging from refrigerators and furniture to clothing and cleaning agents – is not hugely resource-intensive compared to housing, for example, at 6.9 billion tonnes of resources and 5.6 billion tonnes of GHG a year. However, it’s incredibly wasteful, toxic and it is a huge drain on a different set of resources: cotton, synthetic, fossil fuel-based materials such as polyester and all the dye pigments and chemicals that go with it.
The production of low-cost, synthetic materials, which form the backbone of cheap, fast fashion, has increased nine-fold in the past 50 years, using around 350 million barrels of oil each year and shedding microplastics in the process. Meanwhile, the fashion industry is responsible for a fifth of waste water globally. That’s why we must move towards a circular economy.
Shifting consumption choices and mainstreaming circular design, both usage and acquisition rates can decline.
—@circleeconomy
12. Make careful consumer choices
As we know by now, we need to begin by using less. Aside from conscious choices and utilising the all-important r-word – refuse – we need to start with the efficient design and use of consumer products. By shifting consumption choices and mainstreaming circular design, both usage and acquisition rates can decline. Tangible actions include: increasing digitisation to reduce paper use; not making textiles from animals; aiming to eradicate single-use plastic; optimising the usage of electronics to minimise e-waste; choosing only eco-labelled responsibly-sourced timber furniture, and prioritising local purchasing and sourcing.
13. Get repairing and sharing
We must also learn to make the most of the stuff we have. Here, encouraging repair, maintenance, sharing, re-manufacturing and take-back programmes for textiles, appliances, furniture and machineryare powerful and should form the base of circular systems. Durable denim meets circular business models in the case of Kuyichi: the company’s resale business model offers a take-back scheme for customers to easily give their denim a new lease of life to their denim, as well as a resale service for preloved goods.
14. Support ‘right to repair’
The backwards practice of designing products to break relatively quickly, planned or built-in obsolescence, must be eliminated, or we should choose not to invest in the companies that fail to do so. A phone with an old battery should not have to be tossed out and replaced, but should instead be repaired, the battery replaced easily with available and value-for-money replacement parts. Design for disassembly, customisation and replacement parts are all practical and marketable options that should become mainstream. The EU has no dedicated policy in place to stop the absurd practice of planned obsolescence, yet, Biden in the US has taken a bold and necessary step in formally backing “right to repair” legislation that calls on companies to release the knowledge and tools required to repair many common devices.
15. Consider chemicals
To reduce the level of toxins and pollutants in the environment, we should prioritise the use of sustainable materials for chemical-free consumables. This is imperative in light of recent research that posits that the fifth planetary boundary to be surpassed is chemical pollution – spurred by plastics and chemicals from farmland fertilisers, for example, leaching into the environment. We use products and dispose of them, but they don’t just go away. To avoid further environmental degradation, businesses and consumers alike can prioritise bio-based alternatives, chemicals leasing and natural fertilisers, and organic compost in gardens.
16. Recycle and help build secondary markets
We can also look to recycle our consumables when refusing, repairing or refurbishing are not possible avenues. Closing loops and boosting value in secondary markets will allow a circular market for consumables to thrive. To get there, governments must promote the recycling of plastics, synthetic fibres, paper, wood and wood by-products; as well as specifying recycled content obligations, and substituting them where possible for virgin or raw material. On the plastics front, a range of legislation in this arena has been rolled out: by 2030, all plastic bottles in the EU must contain 30% recycled content, while this stands at 50% in California; and in Maharashtra in India, industrial packaging produced in the state must include 20% recycled content. All steps in the right direction, but this has got to move faster, while concurrently turning off the plastics tap by reducing unnecessary plastics production. If applied globally, this could cut 1.23 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions and save 2.18 billion tonnes of materials, according to the Circularity Gap Report 2022.
Mobility, travel and the circular economy
Mobility systems in their current form are responsible for 8.7 billion tonnes of resources and 17.1 billion tonnes of GHG emissions a year – coming in second only to housing. With its mammoth footprint and contribution to air pollution worldwide, mobility is commonly associated with GHG emissions reduction in the minds of both policymakers and the public.
Current mobility habits leave much to be desired. Privately owned vehicles in Europe sit unused for 90% of the time, while the phenomenon of “ghost flights” recently shocked the world: airlines flying empty planes just to retain flight slots, all the while spewing GHG emissions. From driving to flying, opportunities for change are plentiful as we look towards a circular economy.
