Evolena de Wilde d’Estmael is co-founder & CEO of Faircado, a Berlin-based startup that provides the first AI-powered second-hand shopping assistant in Europe. Faircado’s technology helps people find the best second-hand alternatives to what they are searching for online. Driven by the mission to reduce global waste and support the shift to a circular economy, Faircado’s goal is to help make second-hand goods the first choice for consumers. Evolena was born in Belgium and is proud to be...

Chris Allen is Sustainability Leader and Head of Circular Business Development at Decathlon UK. You’ve probably heard of Decathlon, which is the world’s largest sporting goods retailer, with over 1,700 stores in more than 70 countries.  It’s a family-owned company, founded in 1976, and inspired by the belief that the best sports products should be accessible to everyone.Chris Allen has 15 Years experience in Decathlon spanning various retail management roles, including several years in...

Michael  Colarossi of Avery Dennison explains how Digital Product Passports can be a key enabler in the transition to a circular economy.Michael  is head of Enterprise Sustainability at Avery Dennison, which specializes in global materials science and digital identification solutions. As part of the the leadership team,  Michael  is responsible for environmental, social and governance (ESG) strategy across the company’s worldwide operations. His work focuses on climate action,...

Anna De Matos is the founder of several community-focused sharing initiatives, and a force of nature.Originally from Brazil, Anna De Matos went to university in the UK and moved to Iceland in 2017. Inspired by a visit to Toronto's tool library, Anna started a tool library and repair café, and managed to bootstrap and crowdfund her way to establishing these – all whilst dealing with the serious challenges of autoimmune disease.Anna has degrees in Conservation and Restoration and is now...

Joel Tasche founded CleanHub, a Berlin-based company that provides a scalable solution to plastic pollution. CleanHub connects coastal communities to proper waste collection in places where that doesn’t exist, at the same time creating safe and dignified jobs. Brands can support the mission by funding the collection of waste that otherwise wouldn’t be collected. CleanHub accepts ALL types of plastic – not just the stuff that’s easy to turn into value. CleanHub’s AI technology tracks the...

Are we focused on adding more fuel to get the circular economy going – when, really, the problem is too much friction?Those terms stuck with me a few years ago, from a book helping people to get new ideas going, and succeeding, by looking more closely at the 'frictions' that create resistance. The book, The Human Element is written by organisational psychologist Loran Nordgren and David Schonthal, a specialist in entrepreneurship, design, and innovation.They say that most people working to...

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...

Award-winning documentary film maker Rubén Abruña helps us dig into one of the oldest problems in civil society… All around the world, there are serious problems caused by the various ways we deal with our toilet waste – all the poop and pee we humans create every day. We waste drinking water - Flushing toilets use massive amounts of water – for example, in a country like Switzerland, each person will flush over 40 litres a day down the toilet. Often, the sewage from water toilets is mixed...

Professor Dr. Martin Stuchtey - a geologist, economist and entrepreneur - is challenging and helping to rethink industrial, farming and economic systems. He founded The Landbanking Group, a Nature Fintech aiming to bring natural capital onto our balance sheets in service of the Paris and Montreal agreements.Dr. Martin Stuchtey is a former Senior and Managing Partner at McKinsey & Co., where he co-founded and led the global sustainability activities. He then founded systems change company...

There is a simple solution to conserve, and reuse, more of the nutrients from food waste.In today’s episode, I’m talking to Julia Brenner, a soil scientist and co-founder of Melta, a company dedicated to transforming waste management and soil health. Julia and her business partner founded Melta in 2020, to solve two interconnected challenges faced by rural municipalities: the lack of accessible and cost-effective food waste solutions, and the difficulty of transporting organic fertilizers to...

Tuomo Laine is the CEO and co-founder of Twice Commerce, which provides software to help its clients unlock a range of circular business models.Tuomo is known for being straightforward and action-oriented, and for his dedication to using entrepreneurship for societal good. He is a member of the Unreasonable Group Fellowship, and is occasionally invited to lecture at Aalto University, to share his venture building experiences.Twice Commerce's mission is to uncouple economic growth from the...

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...

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,...

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...

This is #2 in the 5th Anniversary mini-series featuring the Re-Action Collective 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 title of this episode – serving more people with less stuff – was inspired by Anna Smoothy at Cirkel Supply. I loved their aim, to serve more...

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...

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...

Tara Button is the founder and CEO of Buy Me Once, a platform which helps people buy the longest-lasting products on the planet.Podcast host Catherine Weetman says "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...

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...

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.Catherine Weetman says "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...

Professor Walter R Stahel is widely acknowledged as one of the founding fathers of what is now known as the circular economy.Catherine Weetman says: I first heard Walter speak at an circular economy event in London, back in 2015, and then had the opportunity to work with him as on the SFB for the Circular Economy Alliance. We wrote a paper together on Intelligent Decentralisation, one of the concepts he introduced in his latest book, The Circular Economy: A Users Guide.Walter describes...

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*...

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.Catherine Weetman talks to Michael Groves and Fleur Ruckley, to find out how data analytics, mapping and machine learning can make...

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...