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Circular Economy Podcast - artwork for episode 149

149 Giulia Ziino – CircularPlace: generate value from underused assets

Giulia Ziino is a co-founder of CircularPlace, a digital platform that helps organizations generate value by reusing and repurposing underutilized products and equipment.
These services are needed more than ever, by a wide range of organizations. The pandemic, working from home and now hybrid working upturned the entire concept of workspaces, and organizations need to resize, relocate or restructure on a regular basis. That usually means changing office layouts.
Manufacturing businesses may need to update or replace machinery and equipment to reflect changing specifications or what’s selling well in their product mix. And hotels and hospitality venues need to keep their furniture and equipment looking fresh and attractive – and some rooms or areas might look tired, with others hardly used.
All of this means that furniture, equipment and other items become available, and often these might be in as-new condition, or just lightly used. Even if they are more worn, they may be suitable for refurbishment, repair or remanufacturing. The CircularPlace platform is available as a white-label solution, and facilitates the sale or donation of equipment, furniture and other unwanted items, either within the company or to external buyers. This provides tax benefits as well as reducing GHG emissions and waste. CircularPlace was founded in 2021, and clients now include Microsoft France, Sodexo, Schneider and Fedex.
Giulia Ziino joined CircularPlace as a late-stage co-founder, bringing international experience and initially taking on the role of Chief of Staff, where she focused on expanding and stabilizing the brand. Now, as Chief Marketing Officer, Giulia is building a robust presence for CircularPlace in the B2B circular economy space and driving impactful storytelling around sustainability.
We’ll hear how CircularPlace helps clients with asset and inventory management, with logistics, and provides an impact calculator to measure carbon savings. We hear what’s encouraging companies to look at these solutions, and how the platform links clients with specialist resellers, improving the value recovered as well boosting the existing reuse markets.

Circular Economy Podcast Ep99 Ben Jeffreys - clean, low-carbon cooking for all

99 Ben Jeffreys – clean, low-carbon, circular cooking for all

Ben Jeffreys, co-founder of ATEC, is a multi award-winning social entrepreneur making better things happen. Right now, he’s focused on decarbonising cooking 🍳, which is a leading cause of illness and death for women and children,
The WHO says around a third of the global population cook using open fires or inefficient stoves fuelled by kerosene, biomass (wood, animal dung and crop waste) and coal. That generates harmful household air pollution 🤒, and inhaling those toxic fumes kills more people than malaria, and creates emissions, in the form of black carbon. The IPCC says that replacing these with clean stoves could save between 0.6 and 2.4 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent each year.
Ben and the ATEC team first got clear on the root cause of the key problems with existing biodigesters, in particular for regions like Cambodia, that are prone to annual floods. ATEC looked at how nature🌱 already solves this, and used that to create a ground-breaking biodigester design. Ben explains how ATEC has come up with other innovations, including using the IoT, to make the solution more affordable and circular, with potential for carbon credits.
We’ll hear about the many benefits for farmers and local households, how to design for unintended uses of manure, the role of methane in the environment, and some of the challenges of social media and social enterprise.
Before ATEC, Ben Jeffreys held leadership positions in strategy and growth with the likes of Oxfam, School for Social Entrepreneurs, and Westfield.
Ben describes his approach as unashamedly impatient and bold, and he believes that modern, decarbonised cooking can be a reality for a further 4 billion people by 2030. To Ben, this is not pipe-dream, but a technically solvable problem through disruptive technology, financial innovation, carbon markets and eCommerce. As well as being a trailblazer in his field, Ben is a family man, and puts purpose first, taking a big leap in 2015 when moving his young family to Cambodia to found the business.

Circular Economy Podcast Episode 61 Astrid Wynne – IT Sustainability expert

Episode 61 Astrid Wynne – IT Sustainability expert

Astrid Wynne is the Sustainability Lead at Techbuyer, a global sustainable IT solutions provider, which specialises in product life extension. She is also head of partnerships at Interact, a software tool that optimises energy and carbon usage of servers.
Astrid has co-authored a number of academic papers including ‘Optimizing server refresh cycles: The case for circular economy with an aging Moore’s Law’, which looked at how past generations of IT can provide a net positive on use-phase energy, economic benefit and retaining precious materials.
She is a board member at the Free ICT Europe Foundation, chair of the Sustainability Special Interest Group at the Data Centre Alliance and represents Techbuyer on the Interreg-funded research project CEDaCI, and we hear about some of the work at these collaborative and open-data projects.
This episode follows up on a previous conversation with Techbuyer, and digs into some of the perceptions around refurbished and remanufactured tech hardware, including reliability and performance. We hear how a remanufacturered server is able to outperform a latest generation machine, and why they are at least as reliable as new machines, too.

Powering Progress Together, Shell London, 2018

Catherine spoke about Low Carbon City Logistics at Shell Powering Progress Together in London on July 5 2018, a day of discussions focusing on “Exploring Future Mobility: Visions of Transport for 2040”. Watch the short summary video below… Can all transport be electrified? How will autonomous vehicles change the way we travel? Are we about… Read More »Powering Progress Together, Shell London, 2018

Circular economy can make America great again

“Making America Great Again”: 3 ways the circular economy can help newly elected President Trump (and you!)

The United States, along with the rest of the ‘post-industrial’ world, faces complex issues: manufacturing jobs lost, real wages down, dependence on fossil fuels and imported goods.
Instead of making ‘sweeping statements’, newly elected President Trump could ‘sweep up’ waste to make new products, and grow remanufacturing (already worth US $45 billion each year).
The circular economy can help the US – and your business – thrive.