We can learn a lot from the behaviours practiced during the COVID-19 lockdowns – namely a cut in long-distance travel and telecommuting for work.
—@circleeconomy
17. Travel less often
When it comes to cutting the resource and emissions intensity of mobility, the simplest way is to reduce travel. We can learn a lot from the behaviours practiced during the COVID-19 lockdowns – namely a cut in long-distance travel and telecommuting for work. Post-pandemic, these environmentally friendly behaviours can continue to be encouraged through a range of interventions.
The provision of regional and local hubs – the so-called 15-minute city being piloted in both Paris, the US and China, for example – allows residents to reach amenities within 15 minutes, either by foot, bike or public transport. Shared and virtual offices, telecommuting and working from home when possible can continue to be promoted by employers, especially as many companies acknowledge that staff productivity was maintained.
18. Go for lightweight designs
Vehicle design improvements are another more incremental way to reduce the level of materials used in mobility. Lightweight and smaller vehicles, such as cars and scooters, result in less steel and aluminium used for production, as well as lower fuel consumption and embodied energy.
19. Keep your car for longer
When it comes to prioritising durable design and material selection, plus optimising repairability and maximising maintenance, we can also use materials for longer – extending the lifetime of vehicles.
20. Share when you can
As well as better designed vehicles, better utilisation of all vehicles will further reduce the intensity of this societal need. With personal vehicle ownership no longer the dream it once was, interventions include shared mobility, via car clubs and pools, ride-sharing, and public transport, with park-and-ride provision to cut fuel consumption.
21. Design for reuse
Finally, optimising end-of-life vehicle management is critical to cycle flows, with the recycling of metal and plastic components, and the use of recycled materials, on the rise.
To dive into these 21 circular solutions that can bring us back on a 1.5 degree pathway, and understand the key role local and national governments and businesses play in driving the circular transition, download the Circularity Gap Report 2022.
Who on earth wants fish tank wastewater, chicken poo, tumble-dryer lint, loo roll tubes, “a plaster mould of a Komodo dragon’s foot” or half a broken toilet? No one, you might think, but the Buy Nothing community begs to differ: these are all real “gifts” snapped up by more than 5 million members worldwide, who give away their unwanted items in the local community. It’s living proof that “one person’s trash is another’s treasure”, as Alisa Miller, the administrator of the Blackheath/Charlton/Lewisham group puts it.
Miller offered her daughter’s broken toy birdcage with little hope anyone would want it; it was snapped up by a local flower-arranging enthusiast, and filled with succulents and trailing plants. Her co-administrator’s son is the current custodian of a toy helicopter that has been played with by five Buy Nothing families to date. Members ask for what they want and usually get it: anything from household appliances, furniture and gardening tools to clothes and baby gear.
There is nothing unique or original about giving and getting stuff for free. It’s a practice as old as humanity. The juggernaut giveaway network Freecycle was founded in 2003 – but what distinguishes the Buy Nothing project from Freecycle, Freegle, Olio and their ilk is that the emphasis is less on stuff, per se, and more on community. In what Buy Nothing describes as its “hyperlocal gift economies”, users are encouraged to let items “simmer” rather than giving them away to the first person who asks, perhaps suggesting they share a joke or provide a story explaining why they would like the item. In addition to “gifts” and “asks”, users are encouraged to post “gratitude”, with a message or a picture showing what a gifted item has meant to them.
That could all sound insufferably twee, but the thinking behind it is fairly radical. It’s a “social experiment”, explain the project’s founders, Rebecca Rockefeller and Liesl Clark, from their respective living rooms in Washington state, effecting a fundamental shift in our attitude to material goods by building a sense of community, and treating items as community-owned and shared. “If you come at it from an angle of joy and human connection,” says Rockefeller, “you’re more likely to inspire lasting change than when you come at it from telling people: ‘You have to do without this.’”
Clark, 55, and Rockefeller, 52, bonded as “Freecycle renegades”, Rockefeller says. She was trying to give away things (twigs, nettles) that her local Freecycle moderator did not consider suitable gifts; both were looking for a deeper connection beyond an anonymous back-door drop or pickup.
