Pierre-Emmanuel Saint-Esprit is the co-founder of ZACK, France’s leading company enabling the second life of electronic products, through recycling, repair, resale and donation. Last year, the TECH FOR GOOD report by the Presidency of the French Republic named ZACK as one of the top 3 French circular companies. Pierre-Emmanuel explains how his MBA in entrepreneurship at Berkeley, California, helped him create a business to fight climate change, and reduce our pressure on natural resources. We find out how ZACK creates social value too, helping people build the skills and confidence to secure employment.

Circular Economy Podcast

Ep64 Pierre-Emmanuel Saint-Esprit of ZACK

As the account manager for the Upcyclecentrum in Almere, in the Netherlands, Hede Razoky has a strong focus on creative entrepreneurship and making connections, for a shared goal of a 'world without waste'. The Upcyclecentrum has three elements: [1] it’s a recycling centre for local citizens, [2] it has an ‘experience room’ made from upcycled materials, for use by local businesses and community groups, and [thirdly] it has a brilliant entrepreneur incubation programme… providing facilities, materials and other support to artisan businesses that turn local waste materials into desirable, high-value products.

Episode 63 Hede Razoky – The Upcyclecentrum

Malin Orebäck is leading McKinsey Design’s work in sustainability and circular economy. McKinsey Design is one of the world’s leading design agencies, and Malin shares a wide range of insights and gives us a masterclass introduction to circular design for products and services. Malin explains how she helps her clients get started with circular, and overcome linear ‘lock-in’.

Episode 62 Malin Orebäck – Circular Design at McKinsey

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.

Episode 61 Astrid Wynne – IT Sustainability expert

Every 10th episode, Catherine Weetman looks back at recent conversations and round up some of the insights we’ve heard: The theme for this episode is turning off the tap. What do I mean by that? One of my favourite metaphors for the linear economy - our system of taking materials, making stuff, using it and then throwing it away. We’re pushing lots of resources in at one end of the pipe - but it gushes out at the end, and there are leaks all the way along the pipe with pollution going into the atmosphere, air, water and soil. And all of that, of course, is undermining our ability to thrive on this planet. So what can we do? We've got to radically rethink business as usual, to turn off that flow of resources and waste. We need to be regenerative instead of destructive and wasteful. We need a different approach, so we have products with a life of their own, not just serving a single user. We need objects designed for reuse and resale once someone no longer needs them, or objects available in multi user systems with customers sharing or renting when needed. In this episode, we unpack this to understand how it works, and why it helps to separate the benefits of products and services from their cost to the global commons.

Episode 60 Turning off the tap

Rae Stanton is the Earthcare Retail Lead for Lush Cosmetics UK and Ireland, using Permaculture principles to provide environmental best practice insight and guidance on packaging, sourcing regenerative ingredients and much more. We find out how Lush embeds Permaculture and regenerative agriculture approaches into its business practices, and why Lush realised it needed to ‘own the packaging solution’ instead of relying on municipal recycling collections. Rae explains how Lush engaged its customers in designing ‘bring-back’ solutions, including asking them how much the reward should be.

Episode 59 – Rae Stanton of Lush

We talk to Elis Joudalova about OLIO, the #1 sharing app. OLIO connects neighbours with each other and with local businesses so surplus food can be shared, not thrown away. This could be food nearing its sell-by date in local stores, spare home-grown vegetables, bread from your baker, or the groceries in your fridge when you go away. OLIO can also be used for non-food household items. Elis looks after Market Growth & Partnerships for OLIO, and has kickstarted, grown and managed strong food sharing communities in Jersey, Guernsey and Stockholm. Elis is a sustainability, food waste and circular economy change-maker with a contagious passion for food, environment, community empowerment and systems thinking. She loves inspiring and empowering people and businesses to make a change, focuses on the long term vision and has . a unique entrepreneurial approach to solving problems.

Episode 58 Elis Joudalova – OLIO

Helen Burdett leads the World Economic Forum’s work on circular economy innovation, including its flagship initiative, Scale360°, and its work on Circular Trailblazers. The Scale360° program advances innovation ecosystems for environmental and economic impact with scalable, locally-led innovation support delivered through private-public partnerships--all connected through a global digital community. Circular Trailblazers are the subject of a new report from the World Economic Forum and impact organization ScaleUpNation. The special study was conducted to better understand innovators within the circular economy given the major opportunities they offer, for both job creation and economic development.

