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Catherine Weetman

Catherine Weetman MSc FCILT FRSA - Director, Rethink Global Catherine gives talks, workshops and advice on the circular economy and sustainability. Her award-winning book, A Circular Economy Handbook for Business and Supply Chains, published by Kogan Page, includes wide-ranging examples and practical tips. Catherine has over 25 years' experience in contract logistics, manufacturing, retail and supply chain consultancy, and her career spans food, fashion and logistics, including Tesco, Kellogg's and DHL Supply Chain. She is a Visiting Fellow at the University of Huddersfield, and a Mentor and Regional Organiser for the Circular Economy Club

Circular Economy Podcast - artwork for episode 138 with Ruben Abruma

138 Rubén Abruña: keeping our poop in the loop

Award-winning documentary film maker Rubén Abruña helps us dig into one of the oldest problems in civil society…
All around the world, there are serious problems caused by the various ways we deal with our toilet waste – all the poop and pee we humans create every day. We waste drinking water – Flushing toilets use massive amounts of water – for example, in a country like Switzerland, each person will flush over 40 litres a day down the toilet. Often, the sewage from water toilets is mixed with household waste water, so it’s now contaminated with microplastics, cleaning chemicals, contraceptives and drug residues. And then, in most western societies, all that liquid waste is then mixed with industrial waste. So now we’ve got massive volumes of pretty toxic stuff to try and clean up, and separate into drinkable water and solid waste.
In developing countries, millions of people still use open toilets, or have to defecate on the land around their houses. So here, there are massive issues with disease and vermin, and in some areas, even a safety risk from predatory animals.
What’s more, we’re wasting precious resources, too. Our human pee and poop contains valuable nutrients, including significant quantities of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium – NPK – the key elements that we need to growing food and other crops. Instead, we’re using expensive fossil fuels and synthetic chemicals to provide these macronutrients.
Back in his homeland of Puerto Rico over 20 years ago, Rubén Abruña experienced a sanitation epiphany when he sat on a dry toilet for the first time. He was amazed that he could poop using no water, leaving no stink, and that the deposit could be safely composted into fertilizer, without polluting the environment. It drove him nuts that more people were not doing the same, and this prompted him to make the award-winning film “Holy Shit: Can Poop Save the World?”
Rubén has over 30 years of experience in the film, television, and radio industries. He has written, produced, directed, and edited numerous documentaries, broadcast journalism stories, and educational programs in New York, San Juan, Miami, and Zürich.

Artwork for Circular Economy Podcast episode 137

137 Dr Martin Stuchtey: rethinking how we invest in nature

Prof. Dr. Martin Stuchtey – a geologist, economist and entrepreneur – is challenging and helping to rethink industrial, farming and economic systems. He founded The Landbanking Group, a Nature Fintech aiming to bring natural capital onto our balance sheets in service of the Paris and Montreal agreements.
Dr. Martin Stuchtey is a former Senior and Managing Partner at McKinsey & Co., where he co-founded and led the global sustainability activities. He then founded systems change company SYSTEMIQ, and is also professor for industrial systems in transition at the University of Innsbruck. Martin is an investor, multiple board member and owner of an organic farm in Austria. He’s authored numerous papers, press, radio and TV publications and a book, “A Good Disruption – Redefining Growth in the 21st Century”.
I was keen to ask Martin about a chapter he co-authored in a recent book published by Factor X – The Impossibilities of the Circular Economy: separating aspirations from reality.
Then we move onto talk about The Landbanking Group, born out of Martin’s frustration with the lack of progress in pushing back against the current, extractive economy. Martin also realised that we need to rethink how we invest in nature as the fundamental building block of our future on this, our home planet.
The Landbanking Group’s ambition is to change the way we make land-use decisions worldwide. Their first-of-its-kind platform allows land stewards to earn income from accruing natural capital (such as biodiversity, carbon, soil, water). It allows companies to invest into balance-sheet grade natural capital contracts (or “Nature Equity”). The Landbanking team aims to create the hardest currency for nature by combining the latest science and accounting practices into a coherent, transparent, and compliant way to invest into natural capital – because nature is critical infrastructure – for companies, economies and societies. 

