Finance: LabCycle, a female and minority-led circular economy startup, secures over Β£1m seed funding to scale the recycling of plastic laboratory waste, creating circular solutions for this hard-to-recycle type of plastic. More than 5.5m tonnes of plastic waste is generated by research and healthcare labs worldwide. Due to contamination and hazardous concerns, the majority of this waste is incinerated, producing carbon emissions equivalent to 23 million cars annually. LabCycle's propriertory technology, AutoDecon, starts with an effective decontamination technique, meeting stringent safety and quality standards while preserving the integrity of materials. It uses low-water and energy-efficient recycling technology to ensure over 95% recovery of materials.
Policy: France is the first country to tackle chemicals in fast fashion, by passing a binding law that will ban PFAS in textiles, footwear, and cosmetics from January 2026. PFAS (aka forever chemicals) are used to make textiles water- and stain-resistant. But they pose health risks including cancer, immune suppression, and developmental effects. They also persist in the environment for decades, accumulating in wildlife and food chains. There will be legal prohibition on manufacturing, importing, and selling PFAS-treated products and strict thresholds for residual PFAS in new textiles and footwear. There will be wide market suveillance, monitoring and testing to ensure compliance and non-compliant goods cannot legally be sold, creating strong commercial pressure. There is also a circular economy angle. Second-hand clothing will be exempt and there will be exemptions for PPE and items with at least 20% recycled content.
Research: New research has found enormous amounts of microplastics in urban air, far exceeding earlier estimates. The Institute of Earth Environment of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IEECAS) developed a semi automated microanalytical technique designed to quantify plastic particles in the atmosphere. This method also tracks how plastics move between different environmental pathways, including airborne particles, dustfall, rain, snow, and dust resuspension. Road dust and rainfall in particular play a major role in moving microplastics through the atmosphere. Airborne microplastics was found at a rate of x2-6 orders of magnitude higher than previously reported.
Action This π‘
A circular strategy that engages employees is one that has longevity. Getting employee buy-in is important, but often overlooked. How can you do this?
- Involvement. Getting employee buy-in starts with involving them in the creation. Run a series of meetings to hear their perspectives, ideas and concerns that can shape your circular economy strategy.
- Awareness. Conduct internal engagement on the value of the circular economy, how it links to overarching company goals, and therefore their own day-to-day objectives.
- Empowerment. Empower employees to take the sustainability into their own hands. Encourage and incentivise employee-led circular economy initiatives both inside and outside work.
The Joy of Circularity
With Claudia Grabbe
The concept of a circular economy seems very modern but throughout history, humans have sought to make the most out of resources. In preparing the Circular Economy Act later this year, the European Commission could learn not only from businesses but also from what many Europeans do at home.
The throwaway culture associated with modern consumption is the exception in history. Humans have traditionally cherished materials and gone to great lengths to prolong item lifespansβfrom upcycling textiles in the Roman Empire to rag men like the Parisian chiffoniers who earned their living collecting and selling waste.
In Europe, widespread circularity in households is within living memory. During resource shortages in the second World War and the economic crises that followed, European governments launched campaigns to encourage households to save and reuse materials. These initiatives encouraged extensive domestic methods of reusing, repairing, repurposing, and regenerating.
My dissertation for University College London investigated the relevance of these traditional practices for modern consumers. Drawing on 20 interviews with Brussels residents from a range of European backgrounds, it explored how they value (and do not value) resources and how their parents and grandparents did so. Being first generation middle-class, these participants could now afford to waste as their parents could not, but they have chosen to return to methods of circularity they learned in their childhood.
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Why do people practise circularity at home?
Policymakers often assume that people need extrinsic motivations like price and cost to change their behaviour. However, my participants reported important intrinsic motivations for avoiding waste.
- Moral incentives: participants had inherited moral aversions to wasting clothes and food from their elders, following traditional mentalities to avoid excess like 'buy only what you need' and 'buy to last'.
- Home curation: decorating one's home with hand-me-down furniture and heirlooms was a form of family storytelling through displaying memories and enjoying the aesthetic of traditional lifestyles.