There’s a re-use for everything … sweet pea seedlings growing in toilet roll tubes. Photograph: Mike Jarman/Alamy
“We wanted more of that dialogue,” says Clark. Her attitude was shaped by her experiences as a film-maker, exploring mortuary caves on the Nepal-Tibet border with her husband and children. The objects they found there had been used, exchanged, appreciated and transformed over centuries. “It helped me understand a little more the practical side of reuse and how an entire culture could thrive without any stores.”
Users are encouraged to let items ‘simmer’ rather than giving them to the first person who asks
“The stuff is one thing, but the stories that go along with it – the humour, the poignancy, the memories – those are the things we really want from each other,” agrees Rockefeller. Both, too, were shocked at the tides of plastic detritus that washed up on the beaches of their home on Bainbridge Island. “It led us naturally to ask what role do we play in this and how can we lessen our impact?” The pair started out with an in-person gift exchange in a local park at weekends; they launched the first Facebook-hosted group in 2013.
I’m speaking to them surrounded by the debris of a minimal, but not particularly mindful Christmas: cardboard packaging, return labels and scraps of wrapping paper. It’s a time of year characterised for many of us by a sugar rush and guilt slump of conspicuous consumption. Buy Nothing offers members tools and approaches to counter that sickly consumption hangover, but “Buy Nothing” is the name, not the aim.
There’s no expectation or even aspiration that users will somehow forge a fully cashless economy. Indeed, during the pandemic, Buy Nothing changed its rules to allow members to give gifts of cash. “Quite literally, that’s a lifesaving gift you can give another person in a lot of cases,” says Rockefeller. “This was never meant to be an exercise in purity: that doesn’t serve us well. What serves us well is flexibility. A banana, a chunk of concrete or $10 – those are all good gifts.”
Any takers? A bunch of nettles. Photograph: vejaa/Getty Images/iStockphoto
She speaks from personal experience: when the first Buy Nothing group was established, Rockefeller was an unemployed single mother. “I was having to go through the US social services system – it’s horrible and it’s intentionally meant to make you feel horrible about yourself.” Getting food and clothes for her children through Buy Nothing gave her financial breathing space. “I had money to go and buy a cup of coffee or a book, which would have been 100% unreachable for me.”
Of equal importance, she says, was being able to gift bread she had made or foods she had foraged, which allowed her to “get some dignity back”. “The services we can provide are gifts in themselves,” adds Clark. “Gifts of time” (babysitting, gardening, lifts) and “gifts of self” (social meet-ups, offers to become a workout buddy) are a key element of the Buy Nothing experience.
We quickly came to realise how lonely we actually are as a result of not sharing – Liesl Clark
From that first Facebook group, the community has expanded to 7,000 Buy Nothing groups with, at the most recent count, 5.3 million users in 44 countries as diverse as Guatemala, Iceland, Oman, Vietnam and Zimbabwe. On a slow day, Clark tells me, it gains 1,500 members. The greatest concentrations of communities are in Seattle and New York. There is also a huge, dynamic Australian Buy Nothing network. According to Buy Nothing figures, the UK has 50 active groups and approximately 40,000 members. Although Buy Nothing is described by Clark as “an open-source model”, most local groups operate on Facebook, for which Buy Nothing provides guidance, training and ground rules.
A healthy pattern of organic growth, with occasional viral spurts, accelerated during the pandemic. For Clark, physical isolation made people more aware of a deeper kind of isolation. “There’s this ethic of self-reliance, that you fill your house with all the things you need as a family – there you are against the world. But then the pandemic came along. We quickly came to realise how lonely we actually are as a result of not sharing. What we’ve observed is that if people couldn’t physically get together, they’ve been able to virtually connect through sharing items and services.”
Inevitably, this kind of growth creates challenges. As groups “sprout” – the Buy Nothing term for when they reach the maximum recommended capacity of 1,000 members and split geographically – redrawn boundaries have at times perpetuated or reinforced historic racial and socio-economic barriers. These issues have on occasion been compounded by the Facebook group structure where considerable power lies in the hands of local administrators, deciding who can join and what they can post.
Clark and Rockefeller have addressed Buy Nothing’s failings, including the “flaws and racism we as co-founders built into the original structure of this movement”, as they said in a June 2020 statement. An Equity Team now provides guidance to groups on how to develop an “actively anti-racist and anti-oppression policy”, including trying to use geographical group boundaries to create diverse sharing communities.
