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Artwork for Circular Economy Podcast ep 147

147 Dr Alexandra Leeper: smarter ways to create value

Dr Alexandra Leeper is the CEO of the Iceland Ocean Cluster and is passionate about the sustainable use of ocean resources. She’s working as a scientist intrapreneur in the blue and circular economies, drawing on diverse experiences from working all over the world in universities, consultancies, and at sea.
Alexandra has a background in marine resources and completed an industrial doctorate in aquaculture and circular economy in 2021. Her work focuses on sustainable value creation, positive impact in the blue economy and supporting the development of ocean clusters around the world.
The Iceland Ocean Cluster is at the center of maritime innovation in Iceland, with a mission to create value by connecting together entrepreneurs, businesses and knowledge in the blue economy.
They describe their flagship project, 100% Fish, as an ‘incredible fishy value machine’. 100% Fish is all about inspiring the seafood and fish sectors to utilize more of each fish, increase the value of each fish landed, support new business opportunities, increase employment and most importantly decrease waste. It’s incredibly successful – since the 1990s, the utilization of fishery by-products has increased 30-fold, the export value per kilogram of fish has risen by a factor of 4 and a wide array of different products have been developed.
Alexandra explains how that works in practice, and how it’s sparked a movement around the world, with other Ocean Clusters using the same approach to come up with their own incredible value machines, and create value for their local blue economies.

Artwork for Circular Economy Podcast episode 139 with Peter McCafferty of Zero Waste Scotland

139 Peter McCafferty: supporting circular businesses

Peter McCafferty works on Zero Waste Scotland’s Circular Economy Business Support Service (CEBS). These services were launched back in 2017, and since then, Peter has worked with over 200 SMEs and large organisations, so he’s got a wealth of experience and insights to share with us, especially on the fuel and friction around the circular economy.
Zero Waste Scotland is a not-for-profit environmental organisation funded by the Scottish Government and the European Regional Development Fund. Its purpose is to lead Scotland to use products and resources responsibly, focusing on where it can have the greatest impact on climate change.
It aims to both inform government policy, and to motivate individuals and businesses to embrace the environmental, economic, and social benefits of a circular economy.
Peter has over 13 years of experience of working in sustainability and resource management, and his role involves working with individual businesses to identify, shape and develop circular and sustainable business ideas through a mix of 1-1 coaching and engagement, as well as facilitating bespoke support via Zero Waste Scotland’s dedicated CE Framework.
Our discussion includes:
What’s the big ‘why’ behind ZWS, and in a practical sense, how does it provide support for businesses in Scotland that want to adopt circular solutions?
What kind of things are providing the ‘fuel’ for the circular economy, and why digital solutions are coming to the fore as key enablers of circularity.
We discuss some of the barriers to circular approaches, including regulatory challenges, scaling issues, and underestimated waste reduction potential.
These days, we’re all living in a VUCA world – volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous – and we discuss the importance of systems thinking, especially in getting to grips with the challenges of implementation and addressing complex global issues.
We share our thoughts on the ongoing struggle with language and interpretation of circular economy, and Peter talks about the increasing focus on carbon footprinting and net zero policies, and how seems to be getting in the way of conversations for circularity.

Artwork for Circular Economy Podcast episode 129 with Alex Holland of SolarPunk Stories

129 Alex Holland: SolarPunk Stories for a circular future

How do we draw people towards a deliciously sustainable future?
In this episode, we’re going off at a slight tangent: to explore how we can bring people into this world, to feel they have agency and to see an exciting, meaningful future where we do better, with less.
We’re going to hear about a way of telling stories – that could be fiction to help people understand circular solutions, or it might be stories to help them imagine how circular products and services work in real life, helping them see how that’s more fulfilling than buying yet more stuff and adding to the problems of waste and pollution.
Alex Holland is the Founder of SolarPunk Stories, and has worked as a journalist in the UK, Venezuela and India.
Alex has an MA in Leadership for Sustainable Development and created the world’s first Tea Pub which was also Crowdcube’s most-shared startup.
SolarPunk is a much more optimistic genre than dystopian fiction – it’s more like the Thrutopian concept set out by Professor Rupert Read in an article for the Huffington Post, a few years ago.
Utopias are too fantastical, whereas dystopias can be useless, even dangerously doom-mongering. Instead, we can create thrutopias: stories that help us see a way through the challenges we face, that help us build a vision for the future we want to be part of: a regenerative, fair and inclusive future that we can be proud of. Stories that help us to imagine, to feel what it would be like, and to design the political and economic systems to get us through.

Summary of the knowns and unknowns 4 box category used by NASA and others for strategic planning

Climate and inflation: are we facing unknown unknowns?

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.

Artwork for Circular Economy Podcast episode 127 with Yann Toutant

127 Yann Toutant: getting started with As-a-Service

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.

Artwork for Circular Economy Insights #40

Circular Insights #40 – Pathways to a circular future

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.

Cartoon - excavating chunks from our planet - from 360 Dialogues

Are you held back by last-century thinking?

It was great to be featured by Greenbiz in January, although after reflecting, I realised a couple of my ‘soundbites’ could be read to mean exactly the opposite of what I went on to talk about…! This blog unpacks those, explaining more about what I think is keeping business leaders stuck in ‘last century’ thinking, and how to avoid that trap.

Circular Economy Podcast - episode 122 artwork - Iain McKechnie - steps to a services-led strategy

122 Iain McKechnie: steps to a services-led strategy

Iain McKechnie of the Advanced Services Group helps clients develop services-led strategies, improving circularity and outcomes for the businesses and their customers.
The market for services, including rental, subscriptions and ‘X-as-a-service’ is growing rapidly, both for business to business and business to consumer markets, and services can be a gamechanger for businesses looking to shrink their footprint and adopt circular strategies.
It’s all part of a shift from a culture of ‘ownership’ to ‘usership’, with services emerging as a way to provide more convenient, flexible options for customers, avoiding the burden and hassle of ownership. Meanwhile, businesses can benefit from the stability of recurring revenue, predictable income streams and easier financial planning; and improve sustainability by using resources more efficiently. And providing services helps businesses get closer to their customers, with many more opportunities for contact and dialogues, discovering more about what customers value, and how to improve things.
The Advanced Services Group are specialists in servitization research and practice, with work that is grounded in the latest academic research, real industry insight, business know-how and experience.
The Advanced Services Group helps manufacturing companies and technology innovators on their servitization journey to develop services-led strategies and ultimately transform their business model to compete through advanced services. ASG has worked with over 300 businesses, multinational companies and SMEs to develop their growth strategies through services.
Iain tells us a bit about what Advanced Services Group does, and which kind of sectors are starting to move towards service-based models. Iain then explains how companies can transition from selling products, to moving along what ASG calls the ‘Services Staircase’, developing different kinds of services to create value for their customers.
Iain talks about the kind of benefits these companies are seeing – and how this is better for their customers, too. We hear what typically holds companies back from switching to services, and how they might get started.
Iain shares a couple of diagrams from the resources on ASG’s website – the Transformation Roadmap and the Services Staircase, and I’ve included links to those in the shownotes.