To mark World Refill Day 2024, we talk to Jane Martin, the CEO of City to Sea, a campaigning non-profit with a mission to prevent plastic pollution at source. World Refill Day is a global campaign to prevent plastic pollution and help people live with less waste. It’s a day of action each year, designed to create an alternative vision of the future and to accelerate the transition away from single-use plastic towards refill & reuse systems. City to Sea develops and supports upstream solution...
Jun 15, 2024
This is the 4th and final episode in the special 5th Anniversary mini-series featuring the Re-Action Collective, and we’re focusing on repurposing – using creativity and craft skills to breathe new life into unwanted outdoor gear, clothing and workwear. We’ll hear from the founders of two small repurposing businesses: First, Jen Dickinson, founder of Dirtbags Climbing, an upcycling workshop in the English Lake District, which turns retired outdoor textiles into hand-made bags. And secondly, Becc...
Jun 08, 2024
This is #3 in the 5th Anniversary mini-series featuring the Re-Action Collective, and focuses on repairing. We hear from the founders of three UK businesses that are helping people repair their outdoor clothing and equipment: Rosanna Watson at Snowdonia Gear Repair, Becky Kirby at Sheffield Clothing Repair, and Vicky Balfour of Vicky Bikes. The strapline for this episode was inspired by Rose Macario, former CEO of Patagonia Inc, who wrote a blog back in 2015 declaring that ‘repair is a radical a...
Jun 01, 2024
This is #2 in the 5th Anniversary mini-series featuring the Re-Action Collective, and focuses on sharing and ‘pay to use’. We hear from the founders of three startups enabling people to have convenient and affordable access to high-quality outdoor gear: Anna Smoothy from Cirkel Supply, Rebecca Heaps from Tentshare and Bruce Leishman from KitUp Adventures. The strapline for this episode – serving more people with less stuff – was inspired by Anna Smoothy at Cirkel Supply. I loved their aim, to se...
May 25, 2024
It’s now 5 years since I started the podcast, and to celebrate, I’m doing a 5th anniversary mini-series. I’ve invited several guests from the Re-Action Collective, a group of circular economy pioneers in the outdoor sports sector. Over the next few episodes, we’ll be hearing from them and exploring 3 different types of circularity – sharing, repairing and repurposing. The Re-Action Collective was formed in 2022, by Gavin Fernie-Jones and his friend, Heather Davies. We met Gavin back in Episode 7...
May 18, 2024•45 min
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 ...
May 04, 2024•51 min
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 abou...
Apr 20, 2024•37 min
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 c...
Apr 06, 2024•51 min
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 ta...
Mar 24, 2024•47 min
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 h...
Mar 10, 2024•52 min
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 • Suppor...
Feb 25, 2024•37 min
We explore why it’s important for business to map, and understand their waste flows: what it is, specifically; where it comes from and goes to; how much there is – and why!; and to understand the opportunities for wasting less and circulating more value. Topolytics is a data analytics business that is making the world’s waste visible, verifiable and valuable. Michael Groves and Fleur Ruckley explain how data analytics, mapping and machine learning can make waste and resource management more tran...
Feb 11, 2024•53 min
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’ t...
Jan 28, 2024•49 min
Claire O’Sullivan and Kitty Wilson Brown are two inspiring people who are passionate about the properties and potential of hemp, especially for textiles. Their journey together led them to found a UK business, Contemporary Hempery. Hemp has amazing potential, for a wide range of products, and it’s brilliant for regenerative farming practices – so why aren’t we doing more with it? It’s useful as a textile, in construction, in food and personal care products, and as an alternative to plastic. But ...
Jan 14, 2024•45 min
People’s priorities are changing, as we realise more stuff doesn’t make us happier– so how can businesses thrive by doing better, with less? In this episode, Catherine suggests it’s time to bust one of the myths of the modern economy – people don’t want more and stuff! Priorities are changing, people are realising that more stuff doesn't make us happier. Instead, people are discovering that life is better when we care for, share and treasure our stuff, and what’s more, that’s better for our plan...
Dec 31, 2023•42 min
This is the 2nd part of the conversation with Ken Webster, one of the foremost thinkers in the circular economy field, where we explore concepts for a critical aspect that’s being ignored - the economy itself! In this episode, we go deeper into the possibilities offered by a universal basic dividend, especially as we move to a world where artificial intelligence might completely change the nature of work. Ken mentions his work with Earth4all, supporting the discourse and new thinking marking the...
Dec 17, 2023•55 min
This episode is different – I’m talking to Ken Webster and we explore some big themes and concepts for a critical part of the circular economy that often gets ignored - the economy itself! Catherine says: Ken Webster is right up there as one of my circular economy heroes, and is widely acknowledged as one of the foremost thinkers in the field. From 2010 – 2018, Ken was Head of Innovation for the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, shaping current concepts of a ‘circular economy’.. Ken also co-wrote the ...
Dec 10, 2023•54 min
Let’s talk about how we talk about the circular economy – the language we use, and whether it’s helping us… or getting in the way. Ann Stevenson is the circular economy lead at Resource Futures, an employee-owned and non-profit distributing BCorp environmental consultancy in the UK. Ann has been working in the field of environmental consultancy for over 25 years, and one of her specialisms is understanding and managing risks in transitioning to a circular economy. Ann became curious to know more...
Nov 26, 2023•42 min
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...
Nov 12, 2023•50 min
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, st...
Oct 28, 2023•43 min
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 ow...
Oct 14, 2023•46 min
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 c...
Sep 30, 2023•42 min
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 ...
Sep 16, 2023•52 min
Fiona Dear is a Co-Director at The Restart Project, which aims to keep our electronic technology in use for longer through repair and reuse
Sep 02, 2023•47 min
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. ...
Aug 19, 2023•49 min
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 describe...
Aug 05, 2023•59 min
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...
Jul 22, 2023•38 min
In the 2nd part of the conversation with Sian Sutherland, co-founder of A Plastic Planet and PlasticFree.com, Sian tells Catherine Weetman why, instead of seeing a miserable picture of the future, we can reinvent a better, brighter future. As Sian says, by "fixing the plastic crisis, we will fix so much else" A Plastic Planet is one of the most recognised and respected organisations tackling the plastic crisis and PlasticFree, the first materials and systems solutions platform, empowering global...
Jul 08, 2023•53 min
Sian Sutherland, co-founder of A Plastic Planet, tells Catherine Weetman why there are compelling reasons to design plastic out of our lives, and how and PlasticFree.com helps us do that... Plastic is embedded in pretty much every part of our lives. The plastics industry promotes it as the perfect material for thousands of products, being cheap, lightweight, clean, and convenient. But is that really true? And are there better ways to design products, packaging and systems to meet the needs of pe...
Jun 24, 2023•45 min
In episode 106, we hear from another disruptive start up, helping people ‘get more, from less’ - shrinking the footprint of production and consumption by improving the utilization of under-used objects. Today, I’m talking to Yael Shemer, an environmental entrepreneur and the co-founder and chief customer officer of TULU. Tulu is an on-demand service, enabling people to access things to help them cook, host, clean, and do DIY. Tulu operates in residential buildings and student housing, with custo...
Jun 10, 2023•50 min
