 Hello and welcome to the Circular Metabolism Podcast. This podcast is hosted by the Chair of Circular Economy and Urban Metabolism held by Aristides de Tannassiades and Stefan Kanpermann at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. In this podcast, we talk with researchers, policymakers and different practitioners to unravel the complex aspects of what makes urban metabolism and economies more circular. Hello and welcome to the Circular Metabolism Podcast. This podcast is produced by the Chair of Circular Economy and Urban Metabolism at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, held by Aristides de Tannassiades and Stefan Kanpermann. In this podcast, we discuss with researchers, administrators and practitioners to clarify the different aspects that make the economy and metabolism of our cities more circular. On episode number 8 of the Circular Metabolism Podcast, we had the chance to chat with Julia Voll. Previously, governments and cities network manager at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. I was particularly interested to discuss with Julia to better understand how the Ellen MacArthur Foundation managed to create such a momentum around circular economy in such a short notice. Indeed, as a researcher on this topic for quite some time, I have always wondered why this expression became so popular compared to the green economy, the blue economy or resiliency, for instance, and what were the arguments that convinced this vast array of stakeholders ranging from very large companies to governments and to start-ups. According to Julia, circular economy took off so quickly because unlike other sustainability agendas and plans, it was an economic agenda that is focusing on innovation, business development, job creation, and which made sense to most businesses. On top of that, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation managed to be at the right place at the right time to capitalize on existing initiatives from sustainability to corporate social responsibility, but make them much more operational. While I could understand why the private sector would be motivated to include circular economy principles in their business models, it was still hard to understand why local, regional, and national governments were also interested in this concept. Julia mentions that they also see the economic benefits of circular economy, but governments and administrations also faced new sets of systemic challenges which were less present 10 to 20 years ago. In that sense, they need to reinvent themselves, create new types of growth, take care of job creation, but also, most importantly, face their materiality. With recent events like the China ban, cities become suddenly aware of their need to take care of their used materials. Yet, how do we make a city more circular, which doesn't necessarily own all of the infrastructures and economic sectors needed to deploy circular economy strategies? For Julia, at the city scale, we could do so if we focus on the circular economy from a design perspective. So not only how to recycle more, but how do we engage with businesses that provide the services that are used in cities, such as mobility, food, etc. By engaging with daily users, and given that it is a densely populated area over a limited territory, cities can become a hotbed for design, material, and business model innovations. So far, Julia has identified two approaches to facilitate and accelerate the uptake of circular economy in cities. First, cities like Amsterdam, Brussels, and Charlotte, for instance, develop an urban metabolism study to have a better knowledge on the flows entering and exiting the city, in order to identify the priority sectors upon which to focus. The second approach used by cities like London, Phoenix and Toronto is to identify the existing biggest players that could have an impact on the circular economy and try working with them to have a higher impact. In addition, the city has a role to recognize the most promising ventures in their context and to provide funding and infrastructures to help them grow. This is where bigger companies can also come into play as they can make a pilot in one city and then scale up in more cities. In such a complex system, to scale up the circular economy, you need a resilient ecosystem of diverse actors. This means on the one hand, smaller and on the ground actors to cater for context-specific aspects of different cities and users, and on the other hand, bigger ones that can generalize solutions across the globe. Finally, based on the real hype around circular economy in the last decade, I wanted to ask Julia, how can we prevent circular washing, or in other words, the abuse of this expression for just minimal or artificial initiatives without really changing their core business models? For Julia, if companies are doing so, they're just missing out on business development and revenue opportunities, which will hurt them on the long run. Enjoy this episode and don't forget to visit our website www.circularmetabolism.com for the rest of our productions. Before you go, please help us improve our podcast by subscribing to your favorite app, including YouTube, iTunes, Spotify or Stitcher and leave us a comment with your thoughts. It's great to also have a hear of what's happening worldwide, because I guess Ellen MacArthur Foundation is perhaps the go-to foundation when we talk about circular economy, and you probably have a good idea of what happens around the world, and especially in the realms of cities. First of all, to have an idea of, we had this discussion beforehand, why do you think circular economy is so popular nowadays, or what made it to become this expression that governments use, that companies use, that researchers use so frequently? Thank you, first of all, for having me over. It's really a pleasure to be here in Copenhagen and seeing the great event that was organized by the region, and see all the amazing initiatives going on in Brussels. I think it's definitely one of the most pioneering cities in the region we're working with, and it's quite impressive to see the momentum, and so many things are happening, so much building in the city, and it's really looking