The Ellen MacArthur Foundation – on a mission to accelerate the transition to a circular economy.
What the Ellen MacArthur Foundation advocates could not be more closely aligned with the focus of our series — organisations that strive to create long-term positive impact for the economy, society, and the environment.
“Since its creation the charity has emerged as a global thought leader, establishing the circular economy on the agenda of decision makers across business, government and academia.”
– James George, Business Development Lead at Ellen MacArthur Foundation
In conversation with – James George, Business Development Lead at Ellen MacArthur Foundation
“Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.“…hopefully, we stop calling it circular economy and it’s just called the economy. It just becomes the norm… The system needs to be fully disrupted to allow us to do that.”
1. James, it would be great to start off by telling us what inspired you to join the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, and what your role is?
I guess I have a relatively unusual journey; I ended up at the Foundation purely by happenstance. I’d finished my time in the Royal Navy and had spent 18 months transitioning from that career trying to understand what I should do next with my life.
I was skiing with some friends, and in this wider group of friends there were these folks from an organisation called the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. Over the course of the week that we were there, they told me their story, I told them mine, and on the last morning one of the chaps said to me ‘we might have a job for you’. I thought about it for a couple weeks, applied, and within a month I was employed as the Business Development Manager for the Foundation.
“I blinked, and we’ve moved forward three years.”
Now I look after the network development for the Foundation more holistically, trying to understand what different organisations’ aspirations are around circular economy are, and then helping them connect with the different projects, platforms, and work that the Foundation is engaged with right now, as well as the projects we’ve got coming online in the future. I am very fortunate I get to meet a wide range of multidisciplined, multi-industrial folks, and tell them a few stories to try and help them connect the dots with the Ellen Macarthur Foundation. I get to help them realise their own ambitions around circular economy.
2. What a great journey! Could you tell us a little bit about the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, and its evolution over the years?
The Foundation’s been going for 11 years. Back in the beginning when Ellen and four other people started the Foundation, they did so with the sole mission to accelerate the transition to a circular economy.
“Fast forward to today and we’re about 180 strong, with colleagues in North and South America, across Europe and China.”
Whilst the Foundation’s mission remains unchanged, I think the evolution of its journey is really apparent: it’s become much bigger than the one individual. Ellen is an extremely busy lady, working to promote the Foundation, and the Ellen MacArthur Cancer Trust, which is also based on the Isle of Wight. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation is an organisation that at its very highest and simplest level is trying to change the global economy, from Cowes on the Isle of Wight. The essence of that is still present today.
3. What inspiration has Ellen MacArthur sparked internally in the Foundation?
When you talk to Ellen she is a really impressive human being. An inspirational human being. I genuinely get a little bit starstruck every time I get the chance to talk to her.
She’s still very much connected with all the elements of what the Foundation does: whether that’s discussing the circular economy with business or government leaders or joining our team days. It doesn’t matter what your prior experience of circular economy is, or the journey that you took to get to the Foundation, everyone always takes away something positive from interactions (with Ellen).
4. Being one of the most influential advocates for global circular economy, how do you work with organisations and businesses?
It’s funny, I think people have a whole host of associated feelings and expectations. We’re a charity. We’re not a consultancy. We’re not about helping businesses from a commercial perspective to do something different. There’s an element of thought leadership in there.
Over the last 11 years — not by accident, and not in a contrived way — we have continued to stay true to our thinking, messaging, and framing around the opportunity that a circular economy presents. When you look at something like circular economy, the key is very much in the economy part of it. This is about the economic rationale of businesses, organisations, and groups doing things differently.
When you start to think about how we do that as an organisation, I guess we work with a number of groups.
“We work with the business and corporate community, we work with governments and cities, educators, higher academic practitioners, universities, emerging innovators…”
…so the smallest of small to medium enterprise. Then there’s also a series of other organisations that help keep that ecosystem as rich as possible. When you look across those categories, the business and corporate community are the daily engines of our global economies – so if you’re talking about transformational economic change at the global scale, you need to be working with the engines of your economy.
