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
Climate and inflation: are we facing unknown unknowns? Or just pretending these risks don’t exist? Being explicit about what we don’t know can help us better understand how climate and ecological risk might play out…. What NASA and psychologists can teach us about risk assessment, and why researchers think we need a comprehensive assessment of the risks for our economy posed by climate change.
Tara Button is the founder and CEO of Buy Me Once, a platform which helps people buy the longest-lasting products on the planet.
If you’ve heard me talking about the 3 essential strategies for circular businesses, you’ll know that one of those 3 strategies is Keeping things in use for longer, through durability, repairability and resellability. I get frustrated by how difficult it is to find good examples of companies doing this, and so it was brilliant to discover Buy Me Once, which is all about finding products that meet that criteria and helping people find them.
Back in 2015, Tara was a frustrated advertising creative, tasked with increasing the chocolate consumption of children, when the gift of an heirloom cooking pot sparked the idea of Buy Me Once.
The platform went spectacularly viral in 2016, allowing Tara to leave Ad Land. Since then, Buy Me Once has partnered with 100s of ethical brands to help consumers buy for the long term, for a wide range of products from kitchenware to bedlinen, home furnishings to electronics, and for clothing.
Tara explains what led her to start Buy Me Once, and the ethos underpinning the choice of featured brands and products.
We hear what is driving the push for more durable, repairable products, and how the feedback from customers can help brands to improve their products.
Tara has also become a disruptive voice, speaking about product durability at events, on TV, podcasts and BBC radio. Tara’s early career in marketing and advertising meant she could unpack the psychology of consumerism, and she has written a very engaging and insightful book on mindful consumption, A Life Less Throwaway, published by Harper Collins. We touch on aspects of what’s in the book, which has some great tips to help us spot the various kinds of marketing tactics before we get sucked into the ‘buy it now’ decision.
Staying true to our values | Signs of circular progress | Leasing minerals |Sustainable living survey | Planet Critical
There’s a ‘value’ thread running through this round up of what I’ve shared, and what’s inspired me. Firstly, our personal values and principles, which guide our attitudes and actions; then my podcast interview with circular economy superstar, Walter Stahel, digging into how businesses can create more value with circular strategies, and how countries could think differently about the value of the commons; finally, a podcast that investigates what’s keeping us stuck, where (and who) is destroying value, and how new ways of thinking can help us create deeper, richer value for humans, and more-than-humans.
Yann Toutant is the founder of Black Winch, which helps businesses understand the opportunities, practicalities and benefits of shifting to ‘as a service’ models, and supports them in making it happen.
Yann has been implementing subscription-based models for hardware in the ICT industry for 25 years, including over a decade as CEO of Econocom’s Dutch operations.
Today with his own company, Black Winch, Yann Toutant helps CEOs and their teams to focus on the user experience by incorporating all components of an As-A-Service offer into a single in-house comprehensive, scalable subscription model. Yann sees offering a doorway to circular economy as one of the main drivers, making it possible to centralise ownership and to industrialise circularity at scale.
We discuss why ‘as a service’ is becoming more popular, for business customers as well as for people in general, and then Yann talks about some of the benefits for service-based businesses, and how Black Winch helps its clients take the first, easy steps to ignite that journey.
Yann explains how, for some products, ‘as a service’ is likely to exist alongside traditional ownership models, and what he sees as the motivators for that.
Our values guide our attitudes and actions, and most people’ deep-seated values support circularity and sustainability. But we misunderstand other people’s values, and that is holding us back.
The field of social psychology can help us understand more about how our personal values drive behaviour, and what that means for sustainability and the circular economy. How can we tap into our values to drive positive change?
Ruth Taylor of the Common Cause Foundation guides us through the field of social psychology, to explore how our personal values drive behaviour, and what that means for sustainability and the circular economy.
I recently completed ‘Values 101’, a short course run by the Common Cause Foundation. It opened my eyes to a whole new way of thinking about our behaviour and what motivates our choices, actions and interactions.
The course tutors were Ruth and her colleague Tom Crompton, and today, I’m talking to Ruth about some of my main takeaways from the course.
The Common Cause Foundation works at the intersection of culture change and human values, and is driven by the belief that it is possible to design societies that magnify and strengthen the cooperative and caring parts of human nature. By doing that together, we can build ways of living that are equitable and just, and lie within our planetary boundaries.
