User:Dnwesselman/sandbox/Circle Economy

Circle Economy is a social enterprise based in The Netherlands. It started in 2011 as a cooperative that aims to accelerate the practical implementation of the circular economy. Together with its members and partners the organisation takes concrete steps to implement this new economic system by developing practical and scalable tools and programs for businesses and governments, thereby showing that circular economy is an ambitious yet realistic and sensible system for the future world. The organisation provides insights in what a circular future might look like for a company, a region or sector by coming up with scenarios for how to get there. Circle Economy’s network, independently developed tools and necessary insights enable the members and partners to turn these scenarios into reality.

History

Circle Economy is founded by Robert-Jan van Ogtrop, a Dutch entrepreneur and former CEO of Remy-Cointreau,  in 2010 together with a group of people with different backgrounds (economists, ecologists, sociologists, and more) who strongly believe that the world needs new operating models and leadership to take them forward. They envisioned, and adopted a model known as circular economy, that moves society away from a short-sided, consumption-driven way of life towards a new status quo; a system change for a world that is recognized by reciprocity and connectedness.

In September 2012 the Circle of Action was created; a young group of professionals who took on the challenge of building the Circle Economy organization from the ground up. Currently the network connected to Circle Economy consist of members and partners who all have agreed to accelerate the transition towards a circular economy by creating circular projects or applying a circular lens.

Circle Economy’s Supervisory Board, consist out of four people (Robert-Jan van Ogtrop, Herman Wijffels, Louise Vet and Martijn Lopes Cardozo) and is responsible for providing direction and guidance to senior management with respect to the business and activities of Circle Economy. The cooperation is funded by businesses society via annual membership, Dutch and European governments, project fees and foundations.

Focus areas

Circle Economy has four key program areas, which are designed to be cross cutting across sectors and society. These program areas are integrated within the team enabling each program area to benefit from and contribute knowledge to the others.            

Cities Program

Circle Economy sees cities as the hotbed of innovation within countries as well as key inflection areas for change. Cities come face to face with the global challenges of our time and will only continue to feel pressure from increased urbanization and the future challenges climate change. They often are closely integrated with the surrounding regions and are key linkages to the global economy for a country. The ability to identify and implement circular solutions at the city level can have far reaching affects for its citizens, ecology, and competitiveness in global markets. The cities program is currently initiated in a number of cities in the Netherlands, Scotland and Belgium.

Tool development

Circle Economy develops online and offline tools that can be deployed at different intervention points in order to trigger appropriate action. Some examples of the tools are:

• Circular Business Tool - A tool to be deployed at the business or local government level to assess different business models in circularity with the goal to drive decision making towards the models that not only will have circular impact but also make good business sense.
• Circular Assessment Tool (CAT) - A tool that enables financial institutions and funders to assess and calculate the circularity of a given company or organization. Rather than investing based on history, the CAT tool enables investors to fund those that are making the appropriate future steps in circularity - thus prompting the market to take appropriate action.
• Circulator
• Circular Economy BOOSTcamp - An offline tool (event) that enables designers, practitioners, business men and women, and individuals to tackle tangible, local problems by coming together for an intense 3-day period and identify the existing barriers and pathways forward. By identifying key issues prior to the BOOSTcamp, involving case-owners to lead workshops, and bringing a design-thinking approach to the problem solving, the BOOSTcamp ensures that after the 3-day period, further action will take place in order to realize the solutions.

Sector knowledge

Circle Economy has created a core program dedicated to the identification and application of the insights that are created throughout all of the different projects and programs. The capture and sharing of insights looks at three key sectors  to understand how circularity works in each and model them to be further applied elsewhere.

• Circular Textiles Program: By working to apply circularity to such a multi-faceted industry as textiles (both business and consumer facing, both local and global, ranging from luxury to fast moving goods, etc.) Circle Economy is able to uncover how to make circularity work across the value-chain by collaborating with technology companies working on technical solutions, big brands working on how to include circularity into their business models, B2B companies that are interested in secondary waste markets, and others to retrieve a circular textiles industry.
• Finance: Circle Economy works with a number of financial institutions to identify the leverage points that these institutions can use to prompt the markets towards circularity. By using the resource that these firms know best - funding - together creating the tooling and processes needed in order for funding to be used as a tool to create a circular economy. To date, Circle Economy has been working: with PGGM, Sustainalytics and others to create the Circular Assessment Tool (CAT) described above; with Rabobank to design business model challenges in various sectors to prompt clients of the bank to think about circular opportunities and apply them; and to scale these tools and programs to be used by other financial institutions.
• Design: In many of the programs, Circle Economy recognized that opportunities for circular impacts were located in the design -- either of a product or a process. Therefore, by focusing on circular design, which includes the creation of a circular business model canvas, circular design thinking workshops, and working with companies to identify ways to ‘go circular’ via the design process, CE is able to address not only the end-of-life scenarios but also work with partners on ways to design out waste and in ways that are supportive of ecology and ecosystems.
• ArgoFood

Membership

Circle Economy, designed as a cooperative made up of members, is committed to a collaborative approach to addressing the earth’s challenges. In order to have the impact it is necessary to shift the earth back on to a thriving course, working with a wide variety of stakeholders in order to create the solutions is needed to secure the earth’s future. Collaboration is the new competition, company to company, organization to organization, government to government.

External links

• Official website
• The Netherlands Circular Hotspot
• The circular economy ambassadors network
• Nederland Circulair!
• European Remanufacturing Network