How to create circular solutions to attract corporate customers

The extreme weather events in the last few years have made it loud and clear that sustainability is no longer a choice. It is necessary for survival. Thankfully, we see more and more boardrooms realising this. Environmental and social benefits notwithstanding, embracing sustainability also makes a whole lot of sense financially.?

Whether it’s offering products as a service or on-demand manufacturing, designing circular solutions can help companies shift from the ‘take-make-waste’ model to one that benefits all: the people, planet, and profit.?

If you’re already on a path to circularity, it’s time for you to become an agent of change for others. In this article, I share how designing circular solutions can help you win corporate clients.

Understanding circular economy principles

It’s no secret that the current way of doing business is unsustainable and ill-equipped to support a growing population of finite natural resources. A circular economy, on the other hand, transforms the way goods and services are produced and consumed, setting the stage for a resilient and sustainable future. According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a strong proponent of circularity, the concept is based on three principles:?

1. Designing to eliminate waste and pollution.

2. Keeping products and materials in circulation for as long as possible through reuse, refurbishment, repair, remanufacture, and recycling.

3. Actively working to improve the environment.

Currently, only 7.2% of the economy is circular. In other words, more than 90% of materials are lost or wasted.

Clearly, we’ve got our work cut out for us.?

Identifying corporate customer needs

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to circularity. So, when you’re working out solutions for potential corporate clients, you want to focus on their areas of concern. Your clients are more likely to embrace circularity if it helps tackle challenges they’ve been facing for a while, such as waste reduction, resource efficiency, regulatory compliance, and supply chain disruptions.?

Understand what your client wants to accomplish with the help of circularity. For a consumer packaged goods company, circular goals could include eliminating the need for single-use packaging, lids, and plastic straws, improving product performance, or incentivising return. Ultimately, the circular solutions you offer to your clients should be perfectly aligned with their resources and capabilities and actually help solve persisting issues.

Designing circular solutions?

A. Product design for circularity

Designing a circular product means eliminating waste and pollution at the very start instead of having to deal with it later. It involves creating service layers that prolong the life of the product and encourage reuse and multi-use. You’ll find these products to be of typically superior quality and easy to take apart, repair, upgrade, remanufacture, and recycle.

Desso’s cradle-to-cradle carpeting solution comes to mind. By offering carpets on a lease, Desso retains ownership and responsibility for installation, maintenance, and end-of-life treatment. Changing the status quo can be disruptive. So, Desso started their experiment with their B2B customers, leasing carpet tiles for offices and industrial flooring. It became a logistical cakewalk to collect carpets, remove the old, worn-out fibres and recycle them into new fibres.?

For consumers, the brand is designing durable, biodegradable carpets that can be later returned to the food farming system. What’s more, they aim to use renewable energy to power every stage of the cycle.

B. Implementing take-back programs

The fact of the matter is that very few companies think about what happens to their products after sale. In 2019, humans consumed about 100 billion tonnes of materials. It’s upsetting to imagine how much of this ended up in landfills or clogging the waterways. To help clients reduce dependency on virgin materials and close the loop, designing for easy disassembly alone won’t suffice. You also need to implement systems that maximise recoverability when the products can no longer be reused or remanufactured.?

Plan take-out programs that incentivise product returns from consumers and logistics of returning materials to those who can make the best use of them. MUD Jeans, a Dutch apparel brand’s take-back program, nudges consumers to return their old pair of jeans for a neat 10% discount on their next purchase.?

C. Leveraging technology and innovation

A circular economy is built around keeping products and materials in use at their highest value. Without real-time visibility of the product’s design, location, and condition, you can do very little to prevent wastage or transform it back into a resource.

Thankfully, digital technologies like blockchain, AI, and the Internet of Things (IoT) make it possible to track, capture, share, and analyse a product’s data throughout its lifecycle. A complete and detailed view of the product helps reduce waste, improve resource efficiency, and promote transparency and traceability throughout the value chain.

D. Collaboration and partnerships

By its very design, a circular economy relies heavily on an all-hands-on-deck approach. No matter how brilliantly you design solutions, their success depends on how well you mobilise every player across the value chain. Material providers, component manufacturers, packaging suppliers, value recovery players– everyone needs to be on board with the organisation’s circular ambitions. Consumers, too, have an important role to play in extending the life of a product as well as its end-of-life treatment.??

Partnering with businesses with shared goals can speed up the transition.? For example, Adidas has partnered with Parley to procure yarn and filaments made from reclaimed marine plastic waste and use them to produce shoes and clothes. This partnership promises to cut down the amount of plastic waste in the waterways.?

And at Planet Protector, we utilise discarded wool to create reusable packaging alternatives to toxic polystyrene. Simply put, the wool industry’s waste is a resource that helps us remove polystyrene from the planet.

Demonstrating value to corporate customers??

Circularity is a restorative and regenerative concept that isn’t just limited to not harming the environment but also improving it. For the water-guzzling textile industry, circularity can help reduce negative environmental impact through improved material selection, value retention, durability, and resource use. It can also tackle the microplastic problem through circular design and closed-looped production and better collection, reuse, and recycling of waste fabrics.?

According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, transitioning to a circular economy can help Europe slash down its primary material use by 32% across industries and halve CO2 emissions by 2030. A reduction in the need for new materials not only reduces the impact on the environment but also saves costs and optimises resources, including water and energy. It also boosts growth and supply chain resilience.

Gone are the days when greenwashing would work. In this increasingly digitised world, it’s easy to verify brand claims. Companies whose sustainability efforts are grounded in data are the ones most likely to see an improvement in brand reputation and loyalty.

Breakthrough tools like Circulytics are helping companies across industries monitor their circularity performance, highlight success and identify areas for improvement. To achieve this, Circulytics goes beyond the traditional carbon footprint and assesses a wide array of indicators, such as strategy and innovation, material circularity, water and energy consumption, and circular product design.

Overcoming challenges in circular solution implementation?

As a business owner pursuing circularity, I’ve found the shortage of recycling facilities, insufficient logistical support, and inadequate technical capabilities to be major barriers that we must overcome. We can also benefit from a more collaborative ecosystem made up of peer businesses, suppliers, NGOs, and government agencies that share similar ambitions and can help each other retrieve materials and keep products in circulation.?

It’s true that implementing circular solutions is going to be costly, certainly more than traditional linear models. You’ll need to convince clients to invest in new technologies and processes. Here, a cost-benefit analysis could help you demonstrate the long-term advantages of upfront investments. Implement initiatives like using renewables, buybacks or trade-in programs, and remanufacturing that could incorporate circularity into existing business models while slowly working your way up to a closed-looped economy.

Help your clients visualise 3 to 5 years into the future when such investments will be necessary in light of growing regulatory pressure. Brands that have already transitioned to circular models will be better positioned to lead the pack.

Government policies and incentives can be major catalysts in a circular economy transition. In Norway, the recycling rate of plastic bottles stands at over 92%. Not to take credit away from Norwegians and their enthusiasm for recycling, but the government-led bottle deposit scheme has contributed hugely to making recycling a way of life for this Scandinavian nation.

Conclusion

With planetary survival at stake and the overwhelmingly positive benefits of circularity, every business must kickstart its circular economy transition sooner rather than later. Forward-thinking brands have already embarked on the path to circularity. Get ahead of the curve instead of waiting for the regulatory pressure to make it imperative.

By designing out waste, keeping products and materials in circulation, and employing regenerative practices, businesses can build resilience and sustainable growth. Most importantly, give our planet a much-deserved chance to heal.