The Common Cause Foundation sees Values playing a pivotal role in shaping our cultures and systems. The dominant global culture is out of balance, prioritising extrinsic values such as wealth, power and social status, in a way that has led us to the brink of destruction; with crises of poverty, inequality and climate change. Common Cause Foundation’s work shows that balance can be restored by elevating intrinsic values instead – values like community, creativity and unity with nature.
Ruth Taylor has worked in the field of social and environmental change for close to 15 years. She is driven by the question of how more people can be encouraged to think, feel and act differently when it comes to the multiple and interconnected challenges we are experiencing globally.
Ruth explains what values mean, and how they impact our daily lives, and we talk about the Perception Gap – the mistaken beliefs we have about other people’s values, and why that matters. We also talk about why we might not always act in line with our values, and how we can overcome that.
We explore how engaging certain values could influence more sustainable and circular behaviours, and how it’s relatively easy for people to become interested in topics and actions that have similar underlying principles – for example, being passionate about women’s rights makes it more likely that you’ll be interested in supporting other movements for equality and fairness, both for humans and other-than humans.
We find out how values are like muscles, and can be strengthened, and we discover why we misunderstand other people’s values, and how that’s holding back our shift to a circular and regenerative world.
Professor Walter R Stahel, widely acknowledged as a circular economy pioneer, talks about progress, barriers and missed opportunities. Walter is the founder and director of the Product-Life Institute in Switzerland, founded in 1982 and now Europe’s oldest sustainability-based consultancy and think tank. These days, his is a keynote speaker and author on sustainability and circular economy and says he has always been interested in what he does not know.
With over 500 publications since 1975, he holds a number of visiting professor and lecturing roles, and a long list of awards and advisory roles, including being a Full Member of the Club of Rome.
Walter sees the circular economy as a ‘changer of the globalised industrial game’, creating societal resilience and providing protection against disruptive events. Walter created the idea of the performance economy, as a way of extending the concepts of the circular economy, and says that many of the opportunities are either untapped, or criticised by those who benefit from the Rentier Economy. (If you want to know more about the problems of the rentier economy, have a listen back to ep 119 with Ken Webster.)
We talk about the business case for the circular economy, and Walter highlights some of the aspects that are often missed, especially for the future value of materials. We discuss the opportunities offered by platforms, digital twins and passports for products and materials, and why we need better ways to assess the remaining life of expensive products and components.
We discuss the need to shift from a mindset of owning to using, and the need to change how we frame things for customers and businesses. Walter describes how we might rethink designs to minimise risks and liabilities, and how caring for our things opens up lots of interesting career opportunities, especially for young people.
Here’s the latest round-up of what I’ve shared, and what’s inspired me. This time, there’s a travelling theme – a mobile circular ‘shed’, digital mapping for waste streams, choosing different pathways to the future, and a story to build a ‘golden path’ to a brighter future.
My review of The Wonderful Circles of Oz: A Circular Economy Story, by Ken Webster and Alex Duff.
Ken Webster, one of the circular economy’s leading thinkers, and creative writer Alex Duff teamed up to offer us a different way of looking at the problems of our modern economy unset out ideas for a restorative alternative. It’s an intriguing, thought-provoking book that tackles key issues including the use of personal data, digital currency, the rise of the ‘rentier class’ and the future of food.
Mirella Ferraz is co-founder of Share Shed, the world’s first travelling library of things. The Share Shed van visits rural communities, so people can borrow a wide range of useful things, including tools, household appliances, camping and gardening equipment, sewing machines, suitcases and much more!
Share Shed aims to
• Help people save money, space and resources, and reduce clutter
• Build bridges between people’s needs and wants and the resources already available in their community
• Support more collaborative and sustainable lifestyles and inspire people to engage in social change
Mirella Ferraz has worked for over 10 years at the Network of Wellbeing, which supports Share Shed, and she is proud to set up and run community projects that support the wellbeing of people and the planet. Mirella grew up in Brazil, and currently lives in Devon, UK.
We find out how Share Shed works in practice, and how it’s been evolving as it expands to serve more communities – including finding was to make the service more convenient for those who can’t make it to the Shed’s pick up and drop off locations and schedule.
Mirella tells us how perceptions and attitudes are changing, too – for a variety of reasons.