New Boost for the Circular Economy

New legislation is providing big new business opportunities for innovation in reducing waste streams in California, and the ideas may spread nationally.? On September 26, we had a MeetUp featuring two speakers:? Heidi Sanborn and Shira Lane.? Heidi has been a strong advocate of minimizing waste streams for nearly three decades, wearing many hats.? The most recent one is being the Executive Director of the National Stewardship Action Council.? Shira is the founder and CEO of Atrium 916, a non-profit promoting creative ways to achieve sustainability and minimize waste.??

One of Heidi’s big achievements is the passage of SB54 in 2022 mandating that producers pay fees to deal with the costs of handling their waste, with the money going not only to waste handling but also to innovations that can reduce waste.? It is similar to the carbon dioxide cap-and-trade law which penalizes emitters and routes the money to companies and projects that offset or eliminate those emissions.? In both cases, they create strong incentives for producers to adopt technologies and practices that reduce the penalties they are charged.? In contrast, Heidi is not a fan of having consumers pay a fee like those on bottles and cans to give them an incentive to recycle.? In her view, that approach makes the consumer responsible for reducing waste and municipal governments to set up elaborate collection infrastructure, rather than putting the responsibility on the producers to do the collection of recyclables and to modify the goods to make them more recyclable.? This bill and other initiatives Heidi is pursuing create opportunities for startups to get grant funding from Cal Recycle, CalEPA, and the US EPA to underwrite the development of new ideas for minimizing waste.? The pace of getting that money available is tied to getting the rules set up to implement SB54, a task that will likely be done in 2025.? Heidi joined the discussion via a recorded interview and you can learn more by viewing her entire presentation here.

Shira talked about upcycling waste into new products as well as working with innovators to create products with less waste.? She was particularly passionate about eliminating plastic waste.? She pointed out the harm microplastics are creating, the tiny particles that are now accumulating inside us all.? Evidence is growing that these microplastics are more harmful than we recognize.? In her view, recycling or even plastic waste conversion to new products will turn out to be adequate to deal with these microparticles.? There will always be unrecovered plastic waste that ends up in streams and the sea, slowly degrading to microscopic shreds that are hard to detect and impossible to avoid.? She has a website?that sells sustainable products as alternatives to conventional counterparts.?

If you are an entrepreneur looking for new horizons, this new attention on making the economy more circular looks like it will be a rich source of funding for those with good ideas.