Miller worked hard to avoid creating a silo of privilege in south-east London when creating the community in 2019. “This area has got huge wealth inequality. It couldn’t be more diverse, and we intentionally wanted to make sure that we straddled those areas; that was a critical goal.”
The newly launched Buy Nothing app is designed to swerve the structural potential for inequity of the Facebook group model. Here, users choose their own geographical limits and create their own communities: “hyperlocal”, “neighbourhood+” or “surrounding areas”. “I’m really hoping our app makes this more accessible [to people] who have been unable for a variety of reasons to connect with it on other platforms, so we get a more diverse set of voices,” says Rockefeller.
There are personal costs to growth, too. A network of nearly 13,000 volunteer administrators keeps Buy Nothing functioning, assisted by a core staff of a dozen, all working from their kitchen tables and living rooms. Clark and Rockefeller have always been unpaid volunteers. “I work weekends, in the holidays, in the hours when you’re supposed to be sleeping,” says Clark, who was able to make money from film-making initially. “There’s certainly some joy in it, but it’s become unsustainable.”
I really believe this will help us, as individuals, to participate in our collective survival – Rebecca Rockefeller
Rockefeller has taken on part-time jobs over the years to support her full-time commitment to Buy Nothing. “My kids look at it as their sibling,” she says. “It’s not just me and Rebecca,” adds Clark. “The key volunteers are an incredible group of, basically, women, who are doing this unpaid labour and it’s not the model we want to promote for the world. We need to get a little more creative with this.”
They hope that the app will also allow them to capture data on what Buy Nothing does to reduce waste and waste management costs, thereby potentially enabling it to raise funds from municipalities. “We’ve never been able to study how much waste is being diverted from landfill,” says Clark. “Imagine if any given community could access that information?”
Moving from the germ of an idea to a global structure is challenging, but for Clark and Rockefeller, the impetus and the motivation is as strong as ever. I ask about their most memorable experiences with Buy Nothing. Clark describes how musical instruments were collected and delivered to victims of the 2018 fire in Paradise, California. As a community, they had enjoyed making music together. Their basic material needs were met by big charities, but they missed having this creative outlet.
For Rockefeller, it’s a source of great pride that her brother-in-law’s community group suggested Buy Nothing as a first port of call when helping refugees from Afghanistan settle in their town. “We’re building this tool that I really believe will have the power to help us, as individuals, to participate in our collective survival,” she says.
Over in south-east London, members of the Blackheath/Charlton/Lewisham group appreciate the new friendships and the sense of local connection. “It’s culturally so different from any kind of other free stuff group out there,” says Miller. “I love giving back to the community and turning to it when I’m in need of something” adds Elif Koç. “I can spend what I’ve saved for charity and other meaningful causes.” Their group has shared camping equipment and loaned books to children; it has supported a victim of domestic violence and a refugee in setting up home and providing clothing for their families. It does feel like a gentle revolution – one houseplant cutting or power tool at a time. As one member, Sarah Wilde, puts it: “I really like the opportunity to quietly rage against the machine.”
In a secret location in an industrial area in western Sydney, a test strip of asphalt is being laid.
But this is no ordinary road.
The 50-metre strip stretching out into the hot afternoon sun is held together by an unusual material. The gooey cellulose that binds a road surface together is usually imported from overseas, but here it has been sourced locally: from the paper, plastic, lids and liners of coffee cups that were once destined for landfill.
A test strip of road which incorporates coffee cups from the Simply Cups program. Photograph: Carly Earl/The Guardian
For months now, heavily loaded trucks have rolled back and forth over this asphalt and the surface has held up without cracking. The product has been put through a machine test that flexes it until it fails. So far, it has done everything a road surface is expected to do, and then some, says John Kypreos, director of State Asphalt Services. “It’s a better performance product than what we were producing before.”
Exactly how much of the asphalt was once part of a takeaway coffee cup is top secret, according to Kypreos. Ask too many questions and you’re hit with the same answer: that’s the “secret herbs and spices”.
But the western Sydney asphalt manufacturer is on the cusp of rolling out the first roads in Australia surfaced with recycled waste from coffee cups, as part of a collaboration with recycling program Simply Cups. The unusual partnership was brokered by the organisation Closed Loop, which looks for opportunities to achieve what’s known as “net-positive waste”.