forward for the next couple of days to learn more about it. Regarding your question, I think that the circular economy has made, it became so popular and really took off because as opposed to many of the other sustainability agendas, this is not a sustainability agenda. This is an economic agenda that is driving innovation, business development, job creation. A lot of the things that are so important for us today, and it just makes sense to people. It is very clear rationale that connects the environmental aspects of things, the economic aspect of things, and the social aspect of things into a quite systemic approach, and people can resonate and say, okay, this makes sense. I can see how it can create new revolutions, how it can help me develop new business models, improve the livability of people in my city. I think this is really not being a green agenda, but really an innovation agenda. That's where it landed well, and we are really happy to see that it's been picked up so fast. One might say, I think we started about eight years ago, and suddenly there is a circular economy package for the commission. There's lots of things happening in the corporates in cities, so yeah, it's quite tremendous to see. I really liked and enjoyed what you said, the systemic approach, and I think a lot of times the systemic approach lacks from these green deals or from these economy plans. It's one or the other, now you try to combine both. I think you're right, the word economy really helps in this agenda in this discussion. Now, why Ellen MacArthur Foundation? How did you manage to bring people together, and what was this reason of success? Do you have any hints? Well, I think there are a couple of factors in playing. I think, first of all, there is something around being in the right time, in the right place, perhaps. There has been sustainability talk has been evolving for the past few decades, and I think probably at the turn of the century and in the early 2000s it was CSR was driving the agenda, but I think it became quite evident to many, especially businesses, that CSR and all of these sustainability initiatives, they are very incremental. They require a lot of investments, and they are preferable to the business model, and it's absolutely not very clear how it helps you to generate new revenues. So I think that being the market, it became more and more ready for something different, and the fact that the people that were founding the Ellen MacArthur Foundation have managed to bring a couple of schools of thoughts like by mimicry and cradle to cradle, and industrial symbiosis, and combine them in a way that was easy to visualize and has made clear economic rationale behind it. That's why companies jumped on it, and I think that the couple first report came in 2012-13 really outlined the economic opportunity, and that would help to get the first movers, the first pioneers on board, and once they jumped on board, then you know, everybody wanted to jump on a successful wagon. Of course, when you hear big companies such as Philips, such as the biggest ones were the first Renault and all of the big six, or I don't know how you call them, the first ones who jumped in the wagon, you're already impressed, because it's not that easy to put these, well, in a relatively new concept to bring them on board. Well, I guess Philips already had some on the ground and practice. I don't remember when the pay for locks was already installed. I think it was around the same time, it was when they started experimenting with that. So they were already, let's say, doing what they thought was important, but so companies is, let's say, the biggest component, I think, why circular economy is now thriving. Now there are also cities and regions and governments that are behind it. Why do you think they are so interested? They also see it from an economic point of view, they see it, what's their rationale, do you think? I think they are seeing a lot of the economic aspects in that, but I think also right now, governments, there is local, regional, national, they are faced with really new sets of challenge that were maybe less relevant than 20 years ago. They need to reinvent themselves, they need to create new types of growth, they need to address the job situation. Also the question of materials is becoming more and more evident. On the one hand, materials are becoming more scarce and volatile. On the other hand, we end up with abundance of used materials in cities and regions and legislation like China Bank. Now cities are like, what am I going to do with all this plastic? I think they are being pushed into looking into new ways of doing things and really getting some of the pioneering governments on board. The city of London, the Danish government, Slovenian, it was really helping us to demonstrate, okay, there is space for that and when we walk together with the Danish government on the toolkit for policymakers, it was really helping us outline the economic opportunities for sectors and countries. So now we can say, if you are food producing country, this is the set of opportunities you are looking into. If you focus on what country or region you are building, construction, this is your set of opportunities. So it really helped to demonstrate there is concrete things that policymakers care about and need to have in order to be voted in again. So here it is. So of course, nations are slightly easier than cities because at least they have the entire economic sector represented and they have some infrastructure already there. In cities, it's a bit more difficult because sometimes the infrastructure, the waste management or the reuse or the recycling plants are not necessarily within the city boundaries and sometimes you, like Brussels, it's a very much a service-based economy and I find that slightly more challenging, I guess, than nations. How do we make a city more circular or what's the approach when we're talking about cities? Well, I'm not necessarily sure that it's easier for national governments because national governments are much more slow and everything that has to go through legislation is always being quite challenging. Again, for example, that's why circular economy took off faster