Episode 57 Helen Burdett – World Economic Forum

Laura Meijering, a designer, fashion lover and entrepreneur from The Netherlands. While studying, Laura watched the True Cost documentary - something inside her snapped and she realised she wanted to be part of a better fashion system. Laura founded Unravelau in 2017, to unravel the threads of fashion and keep only the good parts. She wants to pioneer a new way of designing the clothes we wear. As Laura says, unravelling the fashion industry is a big job, and so Unravelau starts by cutting the crap and spreading awareness of the impact we have on the planet. Unravelau uses only organic and second-hand materials, and produces for customer commissions, so there is no dead stock.

Episode 56 Laura Meijering – Unravelau

We meet Anthony Burns, Chief Operating Officer of ACS in Scotland. ACS started out as a formal-wear hire business, and is now an internationally recognised and award-winning circular fashion enterprise with clothes rental offerings for woman, men, children and babies. It is now working with a wide range of fashion brands, acting as their Circular Service Provider. We find out how the business has evolved, its progress towards B- Corp status, and about some of its innovations in packaging and garment cleaning. We also hear what ACS is doing to be a good neighbour in its local community.

Episode 55 Anthony Burns – ACS

Catherine Weetman talks to Louise Bijleveld, Co-Founder of LONO in Côte d’Ivoire. Lono helps agro-industrial companies and farmer cooperatives to create value from waste, by converting it into biofertilizers and biogas. Its overall aim is to help value reach rural areas and reduce the inequalities in agricultural supply chains. Côte d’Ivoire is an important global producer of cocoa beans, cashew nuts, natural rubber and tropical fruits – all of these produce huge amounts of agricultural waste when harvested. The farms are often in remote areas, so it’s a big challenge to find ways to combine compatible feedstocks and make the logistics cost-effective.

Episode 54 Louise Bijleveld – LONO

Mick Payne is the Managing Director of Techbuyer’s UK operations. Techbuyer helps businesses maximise their IT budgets by supplying cost-effective new and quality refurbished servers, storage, memory and networking equipment, from over 150 brands including HPE, Dell, IBM and Cisco. Every year it configures over 3000 IT servers and data-erases over 10,000 hard drives each month.

Episode 53 Mick Payne – Techbuyer

Elizabeth Knight is an author, sustainability activist and founder of New York’s first Repair Café, and is the co-author (with John Wackman) of Repair Revolution: How Fixers Are Transforming Our Throwaway Culture. In the book, John and Elizabeth explore repairing in the broadest sense of the word. They focus on the community repair experience, the wisdom of repair, the sustainable aspects of repairing, the adventure of opening a device and seeing what’s inside, the right to repair that is gaining attention worldwide – and much more! We hear how repair cafes can bridge across social divides, and how they help people of all ages and backgrounds build new connections and develop their social confidence levels. We find out that you don’t need to be a repair geek, and hear about the wide range of volunteer roles available. Elizabeth explains what visible mending is, tells us inspiring stories about the rewards of being involved in a Repair Café, and how you can find one, or start your own.

Episode 52 Elizabeth Knight – Repair Revolution

Jamie Butterworth is a partner at Circularity Capital, helping large investors, including financial institutions, global corporations and family offices, to invest in circular businesses which can gain competitive advantage by breaking the link between resource use and business success Circularity Capital invests in circular businesses and startups, such as Winnow, ZigZag, Shark Solutions and Grover. Jamie tells us why there is a need for specialist investment in circular businesses and what specific financial challenges those businesses have, how investors evaluate circular business models, and what is happening as more investors become aware that we’re in a race to solve the climate and biodiversity crises. Jamie also explains Circularity Capital’s approach to working out what to invest in – through an ‘unintended consequences’ paper.

Episode 51 – Jamie Butterworth of Circularity Capital

In this season, we’ve featured another 9 amazing, talented people, helping to make the circular economy happen. Our guests have been from the USA, Chile, Ghana, Spain and the UK. We’ve heard valuable insights, shared by people working in startups, in well-established companies, and working to support those with new ideas, or to make existing businesses more circular. And yet again, I’m struggling to fit all the brilliant tips and lessons learned into this round-up episode. A recurring theme was the advice to use different ways of thinking. You can link up with people from outside your organisation, you can use different design perspectives, like biomimicry, lean innovation or systems thinking, and you can develop your own process to help you think about the complete cycle, as we’ll hear later.

Episode 50 – Thinking differently

How circular approaches make a better business (and a better world): for you, your partners, and your customers. Catherine Weetman, of Rethink Global will be chatting with those inspiring people who are making the circular economy happen: rethinking how we design, make and use everything. We’ll talk to entrepreneurs & business owners, social enterprises, and leading thinkers. We’ll find out how they are using circular principles to create value, increase resilience and reduce risk: to make a competitive, sustainable organisation. You’ll find the show notes and links at www.circulareconomypodcast.com, where you can subscribe to updates and useful resources.

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Circular Economy Podcast

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