Kypreos met Closed Loop’s chief commercial officer, Chris Collimore, about a year ago, after a late-night conversation at a birthday party turned to how waste can be used to make roads. Soon after, he saw a Simply Cups collection stand in a 7-Eleven, and got on the phone to Collimore.
“It really did start with an idea that John had that he then matched up with our program,” Collimore says.
Chris Collimore, the chief commercial officer of Closed Loop. Photograph: Carly Earl/The Guardian
Net-positive waste
The idea is a simple one: instead of burying waste in landfill, the raw materials of that waste are “upcycled” into new products. It means not only keeping stuff out of landfill, but that fewer virgin resources are consumed in the manufacture of new products. It also means less energy and therefore less greenhouse gas emissions go into the sourcing of those new resources.
That’s what’s called closing the loop, or a circular economy.
But there’s a big but: someone has to buy these recycled products, or else the loop has not actually been closed. And that’s where Closed Loop comes in as matchmaker: pairing up waste streams with companies that can do something with them.
Coffee cups are collected by Simply Cups and then turned into asphalt. Photograph: Carly Earl/The Guardian
“It’s not until you’re actually buying back the products that are made out of that [reused] material that you’re … properly recycling,” says Rob Pascoe, the organisation’s founder and head. “It’s not just a matter of lifting the lid on your yellow bin at home and putting stuff in the bin and saying, ‘I’ve done my job’.”
There are three conditions that need to be met to close the loop on a waste stream. First, there has to be a need for the product made from that waste, whether that be fence posts or street furniture. Second, the product made from waste has to be fit for purpose – it has to meet the same standards as the existing version. And third, it must be commercially viable.
Commercial viability isn’t about being cheaper than the non-waste-based alternative, Pascoe says. A product made from recycled materials might be slightly more expensive, but consumers need to remember how much money they’re simultaneously saving on waste disposal.
While coffee cups are attractive because they are an everyday and relatively easily collectable waste stream, the real low-hanging fruit for waste reuse is food waste, says Pascoe. Australia spends more than a billion dollars on artificial fertilisers in an attempt to restore the nutrient capacity of the soil that our food crops are grown in. But at the same time, we’re sending huge amounts of food waste to landfill where it generates methane.
“It’s sheer stupidity,” he says.
State Asphalt Services in western Sydney. Photograph: Carly Earl/The Guardian
Soft plastics are another one, and here Pascoe disagrees with the move to ban single-use plastics.
“It’s not the plastics that are the problem, it’s what we do with the plastics,” he says. As soon as you put a value on waste, it stops being waste and starts being a resource. “If we do that, it is very, very easy to recycle plastics.”
Pascoe says Australia has failed to invest in the necessary infrastructure to recycle properly. When community enthusiasm for recycling was at its peak, few knew the reality: that the waste we so carefully sorted into recycling bins was being shipped off to China.
“That has become what recycling means, and it’s not what recycling means,” he says. “We should be putting the demand back on people who create the waste to buy back products.”
Waste recovery and reuse has the potential to boost the Australian manufacturing industry. Photograph: Carly Earl/The Guardian
That change needs to come from the top, Pascoe argues, with government procurement policies that mandate a minimum amount of post-consumer recycled materials in products.
“If we can get to that point with governments then we’ve basically won the issue.”
A major boost for industry
Closing the loop doesn’t just offer environmental benefits, there are huge economic benefits as well, according to Gayle Sloan, CEO of the Waste Management and Resource Recovery Association Australia. Every 10,000 tonnes of waste that is recovered, reused, repurposed or recycled creates 9.2 jobs, compared with just 2.4 jobs if that material is sent to landfill or exported.
“We’ve got the chance to create four times as many jobs if we actually think about the materials that we consume and purchase, the supply chains, the collection, the reprocessing and the remanufacturing on shore,” Sloan says. Waste recovery and reuse offers the potential to be a major boost for the Australian manufacturing industry coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic, if it’s done right.
Sloan says the right sort of conversations are beginning within government, with MPs starting to talk about resources instead of waste, and “recognising that it’s not just something we discard in a linear way”.