in, for example, Denmark or Slovenia because they are small countries. You compare that to the UK and all of Denmark is smaller than the London population. So yes, they have more control over some of the sectors. But I think if you approach, if you look at the circular economy from a design perspective and not thinking, oh, we just need to recycle more, but how do we engage the businesses that are providing some of the services and products that people consume in cities, whether it's mobility or building houses or the clothing that we wear and thinking, okay, on a city level, how can we create a circular economy that is engaging the users, the daily users, how do we develop new business models that leverage on the fact that it's dense population over a small geographical area and is rich in people and data and how do we engage all these advantages of the city to try and be a hard bet for innovation, both design innovation, material innovation and business model innovation. Then cities have advantage. You can pilot some new mobility service on a Brussels level and it's quite easy, right? Same about we work with retailers, we're now going to start piloting new leasing business models in cities around the world and they are leveraging on the fact that it's a lot of young people living in cities, they're open for innovation, they all have iPhones, it's easy to access them and try new things with them. And so I think it's a great point, so the size might matter. Therefore, I'm wondering, have you, from a city to another, have you seen any patterns or each city completely differing in the way they uptake circular economy? I mean, you mentioned London, let's say London and Brussels, do they have, so I guess the economic sectors are frequently similar, like the construction sector, the food sector, let's say the retail sector, but except from that, is there any, the implementation, is it similar or you know, there are very much context-based factors that differentiate the uptake of circular economy in London and in Brussels? I think that there are probably two scores of approach. One is done, for example, by Amsterdam and Brussels, Charlotte, North Carolina, we start working closely with them and what they did. So they report a couple of days ago, yeah. Exactly, what they've done, it was very similar to what happened in Brussels, they did urban metabolism approach. They said, okay, we have x amount of materials that are going to waste from built environment and from textiles and this is for us the highest priorities on the agenda right now because that's where we have the biggest impact potential and they build their circular economy and you guys are building circular economy approach around the urban metabolism output. And then there is cities like London and probably Phoenix, Toronto, that are more looking into, okay, we understand circular economy, we know who is here and is willing to work on it, let's see who are the biggest impactors in the field that are present in the city and try to build our circular economy approach around working with them. So what exists already? Yeah, exactly. For city like London, it's easy because they have everything out of everything, right? But for Phoenix, for example, they leveraged on a very strong university present in the city and the ASU, which is I think one of the largest universities in North America and they have a very advanced innovation approach. So they built a circular economy hub around the university and the landfill and say, okay, if we divert materials from landfill and it is end of pipe approach, but I think that's that is where you need to be flexible, where you need to start somewhere. Yeah. And right now they managed, they already probably exceeding the rate of their plans to divert waste from landfill, creating new jobs in the city, creating new business models and by that also creating proof of concept and then gives them more leverage to continue on. Okay, and how do you think then you figure out who are these people or who are these initiators? Is it just, you know, personal contacts, sorry, or is it we know who has the biggest number of employees and we say, okay, perhaps this company might be the first one to start with or you mentioned the university in the case of ASU. Is it just the tacit you know, knowledge and they start from it? Well, that's where the, that's why I also, I guess, where city has an advantage because we are not the ones to decide for them like what should be their circular economy approach. It's because the people who work in the city, and they're closer to the action, the daily action, it's easier for them to recognize, okay, we think that we need to go on one, two, three. And from our perspective, we're happy to support whatever they think is the right approach, but that's also where versus national government that is sort of very much detached from what's happening on a daily basis, which are the, of course, they know the sectors but who are the shakers and movers around. I think that's where cities have advantage on that. Another thing that we started mentioning here with the evaluation of the charity, one of our key feelings that cities should move forward is that once you have these shakers and innovators and front runners, how do we make sure that they kind of anchor themselves? And you know, it's not just an innovation for a couple of years, but we managed to, you know, upscale their ambitions and make them at a city level because right now, a lot of times, it's one company with one flow at one location and if they don't have enough funding, you know, they die off and the idea dies off. How can we make it more sustainable? I know the word is, it's not the one that you use, but how do we make them to stay here and to thrive? You know, how do we upscale the ambitions? So I guess that's where the city has a role in recognizing the most promising ventures in the city and either provide, make sure that they're successful first of all, of course, but then provide funding and infrastructure to scale or that's where a bigger business can come into play and say, well, this company has a very good idea and we think it could be relevant for us. We're going to pilot on a city level