Circular Economy Podcast - artwork for episode 136 with Julia Brenner of Melta

136 Julia Brenner of Melta: creating value from food waste

There is a simple solution to conserve, and reuse, more of the nutrients from food waste.
In today’s episode, I’m talking to Julia Brenner, a soil scientist and co-founder of Melta, a company dedicated to transforming waste management and soil health. Julia and her business partner founded Melta in 2020, to solve two interconnected challenges faced by rural municipalities: the lack of accessible and cost-effective food waste solutions, and the difficulty of transporting organic fertilizers to remote areas.
This is a brilliant example of something that is needs little investment, saves money, time and space, and can be adopted easily, all around the world. It is easy to scale out, and a great example of a local, regenerative solution to the typical ineffective, expensive and resource-intensive solutions that we see in western society.
The Melta system uses the Bokashi process which is thought to originate from East Asia, centuries ago. The Bokashi process converts food waste and similar organic matter into a nutrient-rich soil additive which also improves soil texture.
Melta’s innovative system for organic waste collection, processing, and utilization can reduce municipal waste transport by 70%, and producing a nutrient-rich fertilizer that is cheaper and easier for farmers to access.
Julia studied soil restoration at the University of Iceland and then delved further into nutrient cycling and climate models at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. She continues to engage in collaborative field experiments with the Soil Conservation Service of Iceland and Icelandic Agricultural University. Julia is passionate about making “sustainability” a realistic and attainable goal, and is committed to bridging the gap between practical waste management and soil health.
We discover why dealing with household food waste is such a big headache for rural municipalities; and how the bokashi process can easily become part of a system that’s better for households, farmers and the local council.
Julia explains how the Bokashi process works in practice, and why households prefer it over other methods like putting food waste in with other refuse, or have separate food waste collection bins. As we’ll hear, the results are amazing – and the system is very simple, so it could be easily used in rural areas around the world.

Artwork for Circular Economy Podcast episode 135 with Tuomo Laine

135 Tuomo Laine: unlocking circular business models

Tuomo Laine is the CEO and co-founder of Twice Commerce, which provides software to help its clients unlock a range of circular business models.
Tuomo is known for being straightforward and action-oriented, and for his dedication to using entrepreneurship for societal good. He is a member of the Unreasonable Group Fellowship, and is occasionally invited to lecture at Aalto University, to share his venture building experiences.
Twice Commerce’s mission is to uncouple economic growth from the extraction of new materials, and it helps a broad spectrum of clients, from large retailers to individual sellers.
The platform aims to enhance the value of any kind of object – by extending product lifecycles, unlocking more usage and sales from each item, conserving resources, improving value chain gross margin and reducing the need for new manufacturing. This is all about creating more value through circularity, not finding ways to reduce quality or reduce the pay for workers.
Twice Commerce’s clients include Decathlon, Rab Outdoors, Intersport, Motonet and many others, covering clothing, outdoor equipment, tools and much more, and by enabling improvements to the bottom line, Twice Commerce helps clients align profitability with environmental stewardship.
Tuomo and his colleagues are getting to the crux of how to redesign the typical one-way commerce software to facilitate circular solutions and to address the elements that are adding cost, complexity or dysfunctionality.
This is all about unlocking productivity – not just labour productivity, but thinking about how to leverage more value from the inputs you’ve invested in every unit that comes off the production line.

Artwork for episode 134 with Jane Martin of City to Sea

134 Jane Martin of City to Sea: powering refill & reuse on-the-go

To mark World Refill Day 2024, we talk to Jane Martin, the CEO of City to Sea, a campaigning non-profit with a mission to prevent plastic pollution at source.
World Refill Day is a global campaign to prevent plastic pollution and help people live with less waste. It’s a day of action each year, designed to create an alternative vision of the future and to accelerate the transition away from single-use plastic towards refill & reuse systems.
City to Sea develops and supports upstream solutions to give individuals, communities and businesses practical ways to replace single-use plastic in their lives, shopping baskets and operations.
City to Sea are specialists in behaviour change and creative communications and they develop innovations including the Refill app and Refill Return Cup to shift the dial from linear to circular.
For the past five years Jane Martin has been working as Head of Development at City to Sea, leading project work developing refill and reuse infrastructure in food-to-go and retail sectors, and she has recently been promoted to CEO.
Jane has broad experience across environmental, FMCG, retail, and culture sectors. In ten years’ time Jane wants to “look back and see a transformed circular economy where we value all the precious resources in the system and where we’ve abandoned our damaging throwaway culture.”
Jane summarises a report from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which categorizes packaging refill & reuse systems into four types: refill on-the-go, refill at home, return from home, and return on-the-go.
Each of those four categories has its own challenges around user needs, logistics, infrastructure and control systems. City to Sea focuses on refill on-the-go and return on-the-go, and we unpack those. Jane talks about some of the practical schemes that City to Sea has supported, and shares the insights and learnings gleaned so far.

Book review: Any Human Power by Manda Scott

We’re in the decisive decade, when we need to share stories that offer hope. ‘Thrutopian’ stories can help us find ways through the constraints and complex challenges; to spark ideas for how we can come together to create world where people and planet can flourish.
Bestselling Scottish author Manda Scott’s latest book shines a light on murky corners of politics and society, illuminating the corruption and controlling forces that lock us into neoliberal, extractive and exploitative systems.
The story is woven around a diverse range of people trying to find a way through the messy political, cultural and economic systems we seem to be locked into, and Manda shows us the importance of finding our people, the power of building community around universal values, and how technology can be used to form alliances and co-create new approaches.