But that’s only one part of the conversation. There’s also: how do we create the right conditions? The right legislation? The right framework? This is where the work with governments and cities and municipalities comes in. How do we create the right conditions to allow those circular economic business models to flourish? You’ve got to take people on that learning journey. This is a large complex topic.
How do you make sure that everyone understands it, not just the smartest folks, because we’re working with universities at degree, master, pHD-level learning, but then also all the way back to grassroots level. How do you make sure that the message can be understood by everyone, so it is accessible for everyone? Finally, this group of emerging innovators are a source of great disruptive technology, disruptive innovation, disrupting the status quo and the existing linear economy that we have.
“For us it’s about looking at the system. How do we change the way the system operates rather than specific individual companies, businesses or institutions that are all part of that value chain?”
Even if you are the largest company in the world, you don’t control all the elements of your value chain or the pressures within your supply chain. Only by bringing all of these components together can we start to see system change, and that’s what we want: systems that work for everyone.
5. That’s great, could you break it down even further?
Looking at some of the emerging innovators that we that we work with, small start-ups at the beginning of their journey, they’re very agile and what they need is more exposure and opportunities to collaborate. To be connected to those larger organisations that need fresh innovation to disrupt their existing business models.
6. Are there any examples of where that bridge between the less agile and the very agile, or the young and the old, the big and the small worked really well?
There is one that I love, and I talk about quite a lot: “a small emerging innovator called Winnow. They were part of our emerging innovator program and use AI technology to tackle food waste in restaurants.” Their technology is interesting to me because, firstly, it’s something you install into the restaurant, in the kitchen. It’s very much at the point of waste where that economic impact sits. But, secondly, it allows the chefs in the kitchen to understand and learn a little about the amount and volume of food they’re sending out.
They partnered with IKEA a few years ago, who are one of the largest meatball distributors in Europe. People go to IKEA just to eat the IKEA meatballs! By applying the AI learning technology they managed to eliminate food waste within the IKEA infrastructure in the field of millions of Euros, just by monitoring the amount of food that the kitchens were wasting, and allowing IKEA to adjust their portions. It wasn’t about limiting what the customer could have, but providing real time data about the food wasted daily in individual kitchens, and individual geographies, across IKEA.
A very simple shift in the way people operate day-to-day has a huge amount of economic impact: you’re not buying more food than you need, not wasting food, and not adding to the huge deluge of nutrient loss that we see through our wasteful food systems. In doing things slightly differently, you can deliver significant economic, social, and environmental impact to the day-to-day running of your infrastructure.
Photo Credit: Ellen MacArthur Foundation
7. That’s a fantastic example. As an expert, why do you think the linear economy is no longer viable?
I work with some extremely smart people, but I’m a fan of talking about things in the simplest kind of terms — it’s the best way I understand it!
“When we look at the linear economy, which is the economy we’ve seen since the industrial revolution, it’s an economy that relies on taking stuff out of the ground, making materials and products, and then eventually throwing them away as waste.”
We’ve normalised this consumptive and extractive behaviour. Old constantly needs to be replaced by new, the latest design gadget needs to replace what we had 12 months ago. It’s also worth pointing out that for the last 200-300 years, it’s suited us extremely well and generated trillions of dollars globally. We’ve lifted millions of people out of poverty, and we’ve connected each other globally in a way that we would never have anticipated 100 years ago.
But the problem with taking stuff out of the ground that’s finite is that once we use it up and there’s no more of it, the system can’t run — especially if we consider we're getting much better at pulling stuff out of the ground. We're getting much quicker at making stuff. We're getting much more effective at distributing that consumptive material, so the setup of our take-make-waste economy is very much extractive in its design. It’s about value extraction.
We compare that then to a circular economy: “What if in its simplest level we could take that straight line and turn it into a circle, and instead of looking at how we extract value, look at how we continue to create value and circulate?”
Then it’s about trying to understand how we still create growth, jobs, and prosperity, but in the most restorative and regenerative ways, creating resilient and long-term growth, based on three principles.
8. And they are?
1) Eliminate waste and pollution
2) keep products and materials in use
3) regenerate natural systems.
“Waste and pollution is a result of our production models and is very much man-made. When you look at natural systems, there’s no waste. There’s only secondary resource.”
