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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

Artwork for Circular Economy Podcast episode 117 James Rigg -a refurbishment revolution for electricals

117 James Rigg: a refurbishment revolution for electricals

James Rigg is CEO of Trojan Electronics in Wales, and has a wealth of expertise in value-adding circular solutions for electrical and electronics manufacturers and retailers. James has built on his experience across retail and more recently, leading growth across the Buy It Direct Group, and is now focussed on expanding Trojan Electronics Circular Solutions to help retailers and manufacturers recover value and at the same time, reduce e-waste. Trojan provides services to high-profile brands, and we’ll hear about some examples.
E-waste – the waste from end-of-life or unwanted electricals and electronics – is the world’s fastest growing waste stream, and is forecast to grow by 30% over this decade.
The Trojan Electronics team provides electrical repair, refurb and resell services in several ways – through their client’s own marketplace stores, through direct integration into the clients’ ecommerce stores, and through Amazon, eBay, Tik Tok, Wowcher and others.
Trojan is a £20M turnover business based in Swansea, south Wales, employing 150 staff in a purpose-built warehouse housing repairs and all its other services, and refurbishing over half a million items each year.
Ahead of our conversation, James sent me some customer research, digging into people’s attitudes to refurbished products, with some very encouraging findings, and we’ll hear more about that in the conversation. I can share a few of the standout figures now: over a third of the respondents had bought a refurbished or repaired electrical item in the previous 12 months, including smartphones, laptops or tablets, and household appliances. Only 1% of those people had a bad experience with that purchase, and almost 80% said they’d buy refurbished in the future. And even though people knew they’d bought a refurbished item, 24% of customers couldn’t tell the difference from the equivalent new product.
The survey includes some market research, highlighting predictions for the growth of refurbished electronics – the market was valued at around $85bn in 2021 and is forecast to grow at 12% each year over the next decade. James is happy to share the research, and I’ve included a link to the research paper in the shownotes.
James also shared information from Trojan’s clients who are offering refurbished products alongside new versions, and the results are very exciting. However, at some clients, attitudes are slow to change, with people reluctant to make the transition to selling refurbished products as well as new versions, and James explains some of the reasons behind this.

Circular Economy Podcast - artwork for #116 Chuck Fuerst - circularity for product returns

116 Chuck Fuerst: circularity for product returns

Chuck Fuerst is Chief Marketing Officer for software provider ReverseLogix.
ReverseLogix is the only end-to-end, centralized, and fully integrated returns management system built specifically for retail, eCommerce, manufacturing and 3PL organizations. The ReverseLogix platform facilitates, manages, and reports on the entire returns’ lifecycle.
When I first worked in logistics, back in the late 1980s, for most companies, most of the time, returns were a minor issue. When e-commerce came along, starting in the 1990’s, product returns began to increase, and over the last few decades – especially as companies have moved towards cheaper products, with less reliable information on sizing for things like clothing – returns have become a major issue for many businesses – whether that’s for manufacturers and retailers, and for both B2B and B2C models.
Chuck explains how the ReverseLogix software helps companies improve the process for getting products back into the system – whether that’s from e-commerce returns, returns of faulty goods, for repairs and warranty claims, and more. We’ll hear how ReverseLogix improves the customer returns experience, saves employee time with faster workflows, and helps businesses get insights into returns data – all of which improve profits and circular outcomes.

Circular Economy Podcast - episode 115 Paddy Le Flufy - building future-fit systems

115 Paddy Le Flufy: Building future-fit systems

We’re exploring the broader context of a future-fit economy, asking questions like:
How do we create the conditions for circular solutions to gain traction? What’s holding us back, particularly when we think about our economic systems, and the way companies are set up?
In today’s episode, I’m talking to Paddy Le Flufy about his book, Building Tomorrow: Averting Environmental Crisis With a New Economic System, which was published in March 2023. Paddy’s aim is to work out how we can improve our own society AND improve the lives of the billions of people currently affected by the dominant global systems.
In A Circular Economy Handbook, I included a chapter on Enablers and Accelerators for the circular economy, and today we’re going to explore a couple of important ideas that fit into those categories – concepts that aren’t circular in themselves, but are important ways to help circular approaches have even more impact.
Before embarking on this project, in 2015, Paddy had a somewhat different life. After a degree in mathematics at Cambridge University then qualifying as an accountant at KPMG in London, he lived something of a double life. He worked as a finance specialist in London for six months at a time, but then used his money to live in remote places, alongside people whose lives were drastically different from his own – and we’ll hear a bit more about that later.
Paddy’s book is featured on the 2023 Financial Times Best Book of Summer reading list, and has earned praise from Jeremy Lent.
“The book aims directly at creating systemic change by providing people with both a holistic vision of a new economic system and the tools with which to build it… Positive real-world examples and potential future developments show how people throughout society can help build the new system. Those that do will be creating a better world.”
Paddy will give us an overview of the 6 themes in the book, one of which is the circular economy, and we’ll then go a bit deeper with a couple of them, exploring different forms of company structures and learning more about regenerative organisations.