Artwork for episode 133

133 Re-Action – repurposing: a new life for unwanted stuff

This is the 4th and final episode in the special 5th Anniversary mini-series featuring the Re-Action Collective, and we’re focusing on repurposing – using creativity and craft skills to breathe new life into unwanted outdoor gear, clothing and workwear.
We’ll hear from the founders of two small repurposing businesses:
First, Jen Dickinson, founder of Dirtbags Climbing, an upcycling workshop in the English Lake District, which turns retired outdoor textiles into hand-made bags.
And secondly, Beccy Evans, founder of Utilifolk, who gives things fresh appeal and new life by re-working unwanted garments that are no longer fit for their original use, and makes new pieces from preloved and remnant textiles.
Ironically, nearly every outdoor gear brand uses sophisticated marketing to hijack our brain chemicals, encouraging us to buy yet more stuff to do the things we love, to excel and enjoy them. And yet, those same things, when discarded, are destroying the very essence of the places and living things we love so much.
We discuss the ethos and design principles for their businesses, why we need to avoid sucked into the ‘fast-fashion’ and ‘compartmentalising’ approaches of brands that want to sell more stuff, and how repurposing can help people create their own identity, instead of looking like they’re wearing other people’s stuff.
Rebecca Heaps, founder of Tentshare, who we met in Episode 131, says “when we buy 2nd hand, the earth breaths a sigh of relief” – and I think that applies to repurposed things, too. Everything we do to keep our clothes, tools and equipment alive is a way to sustain life on earth – for us, and for the future of our living world. And of course, emotional engagement and well-crafted kit helps Re-Action’s mission to make the outdoors more affordable and accessible.

Artwork for episode 132 - Re-Action sharing

132 Re-Action – repairing: from radical to renaissance

This is #3 in the 5th Anniversary mini-series featuring the Re-Action Collective, and focuses on repairing. We hear from the founders of three UK businesses that are helping people repair their outdoor clothing and equipment: Rosanna Watson at Snowdonia Gear Repair, Becky Kirby at Sheffield Clothing Repair, and Vicky Balfour of Vicky Bikes.
The strapline for this episode was inspired by Rose Macario, former CEO of Patagonia Inc, who wrote a blog back in 2015 declaring that ‘repair is a radical act’. But repairing and caring for our things used to be the norm, until we’ve gradually been persuaded to treat our stuff as disposable, and to think that newer is always better. But many of us are discovering that’s not true, and that repairing, customising and caring for our clothing and equipment is better for us, for our wallets, and for our futures.
Now, repairing is having a renaissance, with millions of people finding ways to do DIY repairs, or find repairers with specialist skills and the relevant spare parts.
We speak to the founders of 3 businesses to discover what motivates people to repair, why repaired items can be better than replacements, and what to look out to make sure your gear is easy to care for and repair.

Artwork for blog on designing for durability

Less, but better: a design for life

The research is clear – people are NOT demanding lower quality, lack of repair options and gradual reductions of product lifetimes. And yet, in a bid to increase revenues in a competitive market, companies keep pushing out ‘new and improved’ products. But designing for early obsolescence – whether physical, emotional or perceived – can backfire.
It’s time for a return to democratic, resource-intelligent designs, that help us do better, with less.

Artwork for Circular Economy Podcast episode 131

131 Re-Action – Sharing: Serving more people with less stuff

This is #2 in the 5th Anniversary mini-series featuring the Re-Action Collective, and focuses on sharing and ‘pay to use’. We hear from the founders of three startups enabling people to have convenient and affordable access to high-quality outdoor gear: Anna Smoothy from Cirkel Supply, Rebecca Heaps from Tentshare and Bruce Leishman from KitUp Adventures.
The strapline for this episode – serving more people with less stuff – was inspired by Anna Smoothy at Cirkel Supply. I loved their aim, to serve more people with less products. and that aligns with one of my favourite phrases at the moment, about the need for businesses to do better, with much less.
Sharing, including ‘pay to use’ systems, is one of the 3 key circular economy strategies that I encourage businesses to focus on. Sharing can be a catch-all term for commercial arrangements that make it easy to use something for a short period, rather than owning it. These systems can help organisations to serve other organisations, to serve individuals, or for people to serve other users.
For decades, we’ve been happy to rent houses, holiday accommodation, cars, skis and bicycles, movies and more – and now people are branching out into other categories. Rental and subscription services are popping up for technology, fashion and accessories, home appliances, furniture and more, avoiding the need to buy things you aren’t sure you’ll want to use over the long term. Often, these are disruptive startups using online platforms to provide convenient, flexible ways to access high-quality brands at affordable prices.
Sharing is really coming to the forefront, in particular for younger people who want access to the stuff they need and see ownership as a burden, not a benefit.
Global revenue growth for sharing and renting is forecast to grow at 30% each year, and is key to helping us do much more, with much less. In other words, we get more use – or productivity – from underutilised assets – meaning we need fewer of them in the overall system. This is sometimes referred to as Decoupling. (The UN defines Absolute Decoupling as “a situation in which resource productivity grows faster than economic activity (GDP) and resource use is absolutely declining.”)