A lot of effort today focuses on what you might describe as downstream or end of pipe: how do we deal with waste once it's been created? But by coming back to the start of that process and designing it out in the first place so that waste and pollution is never created, we treat the cause, not just the symptom – that’s the first principle.
The second principle is about keeping materials at their highest possible value. If we have an economy that's based on extraction and waste, we lose the economic value of the physical material, as well as the embedded labour and energy costs that went into making the material. That's money that we're losing out of the economy. If you can keep that material circulating in the economy, then you keep that value in the economy as well.
Finally, the third principle is around regenerating natural systems and natural capital. How do we make sure that the impact of our economy is not only neutral, but restorative, so that the harm we’ve inflicted in the decades before is undone, and we have a positive restorative effect on green spaces, inland waterways, coastal regions, forests, fields, etc. How do we look at things like regenerative agriculture as a way to continue to make growth that is not just negative and not just neutral, but has a positive, restorative effect?
All of those principles are based on design. The economy we have now, we designed. That’s the good news because as soon as we find the direction of travel we want, we can design it again and with the advancements of AI and the digitalization of the world around us, we can get there a lot quicker. We don't have to wait another 200 years.
9. Hopefully most brands have started somewhere, but what are the top pieces of advice for brands and businesses who are not sure where to start or how to contribute?
It's a really great question and I think there is no one answer. It depends very much on the industry, the geography, the infrastructure, the product. If you're going to attempt to do anything like this then it's first trying to understand ‘why’. Why is this important for your organisation?
They key point for me is that a business or organisation is doing it because it’s the right thing to do. Because, based on everything they know, they need to do something different and they are compelled to do it in a more restorative, regenerative way — a circular way.
The second point is what does ‘good’ look like? What is the change you want to see – is it greater market share? Is it better transparency in your supply chain and in your value chain?
Is it being seen as a brand that has the credentials around this concept? It might even be that you need to satisfy some legislative criteria. It’s about understanding what good looks like and fundamentally, what do the economics say about that process.
These things have to make economic sense, because if they don't, they're not going to stand the test of time.
“We’ve all seen really great platforms, mission statements and examples of things set up for the right reason, but unless they make economic sense today, you’re not going to be able to push those forward.”
Ideally, we would want to exist in a system that doesn't just take growth and GDP and profit as a measure of success, but when you look at engaging with the system, when you try to change the way a system operates, you can't do that by ignoring how the system works today. You have to work with that system. There are many bad choices in a bad system, so until you shift the way the system operates, you don’t give people the opportunity to make the right choices.
The third point is you need to be able to measure that change. It shouldn’t just be about making great marketing statements, but what is the month-on-month, year-on-year, decade-on-decade change?
Lastly, you’re never going to do it on your own. You need to collaborate and you need to do that pre-competitively.
“That means either working with people in your own industry, within sympathetic industries, or working with your competitors.” We’re only going to solve these challenges that we face by breaking down historic biases and barriers around collaboration – no one is going to be able to do it on their own because it’s much bigger than an individual company.
Photo Credit: Ellen MacArthur Foundation
10. Tell us a bit more about Circulytics, the company measurement tool you launched last year.
We can't change something we can't measure. How do you know that you've made progress? You need to accurately measure the journey that you’re taking.
In early 2020 we launched Circulytics, which is a free circular economy measurement tool designed to allow businesses and organisations to holistically look at where they are on their journey.
“It delivers an unprecedented clarity about a business’s circular economy performance, which in turns allows for new opportunities to generate brand value with key stakeholders “
This isn't about specific product lines or specific individual elements of the business, it’s looking at the enabling conditions, and the material flows in the whole of your business, and it allows organisations to produce a scorecard. The scorecard gives you an A-E score of where you are against an industry standard on your circular economy journey by looking at a series of different datasets.
“It’s about understanding where you are on that journey.”
One of the elements that has been really compelling for me is when businesses have gone through this process and it's identified areas they didn't need, the blind spots they didn’t know they had. When looking at the challenges they were trying to face they hadn’t considered some of the elements they needed to tackle. Circulytics allows businesses to get a single point in time assessment of where a business is on its circular economy journey.