Circular Economy Podcast 114 Daniel Kietzer: making resources discoverable & reusable

114 Daniel Kietzer: making resources discoverable & reusable

Daniel Kietzer is Director of Ecosystem Growth at Rheaply, a digital sharing platform scaling reuse by making resources discoverable, easily transferable and more valuable.
Rheaply was started in 2016, and has won lots of awards, including Most Innovative Reuse Company at the Reusies in 2021. It’s backed by a number of early-stage investors, including Microsoft and Salesforce.
Daniel Kietzer provides strategic, organizational, and technical support to Rheaply clients and their partners. He’s a circular economy and sustainability professional with 10+ years of experience designing and leading impact-focused projects with forward-thinking companies and organizations across the globe. Daniel’s speciality is reuse and recycling market development is his specialty, but he also dabbles in social entrepreneurship, sustainability in the built environment, water, carbon, and a variety of other sustainability-related efforts.
We’ll get an update on how Rheaply has evolved since my original conversation with Tom Fecarotta back in 2020, in particular how data aggregation unlocks opportunities for cost and carbon savings, as well as supporting your zero waste targets. So many organisations could be tapping into these solutions to help them do better, with less.

Circular Economy Podcast #113 Steven Bethell – systemic solutions to the crisis of stuff

113 Steven Bethell: systemic solutions to the crisis of stuff

Steven Bethell is a thought leader and pioneer in the post-consumer textile space for over 20 years, who’s creating innovative and relevant solutions to the crisis of stuff.
Steven is co-founder of the Bank and Vogue family of companies, which includes a major remanufacturing plant where the circular economy for textiles is brought to life. Taking post-consumer waste and transforming it into relevant products, Steven works with big brands to help them bring their sustainability platforms to the next level.
Steven is also behind Beyond Retro, the largest vintage retailer in the UK and the Nordics which launched in 2002 and now has 15 retail outlets and an online shop, offering a wide selection of handpicked vintage clothing.
When we donate clothes and shoes to a charity shop, how many of those end up being put on display and successfully sold? You might be surprised by the stats that Steven shares.
Steven explains how he at the leverage points in the overall system, to work out where B&V could get involved and how to retain more value, in particular by reselling. Steven then took this further, finding ways to repurpose and remanufacture clothing and footwear – at scale. Steven explains how this works in the retail business he set up – Beyond Retro – and how he then looked upstream to develop remanufacturing services for a major US footwear retailer.
Steven thinks at a system level, looking at the whole value network both upstream and downstream to see where he can intervene to make the biggest impact, and how to create the critical mass needed to create value, and overcome the sticking points.
In his spare time Steven lives off the grid in the Canadian wilderness. He is an avid woodsman: fishing, paddling and learning about the outdoors and its many wonders.

111 Sara Howard: symbiotic circular ceramics

How might we design and make ceramics in a circular economy? Ceramic products make our lives better in all kinds of ways. Some have been around for centuries (think bricks, tiles, pottery), and some are much more modern, in microchips and more.
To help us learn about circular ceramics, we’re going to meet Sara Howard, a very impressive and award-winning ceramic designer and materials researcher, whose practice is focussed on reducing the environmental and societal impacts of ceramic production.
Sara graduated from Central St. Martins in 2020, with a BA Honours Degree in Ceramic Design. In her final year, Sara designed an industrial symbiosis around the ceramics industry, in which waste from one industry replaces the raw materials in ceramic production.
Sara wrote a book, Circular Ceramics, to openly share her methods and processes and help fellow ceramicists to adopt these sustainable processes in their own practices.
On top of that, since graduating just 3 years ago, Sara has created two groundbreaking projects, collaborating with ceramic producers, artists and other industries to implement the use of industrial waste on a larger scale. Sara tells us how she’s set up a project for ceramics made with excavation waste from construction sites, and is launching a circular tableware startup in Bali, complete with its own factory.
We’ll also find out about the key problems with modern ceramic production and why making new ceramics from ceramic waste is pretty much impossible.

Circular Economy Podcast 110 Katie Beverley: designing a circular economy

110 Katie Beverley: designing a circular economy

Are we designing a circular economy – or just designing circular products and materials?
Today we’re catching up with Dr. Katie Beverley. Katie is a Senior Research Officer at PDR International Centre for Design and Research, at Cardiff Metropolitan University. She works with academic partners and the public and private sector, to embed ecodesign, circular economy and sustainable thinking into products and services.
Back in Episode 5, Katie helped us understand more about ecodesign. She describes herself as a ‘critical friend’ of the circular economy, and that feels like a great starting point to explore what’s going well, and what isn’t.

Circular Economy Podcast - 109 Janina Nieper – Connecting new designs to leftover materials

109 Janina Nieper – Connecting new designs to leftover materials

Janina Nieper is an Architect and Designer, working at Furnify, a design agency in the Netherlands.
Janina Nieper is passionate about concepts that promote the well-being of our planet and its inhabitants, including using the Circular Economy to help us stay within planetary boundaries.
At Furnify, a company dedicated to creating circular spaces, Janina is in charge of Business Development and Consulting, merging her expertise in spatial design and Circular Design. Janina wants to accelerate the Circular Economy through connecting, collaboration, and sharing, and she founded the Circular Economy Club in Amsterdam, with regular events to create a network of Circular Pioneers in Amsterdam.
Furnify is a design agency, designing interior spaces for office work, education, and other activities. Furnify aims to turn its client’s sustainable ambitions into a circular reality by offering 2nd life alternatives for new designs. Furnify’s offers four services: consulting, design, realization, and story telling.
We hear about how client needs are evolving and broadening. On top of the aesthetic and practical requirements around what do we need to do in this space – now, organisations want to reduce carbon, make a positive impact on other sustainability measures, and create healthier spaces for their teams and customers. That could include improving mental wellbeing, as well as reducing synthetic materials, chemicals like flame retardents and more.