and if it's successful, we're going to scale up. Just one example from the C100 stories and it is not a city level, but it's a story that I think it's a fantastic story that I love using is that through the C100, we had an emerging innovator from Netherlands called Ecorm and they sort of C100, they met Heineken Mexico and as conversations happening when you know, when you put good people together on the table, they realized that they can substitute a lot of the packaging material from byproducts of the brewing process and they piloted this specific project in one brewery in Mexico and it has become so successful that now Heineken is scaling it worldwide. This company, Ecorm, would not have a problem anymore of surviving on that because it was good approach and it was economically viable and it got picked up. So I think, of course, it has any venture in order to be sustainable for long term has to be economically viable and if so by either the city giving the support or bigger business picking it up. And do you have this because that's a nice collaboration between big and small, right? But is this the way to go forward or is it the small initiatives that are going to rule or is it the big ones that are going to change the system? Do you think that there is one or the other or do they have to work together or how does it work? Who's going to change the economy? Is it the small players or the big players or something in between? Well, I think it has to be everyone. I think that, I mean, if you look at the natural world, in order to be resilient, you have to have biodiversity. You have elephants and you have flies, right? And if one of them has gone, then the other one will be gone as well. I think that this coexistence and equilibrium between big and small is will have to continue to exist probably even more than now. Yeah, so I think it's both. I'm asking this because there is always a kind of a different approach between a big one and a small one. So the small one is always, so it's very innovative and it's also very labor intensive, let's say. The big one is much more efficient and the economy of scale is what matters and what changes a lot of the economy, right? So it's always this back and forth and I'm not sure, you know, what types of circular economy do we have? It's probably not, there's not just one circular economy. I guess there's a labor intensive or a social economy or an innovative economy or an efficient economy. And I think these are kind of different pathways and I don't know if you've seen different pathways appear or do you see a more of a homogeneous story out there? Well, I think what we see is really a mix and I think that in order for the circular economy to scale, you definitely have to have the big business picking it up. But then in order for it to be scaled out on a practical way, okay, let's say you have a phone at Samsung. Let's say tomorrow Samsung decides that all their phones are circular, they are repairable, they have collection systems across the world. Samsung alone cannot do that. So what we're going to do is partner up with small scale repair shops, reverse logistics, maintenance companies, retailers perhaps that are going to be servicing your particular phone in Brussels. And there's going to be another set of supplies and vendors that are going to be doing the same in Copenhagen and so on. So you have of course the giants but they will not be able to serve all of their needs by themselves and that's where they need the diversity of the small businesses. I want to wrap it up perhaps with a more critical question and we kind of discussed it before is you know sustainable development is now dying off as an expression and because it was used and abused and I am always afraid that people are going to do the same thing with circular economy or they're going to use it in their own kind of manner for their own ambitions or their own interests do you how do we keep how do we make sure that this does not happen? How do we make sure it's not a new type of let's say greenwashing? How do we ensure that it's real change? How will you greenwash with the circular economy? No it's well greenwashing a lot the CSR for instance a lot of big companies said they were doing CSR but at the end of the day that they didn't change much in their behavior. They had a sustainability officer and they said we were now buying let's say reusable cups instead of plastic cups but at the end of the day their their entire business model didn't change. But I think that's exactly why CSR has failed is because for circular economy you cannot get a stamp or you know yeah yeah a report from GRI, PRR and there is no you can say that you're doing circular economy but if you're not doing circular economy it's you're only hurting yourself so you can say oh we recycle yeah and that's your circular economy but then you're not you're going to miss out on so many of the business development and revenue opportunities that that's okay you don't have to do it somebody else will. If there's money on the table it will always be picked up and if a company says that they're doing circular economy but they don't really embedded within their business model then they're just going to miss out and I think that's just the way you know evolutionary processes will assess out those who are actually doing it and committing to it and those who don't so hopefully you know the rig the material criticality and this volatility of price will make anyhow everyone circular that's that's how we hope that things will work out again I guess yeah and and regulation and the consumption and user patterns I mean look at what happens with business models that are making sense for consumers nobody is regulating the way to use Airbnb's and Uber's rather than regular taxes but this is the most viable option for consumers so they use it yeah and the same over time is going to happen with other circular economy business models not that Uber is a circular economy business model don't fault me on that it's an interesting one for sure and it's difficult to see how exactly these innovations have you know infiltrating to the regulatory state or the regulatory system because yeah well thank you very much thank you