118 Ann Stevenson: minding our language

It’s episode 118, and we’re going to talk about how we talk about the circular economy – the language we use, and whether it’s helping us, or getting in the way. Catherine Weetman talks to Ann Stevenson, the circular economy lead at Resource Futures, an employee-owned and non-profit distributing BCorp environmental consultancy in the UK.

Ann has been working in the field of environmental consultancy for over 25 years, and one of her specialisms is understanding and managing risks in transitioning to a circular economy.

Ann became curious to know more about how we use language to explain and make the case for the circular economy, and to discover whether that is is affecting how SMEs are moving towards more circular practices. The academic term for this kind of research is discourse analysis – aiming  to understand how language is used in real life situations.

Ann recently completed a PhD, using discourse analysis to investigate perceptions of risks around the CE for established small manufacturing businesses, or SMEs, and she’s written a chapter with her key findings for a newly released book: Circular Economy: Meeting Sustainable Development Goals, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry. We’ve included links to Ann’s phD and the book in the shownotes.

We discuss some surprising findings, in particular how we tend to frame the workings and outcomes of a circular economy in ways that actually encourage and embed the wrong behaviours! For example, Ann explains how focusing on economic cost savings can lead us to focus on outcomes that are too narrow, and that might ignore important benefits – especially over the long term.

We can end up with unintended consequences, too – one example is when we talk about waste being a valuable resource – and Ann explains why that’s tricky.