The joint federal, state and territory governments’ 2019 National Waste Policy Action Plan set a target of banning the export of waste plastic, paper, glass and tyres starting in late 2020, achieving an 80% average recovery rate from all waste streams by 2030, and increasing the use of recycled content by governments and industry. In July this year, the federal government also committed $190m to a new Recycling Modernisation Fund that is intended to generate investment in Australia’s waste and recycling capacity.
Sloan argues Australia also needs a paradigm shift in thinking about how products are manufactured and consumed.
“We need to choose the right materials when we extract resources, and design it in such a way that the value proposition is there and the worth of the material is recognised,” she says. She’d like to see the Australian government mandating the shift to a circular economy strategy, like the European Union has done with its circular economy package.
“It’s not anti-competitive because that is the expectation, that we engage in circular economy that is designing out waste, creating regenerated systems and creating jobs,” she says. “All we’re doing is coming into line with the rest of the world.”
Cradle to cradle
Back in western Sydney, the eventual goal for Collimore and Kypreos is a road that is made of 100% recycled material.
Apologising for the “messy” state of his plant, Kypreos points out piles of crushed rock, sand, bitumen and lime, as well as bits of old road surface, which are all set to be transformed into asphalt. He is already using recycled glass to substitute for some of the sand. A complex process of dehydrating and heating turns it all into road surface.
Chris Collimore’s goal is a road that is made of 100% recycled material. Photograph: Carly Earl/The Guardian
There are huge opportunities for industry to make use of waste streams in Australia, Kypreos says, but the infrastructure that’s needed to sort and store waste so it can be easily accessed just doesn’t exist yet. He argues that waste levies should be spent on building that infrastructure, and on encouraging innovative partnerships and projects.
“There’s product in there,” he argues. “It’s just a matter of sitting down and testing and building the science to see if these items that they can pull out of their waste streams are useable or reusable.” But he’s also wary of being seen as the only option. “We’ve got to be careful that we’re not looked at as the new landfill alternative.”
Turning coffee cups into roads is a step in the right direction, but truly closing the loop means ensuring no raw materials are lost at any point along their life cycle. It’s a cradle-to-cradle mentality.
The ultimate goal is to reproduce the same product with recycled material, says Sloan. Plastics – white plastics in particular – would be an easy place to start, she says, because “we can turn that back into a yoghurt container over and over and over – if we choose the right materials, if we have the right collection.”
The coronavirus pandemic has devastated the economy but also presented a unique opportunity: to invest in climate action that creates jobs and stimulates investment, before it’s too late. The Green Recovery features talk to people on the frontline of Australia’s potential green recovery.
Recycling closes the loop for a circular economy, but the more complicated the packaging design, the lower the chance of it being recycled. Could mono-material packaging be the answer to this problem?
‘Circular economy’ has become the buzzword for businesses around the world, regardless of industry. Oftentimes, the phrase is merely used for marketing purposes, with little attention paid to its concepts and principles.
There are numerous players involved in the lifecycle of one product. From raw materials suppliers and logistics companies, to manufacturers, distributors, consumers, and disposal, it may not be sufficient when only one of the players upstream creates a ‘circular product’ without involving the other players downstream to ensure that the loop can truly be closed.
Over the centuries, the human-environment relationship has grown from a circular one to a linear one. In the past, what our ancestors used to take from nature was returned to nature at the end of its life.
No material is as difficult to differentiate as plastic.
From a material scientist’s perspective, civilisation developed along with newly synthesised materials that allowed technology to flourish—materials that nature is unable to assimilate in a short period of time. Nevertheless, learning to be better stewards of materials can drive our economy back to a circular one.
For the packaging industry, the answer may lie in mono-materials.
Packaging serves a necessary function—protecting or preserving the product it contains. The material chosen for the packaging has to satisfy this basic functionality. But as products get increasingly sophisticated, more functionalities of packaging are needed and a single material may not be able to satisfy all of the requirements.
Laminations, coatings and additives went into the material formulation to achieve the packaging solution. The need for labels to print the necessary product information and branding further complicated the design. This is how a simple packaging purely used to contain a product can become a concoction of differing materials.
Recycling cannot deal with mixed materials, even for plastics.
No material is as difficult to differentiate as plastic. A transparent plastic can be polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polyvinyl chloride (PVC) or even general-purpose polystyrene (PS).
But these plastics cannot be mechanically recycled together and have to be separated, if not the quality of the recycled PET (which has a higher recycled value) will be downgraded or even contaminated beyond reusability.