- Mindfulness: the time consuming and creative nature of activities like making something from scratch, whether it be sewing a dress, repairing a vase, or gardening, grounded participants in the otherwise fast-paced nature of the modern world. This mindfulness then made them more aware of their unsustainable consumption and what other circular habits they could adopt.
- Health: homemade products, like creating herbal remedies and natural beauty treatments out of cupboard ingredients or making pickles and preserves, were valued for their health benefits. These activities often involved traditional family recipes and involved more circular steps like reusing jars for storing the finished product.
The end products of these circular actions, whether they were items that had been bought to last, passed down from a loved one, or hand made, made them more valuable in the participants' eyes, which incentivised them to consequently take more care of the valued product, repair it, and repurpose it.
However, participants encountered barriers created by the frantic pace and resource abundance of modern life:
- Space: storing packaging to reuse or broken items to repair took up space that was challenging for participants who had smaller living quarters or were particularly neat.
- Time pressure: participants who did not practise acts of circularity in their spare time did not hone their skills and consequently perceived these activities as more time-consuming and chore-like than those who did them regularly.
- Convenience: the easy access (and often cheaper option) of replacing a broken item with a poor quality alternative or buying a plastic-wrapped lunch when on the go made reducing resource use difficult.
- Temptation: it was not easy to solely buy things that participants needed given the accessibility and choice of products nowadays.
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βHow do people overcome barriers?
When items are valued, people found creative ways to overcome barriers to circularity:
- Making time while working full-time: people incorporated sustainability into their routines (frequenting local farmers' markets or mending while watching television), sent their children to sewing courses when they did not have the time to teach them themselves, and repurposed or made things from scratch as part of their relaxation and down time. As these practices became habits, they succumbed to convenience and temptation less, as well as becoming more creative over time as their imaginations were stretched to attribute more value to items in their lives.
- Making space: motivated participants found ways to store more items to reuse, reduce what they bought, and make hand-me-downs and repurposed items aesthetically pleasing.
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The Importance of Circular Education
Creativity in becoming more circular in daily life was entangled in self-efficacy. Participants who had confidence in their craftmaking skills demonstrated what I like to call βcyclo-powerfulnessβ, whereby a feeling of the task being achievable made people more likely to experiment with repurposing, which further built their circular skills and repertoire of practices over time. Rather than putting off activities like mending a sock, making a bowl out of discarded wood, or fixing a broken candlestick, people who practised 'make-do and mend' regularly because they were eco-conscious or took pleasure in it were less likely to perceive circular tasks as daunting or time-consuming.
However, people only feel 'cyclo-powerful' when they have the necessary skills. Competencies like woodworking, sewing, knitting, and gluing are critical for making and mending furniture, household items, and clothes. Knowledge of cooking, preservation techniques, and food health are required to repurpose leftovers, reduce food waste, and make pickles and preserves out of excess produce.
Many of these skills are no longer being taught in schools or by parents and grandparents. Younger generations are growing up surrounded by cheap, poor quality goods and food, and a convenience culture of chucking and buying new.
When the EU's Right to Repair Directive comes into effect in July this year, it will support local repair initiatives. However, national governments need to ensure the mandatory teaching of circular skills in schools to empower people to take care of their possessions themselves and appreciate the labour involved in making them. Circular education for all would create a positive feedback loop where people value their possessions more, maintain and repair them, and pass them down to create family memories.
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Claudia is a sustainability analyst at Kite Insights, a consultancy that provides businesses with the confidence and clarity to play their part in sustainable transformation and to take a stance on issues and shape the debate. She specialises in domestic resource use and is a passionate advocate for bringing the circular economy home. She holds a First Class degree in Geography from University College London.
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Smart Picks π§
What is the relationship between a circular economy and mental wellbeing? - A circular economy fosters mental well-being by restoring agency, purpose, and connection to natural cycles, countering the psychological burdens of depletion and waste.
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What did you think of this edition of Circular Digest? If you have any thoughts, questions, or ideas for future content, reply to this email. π
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See you next month!
Kayleigh
How can I help you? πͺ
Here are a few ways, whenever you are ready:
π‘Book a 30 min circularity advisory clinic: Don't know where to start on your circularity journey? Have a specific circularity challenge you need help solving? Let's chat and explore how I can support your goals. Spots are limited so secure yours now!
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Kayleigh Lee-Simion
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