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Date: 2024-04-24 Page is: DBtxt001.php txt00005791 |
Sustainability |
Burgess COMMENTARY |
The 10 ways sustainability professionals can scale up the circular economy The director of Marks & Spencer's Plan A shares his vision of how sustainability professionals can make a difference What are the steps that sustainability professionals can take to advance the circular economy? Photograph: Alamy I've never met a sustainability professional who doesn't agree that the circular economy is critical to our future in a resource constrained world. It's not a new concept, 10 bob for your old pop bottle was big when I was growing up in the 1970s, and there are countless examples that prove the business case. So why is the circular economy not yet part of the fabric of British business? What came across loud and clear from a recent Guardian Sustainable Business roundtable was that more needs to be done, not just by business but by the public sector, NGOs and charities. At M&S there are examples where circular models work and examples of where it's facing significant challenges. Shwopping is one of those working well. Over six million items of used or unwanted clothing have been donated to M&S stores to be re-sold, re-used or recycled by Oxfam. M&S has bought back some of the clothes from Oxfam, turned them into new fabric and re-made them into new pieces of clothing. When popular, high quality product is cheaper to source this way than comparable alternatives, the buying team needs little persuasion. On the back of last year's success, Shwop Coats, made from wool recovered from shwopped items are back this season with a bigger buy and more choice. The challenge is to get even more clothes back from consumers. At the moment M&S is talking about small product runs, one thousand or so lines but we need this to be in the tens of thousands. While M&S is buying wool garments back from Oxfam, cotton is a different story. The fibre lengths of recycled cotton are not long enough and neither the technology nor the supply chain are sufficiently developed. Recycled PET is a good news story. The supply chain is well developed and last year M&S sold over four million clothing and home products featuring recycled PET. If you include the recycled PET that goes into food packaging, the number jumps into the hundreds of millions – a significant slice of business. M&S is trying to get as much recycled content into food packaging as possible but it's a postcode lottery when it comes to the recycling services offered to customers. As a result not enough of the right materials are coming into the supply chain and the standards and segregation vary enormously. M&S has taken action by providing funding and partnering with the Somerset Waste Partnership to deliver high quality recyclate to its suppliers. Other companies have also joined with a local authority to implement a circular business model. The car sharing network, ZipCar for example, is running a programme with Croydon Council and has achieved significant reductions in its car usage, CO2 emissions, and overall travel costs with an annual saving of £500k. Elsewhere, CISCO is redeploying the IT infrastructure from the London 2012 Olympics to recipients that include WWF, the National Grid is recycling aluminium conductors and carpet manufacturer Desso, is running a scheme where it takes back waste carpet to recycle into new products. So it can be done, but the challenges remain significant. Where can sustainability professionals make a difference?
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Mike Barry
Guardian Professional,
Tuesday 15 October 2013 08.14 EDT |
The text being discussed is available at http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/sustainability-professionals-scale-circular-economy |
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