The process of mining iron comes from extracting iron ores since iron does not exist as a pure element on earth. This requires energy input to purify the ores to obtain pure iron before it can be further used in the manufacturing of products.
The reverse engineering of products (such as recycling) into individual materials follows the same process. Recycling could be an energy-intensive activity, but it helps to close the loop for a circular economy in packaging products.
However, the more complicated a packaging design, the more effort is needed.
Unfortunately, this segregation often comes from human intervention in developing countries before the actual recycling can take place. If packaging consists of only one material, these preliminary steps can be avoided. The pathway to recycling will also be shorter and more efficient.
For the multi-layered materials that cannot be separated, either simply because it is not economically viable or not intervenable manually, the easiest method would be to take the inseparable materials and downcycle them into a composite particle board.
The only way to know if this mixture of inseparable materials is durable or even toxic is through testing it, but the composite particle board is thereafter rendered non-recyclable.
Is it possible to standardise the transparent plastic type to use for takeaways?
When it comes to determining which plastics to use for packaging, retailers are simply spoiled for choice. But when it comes to service packaging (e.g. takeaway containers), do we really need to look beyond PET and PP?
In the resin code, 7 refers to ‘others’, yet this one number encompasses many different types of plastics, and even biodegradable plastics are currently listed under ‘7’.
To determine if the plastic is recyclable or not, a consumer must know what the resin code represents, and which types of plastic can be collected—which is dependent on the local recycling infrastructure. Such in-depth knowledge may fly over the face of most consumers.
Thus, standardising which mono-material to use for a certain type of packaging—especially those with low functionality such as single-use packaging—may be the key to ensure a truly circular economy.
Plastics have great flexibility when it comes to engineering the material into the required packaging properties. Yet it is the same flexibility that results in the proliferation of plastic types that goes beyond the 7 resin identification codes.
While certain industries like automobiles or electronics would benefit from advanced plastics, comparatively, packaging for everyday items does not require the same level of complexity.
With a thorough understanding of the recycling process and infrastructure, much can be done by the packaging design engineers to mindfully create packaging for ease of recycling.
Customers visiting the retailer’s Two Rivers Shopping Centre Store in Staines will be able to choose from more than 50 lines of refillable products, including pasta, rice, cereal, confectionary and frozen fruit. Products will be housed in reusable dispensers and customers will be encouraged to bring their own reusable containers, or to use paper bags available in-store.
M&S first launched its ‘Fill Your Own’ offering on a trial basis in its Hedge End store in Southampton in the latter half of 2019. During the trial, 25 of the 44 lines outsold their pre-packaged counterparts. Across all 44 lines, more than 2,600kg of loose product was sold over a three-month period.
This success prompted the retailer to make the format a permanent offering in Hedge End, and to announce a broader rollout in March. Plans for additional stores were put on hold due to Covid-19 but have now been resumed, with new stores set to be added in 2021.
To make the offering Covid-19-safe, M&S has installed hand sanitisers near the refill stations. It has also chosen to post staff at the refill stations to help customers fill, weigh and pay safely. The business has revealed that four in ten refillable lines have outsold pre-packaged options in 2020 so far, in spite of the pandemic.
“As we continue testing and learning from Fill Your Own, it’s clear that demand for refillables remains strong; we know families particularly enjoy shopping the concept as a fun activity, so our new store in the popular Staines shopping centre is the ideal next location for Fill Your Own,” M&S Food’s director of food technology Paul Willgoss said.
“But most importantly, our customers care about the issue of plastic and this initiative is just one part of our plan to help them reduce, reuse and recycle – because we know our actions today will help to protect the planet tomorrow.”
Plastics strategy
M&S’s broader plastics packaging strategy – which is embedded in its Plan A for sustainability – is headlined by a 2022 ambition that packaging that could end up with customers will be “widely recycled”. As part of its aim, the retailer is planning to develop one recyclable plastic polymer for use across all of its plastic packaging and removing plastics from products such as clothing, cotton buds and coffee pods.
Given that only 9% of all plastic ever made has been recycled – and with 82% of UK shoppers now stating that the amount of plastic packaging produced by companies needs to be “drastically reduced” – M&S is not alone in expanding its investments in refill.
