Chief Executive Officer of WRAP Harriet Lamb explains how she wants circular living to become the norm in every boardroom and every household.
If you’re like me, your day kicks off with a strong cup of coffee to charge the batteries. My coffee grinds go into the food waste caddy to be composted, and I’m lucky that my milk comes from a local bottle refill scheme.
Then I choose what to wear from my preloved charity shop finds, fill up my water bottle and hop on my second-hand racing bike that came off Gumtree. All very routine, all very normal. Yet before even reaching my desk I’ve been living my best circular life.
At WRAP, our ambition is for circular living to become the norm in every boardroom and every home.
Currently, the food, textiles and products we use daily come from unsustainable take-make-chuck systems that are wreaking the environment. Together consumer goods clock up nearly half of all global greenhouse gas emissions and are also driving social inequality.
CIWM members don’t need to be reminded of the mountains of waste made using tonnes of raw materials torn from the earth, polluting our water systems and destroying biodiversity.
At WRAP, our ambition is for circular living to become the norm in every boardroom and every home.
We need to transform these broken systems and circular living is our way out of this mess. That is why WRAP has recently had a make-over to put the spotlight on circular living.
Circular living builds on the foundations laid out for the circular economy. It envisions a world where we move forward to a culture of design-make-reuse-repeat, drastically reducing the use of materials and water, and emissions.
It’s about examining sustainability challenges through the lens of people’s day-to-day lives and transforming the systems around them; creating higher living standards through better resource use and designing a way of life where sustainability isn’t an afterthought, but a habit made as easy as possible. It’s about more from less.
This ultimately means separating value creation from the unsustainable use of virgin raw resources.
Business interest in circular living is building – and public interest too – from small community groups to SMEs, right up into the boardrooms of the bigger players here and in other countries. It’s interest we must harness, nurture and spread.
How are businesses embracing the circular economy?
Take St Ives Community Orchard, which grows a variety of fruit trees, and vegetables and manages woodland.
The scheme collects food waste from local businesses and has community compost bins that everyone can feed with their food waste, turning leftovers into nutrient-rich organic matter fed back onto the land.
Or from the more glamorous world of fashion, The Seam prolongs the life of clothes by linking local tailors and shoe repairers with customers needing alterations directly, or through High Street brands H&M, LK Bennett and Adidas.
Bigger, global names like eBay are mainstreaming the concept of circular living to a far wider audience. This London Fashion Week they celebrated 40 years of pre-loved with the joyful “Endless Runway” – Nothing New to See Here.
Meanwhile IKEA halved food waste in its stores across 33 countries and implemented take-back programmes for furniture, while companies like Decathlon, M&S, DFS and John Lewis are all exploring rental, repair, and refurbishment as future business models.
On a global scale, change is happening through collaborative action like the Plastics Pact Network, a collaborative approach to ending plastic pollution and waste spanning every continent, over 19 countries and with 900 local and global organisations.
Network members are seeking to eliminate problematic plastic and ensure the plastic we do need can be reused, recycled or composted.
By moving away from disposable single-use plastics such as straws and cutlery, promoting reuse models in beverages and cleaning products, and changing components and materials to ensure plastic packaging can be recycled, Plastic Pacts members have already eliminated over 360,000 tonnes of plastic.
They have redesigned more than 850,000 tonnes of packaging to prevent them from either entering landfills or leaking into the environment.
Now we need to make the leap from pilots to whole paradigm shifts.
What’s needed to transition to a circular economy?
This also needs government support and at WRAP we are cheering the new Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Steve Reed, for placing the shift to a circular, waste-free economy right up there in his top five priorities.
The trick will be to ensure that this initiative is not a minor side-show to a mainstream headlong dash for GDP growth as per normal.
Rather the circular economy has to become the mainstream economy, creating the jobs, investment and exports of the future.
Already, we estimate that half a million people work in the circular economy and another half a million jobs could be created with the right policy support.
But there can be no circular economy if the public doesn’t embrace circular living.
That’s the elephant in the room that many companies still worry about – how will the customer react?
And that’s why we see more innovation in our stores like Waitrose using eye-tracking technology to monitor which messaging encourages people to pick up loose fruit and veg not wrapped in plastic – is it the ability to choose, or is it for the environment, or to able to only choose what you’ll use?
And that’s also why support for collaborative action, or even regulation, is so strong – so that whole sectors can shift together.
That shift has huge benefits for all. Take in-store refill systems. To really test behaviour change we need to take a whole category and bring all competitors to market in a similar way, across a range of retailers, with a level of standardisation.
If every UK household refilled just one item per week, it would eliminate over 1.4 billion items of single-use packaging annually.
Over the coming months, WRAP will launch new standards and a certification Mark to help people buy circular products with confidence. These circular living standards will start with pre-loved clothing and expand to include refill and durability.
This represents a new frontier in making it easier for the public to navigate this evolving market with confidence and become more open to circular living.
Living a more circular life can help us repair our broken systems and provide a sustainable future for our families. It’s something to ponder over that coffee. No wonder I need it so strong.
