Category: ECO_CIRCULAR_CN

Every day we are reminded why there’s an urgent need to transition to a more sustainable economy. Living in the UK we’ve just had an Arctic’ spring, while elsewhere in Europe, Spain has broken its records for the hottest temperatures in April. Further afield, scientists say that the devastating drought in the Horn of Africa has been made 100 times more likely because of climate change.

It’s the last episode of Season 5! Over the past six episodes, we have talked about growing the electrification workforce, how the Supreme Court shapes environmental protections, partnerships between universities and tribal nations for climate adaptation research, and much more.

The world could reduce plastic pollution by 80 per cent by 2040 if countries and companies implement deep policy changes and transition to a circular economy, according to a report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) on Tuesday.

The report proposes a systems change to address the causes of plastic pollution, starting by reducing problematic and unnecessary plastic use, redesigning the system, products and their packaging and combining these with a market transformation towards circularity in plastics. This can be achieved by accelerating three key shifts – reorient and diversify, reuse, and recycle, – and actions to deal with the legacy of plastic pollution.

The EU must continue its efforts to reduce consumption of materials and generation of waste to achieve a more circular economy according to the European Commission’s revised Circular Economy monitoring framework published today.

With the growing likelihood that the earth’s temperature will warm beyond the four-alarm fire level of 1.5C, we have arrived at a make-or-break moment. What keeps me up at night is that despite the progress we’re making by investing in solutions designed to create a circular economy for plastics that can also materially reduce harmful GHG emissions, there is still so much more to do to achieve our goals.

The transition to a circular economy could lead to the creation of millions of new jobs. At the same time, this shift calls for informed policies that promote both job quality and environmental sustainability.

Circularity is often presented as a fresh, new answer to humankind’s pressing environmental challenges. In actual fact, ‘circular’ is not new at all. Pre-industrialization, it was the dominant economic model. Nothing was lost or discarded, everything was re-used, repaired, repurposed or recycled. And so the wheel went round.

In this episode, host and Bain Senior Manager Jana Kremer-Homann welcomes Christine Levêque, vice president of collection and recycling at Tetra Pak, and Harry Morrison, Bain partner in London. This episode’s topic is “the carbon-free circular economy.”

As the world considers how to address the growing impacts of the triple planetary crises of pollution, climate change, and biodiversity loss, many discussions point toward a circular economy approach as a much-needed solutions pathway.