Amid initial lockdown restrictions in spring, many retailers were forced to close stores with refill or packaging-free offerings, including Lush and The Body Shop. Elsewhere on the high street, some supermarkets removed loose fruit and veg; some coffee shops stopped accepting refillable cups and some of City to Sea’s busiest Refill stations were closed or experienced a sharp drop in footfall.
The refill movement seems to be slowly but surely gaining traction once more – but efforts will need to scale dramatically if businesses are to rise to the scale of the global plastic pollution problem. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation has calculated that just 2% of the products sold by the world’s biggest consumer goods firms this year came in reusable packaging.
Hospitality businesses have a special opportunity when it comes to driving positive change. Whether you’re a restaurant owner or run thousands of hotels like InterContinental Hotel Group, hospitality companies work in a connected, people industry and exist at the heart of communities — employing local people and operating with a network of partners and suppliers.
IHG is uniquely positioned to be able to make a difference because of its scale and, importantly, this is all underpinned by the company’s culture of doing business responsibly, which guides our decisions and how we work.
IHG has almost 6,000 hotels around the world and the vast majority — around 80 percent — are franchised, which presents a unique challenge when it comes to implementing change at scale. It means the IHG team is in constant dialogue with our hotel owners, who operate and finance these hotels, so that we can work with them to drive sustainable change. We also know that our guests and colleagues are hugely passionate about how we behave towards the planet and our communities, so this makes engagement, collaboration and partnership key to getting things done.
For example, when it comes to minimizing IHG’s waste footprint, our teams consider each stage of the hotel lifecycle to find solutions that can be amplified and rolled out at scale. We do this in a way that supports the hotel’s operational needs, while enhancing the guest experience wherever we can.
Today’s technology plays an important role in making such changes because it enables IHG to identify suppliers and partners that have developed innovative solutions to find new ways to embed sustainability into their products, and in turn create solutions that help us reduce our environmental footprint, drive a more circular approach and produce an even better experience for our guests.
IHG has around 400,000 colleagues around the world. Source: IHG.
One great supplier relationship that illustrates this at IHG is with The Fine Bedding Company, which is working with us to help minimize the global plastic waste footprint through our growing voco hotels brand.
The supplier takes single-use plastic bottles that have been discarded and repurposes them in its eco factory to become plush, cozy filling inside the duvets and pillows of our voco guest rooms all over the world. In fact, more than 3 million water bottles have been diverted from landfill and into our bedding to date. When you think of the scale this innovation ultimately can create over time, it’s a huge amount of waste that’s being repurposed and also helping to drive more circular operations for our hotels.
Filling is extruded and spun from recycled plastic bottles. Source: The Fine Bedding Co.
Since forming this partnership, we have received great feedback from our guests, who say that this initiative not only provides them with a great sleep experience, but knowing it is good for the planet brings extra value to their stay.
For us, it’s exciting that consumers are becoming more aware of sustainable innovations such as these, and we are seeing uptake grow across our hotels, with our owners showing increasing interest. It’s a great opportunity for the suppliers themselves, too. Claire Watkin, managing director at The Fine Bedding Company, says working with IHG has many benefits for her business.
“At The Fine Bedding Company, our aspiration is to find ways to recycle products at the end of their life so that they can be truly circular, and so this bedding was really exciting for us,” Watkin said. “We worked in partnership with IHG to create something that had never been done before in the hospitality sector, and it achieved many firsts: It was fully traceable with Global Recycling Standard, it used more sustainable cotton and it was produced in our zero-waste factory that uses 100 percent renewable energy. A few years on, it’s great to see the positive feedback from the guests at voco hotels on both the quality and innovative nature of the product. For us, it has set a new standard in sustainability of bedding, which we look forward to seeing roll out across other brands as it becomes more mainstream.”
The Fine Bedding Company’s Nimbus Smartdown collection. Source: The Fine Bedding Co.
As we begin to recover from the impact of COVID-19, the focus must remain on the long-term sustainability agenda, ensuring we adapt to a new normal in a way that continues to drive circular economy practices and protects environments and communities.
This makes partnerships such as the one we have with The Fine Bedding Company more important than ever. If we want to emerge from the events of this year in a stronger position that helps protect the planet, it’s important we share ideas and collaborate to find solutions. You can’t isolate a business from its value chain, so working together towards common goals becomes even more central to moving forward.