Over time it allows them to see progress, and measures a company’s entire circularity, not just the products and flows. It supports decision making and strategic development, and provides an element of transparency that can be communicated to investors, customers, or supply chains.
“The other 45% is how we do it, how we manage the land, how we manage the products, how we manage our supply chains and our production mechanisms.”
“It’s about understanding where you are on that journey.”
One of the elements that has been really compelling for me is when businesses have gone through this process and it's identified areas they didn't need, the blind spots they didn’t know they had. When looking at the challenges they were trying to face they hadn’t considered some of the elements they needed to tackle. Circulytics allows businesses to get a single point in time assessment of where a business is on its circular economy journey.
Over time it allows them to see progress, and measures a company’s entire circularity, not just the products and flows. It supports decision making and strategic development, and provides an element of transparency that can be communicated to investors, customers, or supply chains.
11. That's a fantastic benchmark and great to hear that it's open source! What are the priorities and goals for the Foundation this year?
It's a really great question. Over the last 11 years, the mission has remained exactly the same: to accelerate the global transition to a circular economy — and we’re not there yet! The topic of circular economy has moved from a fringe topic to mainstream, but there's still a lot more work to do, specifically for the Foundation. Earlier this year we published the Universal Circular Economy Policy Goals Report to help policymakers with their decisions around supporting sector economic growth.
But I think when you look at some of the hot topics right now, climate change and biodiversity are key. We have a number of reports coming out later in the year in time for both COP15 and COP26, building on the report that we published at the end of 2019 around how you can take the circular economy framework to answer some of the big questions that we have around staying below 1.5 degrees before the end of the century.
About 55% of that can be accounted for by the transition to renewable energy or better energy efficiency.
“The other 45% is how we do it, how we manage the land, how we manage the products, how we manage our supply chains and our production mechanisms.”
12. Where would you see the biggest opportunity from an investment perspective for the circular economy? What are the areas to keep an eye on?
We've seen a huge amount of activity and energy within the investment community over the last 24 months. We've seen the dial shift a lot quicker than we've seen previously in many other industries.
We’re starting to hear more about terms like ESG, green bonds, circular investment vehicles. The pace of change that's happening within that industry is remarkable. It’s still not perfect, but the amount of disruption that we've seen, whether that's headlines around fossil fuel disinvestment, whether it's around investment houses telling the FMCG community that they’ll withdraw investment if they don't deliver on sustainable criterias.
We work with BlackRock amongst others, and in 2019 BlackRock established the Circular Economy Fund — a modest fund by BlackRock standards. That fund is now worth over 1.5 billion dollars in less than 18 months and is the fastest growing economic vehicle that the market has seen with regards to circular economy.
That does two things. Firstly, it sends a signal to the market to say there's something in this that delivers beyond conventional investment. Secondly, when someone as large as BlackRock picks up a concept like this, others start to listen. You see that ripple effect across the industry. We’ve seen the growth of multiple investment vehicles over the last 12 to 18 months in sector economy and the prediction is that it’s only going to continue to happen as we move forward to the point where,…
“…hopefully, we stop calling it the circular economy and it’s just called the economy, it just becomes the norm.”
13. Imagine telling our children: guess what, there used to be something called the linear economy.
It's exactly this future that I’m sure lots of people would want to see. “Where the grade of a company is no longer measured just by profit (OK, maybe some conventional profit) but it's also measured around a collaboration index, a social index, an impact index.”
All of these things form the business and it is then what the investment community uses as its metric for a successful investment. We just need to redefine what we have right now, we can’t keep pulling stuff out of the ground, making products from it, and throwing it away
“The system needs to be fully disrupted.”
16. What's the next panel you're on? How are you getting prepared for it and what's your key message?
There's a couple coming up, but they vary between industry and demographic. For me the approach is always going to be the same. It's helping folks to understand that when you talk in terms of circular economy, you've got to be talking about the bigger idea. This isn't just about better recycling, it's about how do we design products, services, and materials within our economies to make sure that they stay in the economy as long as possible. And, when they’re no longer viable from an economic perspective, how do we reintroduce that material into the next generation of products through restorative and regenerative practices?