Leaders gather to discuss challenges and implementing ecofriendly systems

Adelaide Elliott//Web Editor•March 16, 2020   WASHINGTON — What do you think of when you think of a sustainable product or production process? Recycling? Natural materials? Cutting down on energy use?   “Today’s economy is linear, and it is a massively wasteful system,” said Andrew Morlet, CEO of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. “It’s based on the idea of disposability. So pretty much everything today is designed and taken into the economy as a disposable item. It’s very hard to repair items and keep them in the economy. We’re using things less and everything we make requires massive amounts of new materials. It leads to huge amounts of waste. Recycling at end of pipe is wasteful, too.”     The circular economy, an economic system that aims to design out waste and pollution by reducing material use and increasing the reuse of materials and products, is an answer to that problem. The circular economy, according to Morlet and research from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, is underpinned by both waste elimination and the transition to renewable energy and increased recycling, making it one of the few models that build economic, natural and social capital.   But, despite simple surface level idea of “use less, reuse more,” implementing circular economic systems on a micro and macro level can be challenging.   “The design challenge is to design product service systems,” said Morlet. “Thinking about how we design products to fit within a system and stay within a system for as long as possible. And it all has to be in context of location, product and things like that.”   To get started, Morlet suggested companies must first understand the waste problem they are up against. Knowing this, the Ellen MacArthur foundation commissioned research on the subject and learned that plastic is, in many ways, the biggest waste culprit.   The research found that, by 2014, 311 million tons of plastic had been produced, up twenty-fold since 1964 when the total was 15 million tons.   In addition, the foundation found that, after 40 years spent trying to recycle plastics globally, only about 14% of all plastics have even been collected for recycling and only 2% of that ever actually gets looped back into the economy. At the same time, 32% of trashed plastics were found to be leaking into the environment.   “Recycling at the end of pipe is really challenging because materials all mixed together, they’ve never really been designed for recycling,” said Morlet. “So its low yield, low value, and it’s a mostly unprofitable business.”   Rethinking ‘green’   At National Geographic’s Circular Economy Forum held at its headquarters here last month, leaders from business, government and the nonprofit sector challenged some of those notions of what is and what is not “green” with the concept of circular economies.   Four leaders intimately involved in plastic recycling spoke on the subject in the panel “Re-thinking End-of-Life Solutions for Plastic:” Scott Saunders, general manager of KW Plastics, one of the world’s largest plastics recyclers; Ernel Simpson, vice president of research and development for TerraCycle, a recycling business known for its innovative use of hard-to-recycle materials; Nina Butler, CEO of More Recycling; and Keefe Harrison, CEO of The Recycling Partnership.     “We touch plastic in one of its forms dozens, if not hundreds, of times every day, and we have become totally dependent on it,” said panel moderator Valerie Craig, vice president of impact initiatives for the National Geographic Society. “So the question is, how do we keep it out of the environment, and who is responsible for doing that? Or, maybe, how do we change plastic itself so we can still get benefits without the high cost to the panel?”   According to the panel, recycling plastics at all is not the answer to the plastic problem, and it will not be the thing to make a circular economy work.   Harrison suggests that companies shouldn’t just react to the plastic problem with recycling, and instead products should be designed first with the solution in mind. People should also focus on decreasing demands for plastic because ultimately virgin materials will be chosen over recycled to meet those demands for fast, inexpensive and easy to use plastics.   “It’s an uphill battle to meet the gap between our new capacity and recycling,” added Butler. “It doesn’t matter how innovative our recycling companies are.”   Until then, Saunders noted, all recycling companies and other businesses can do is invest money into processes like recycling where they can see a return.   “Our company over the years has sought out individual plastic items that have economies and scale, that have volumes, that we believe we can turn back into a high value plastic resin or product, so that’s where we’re limited,” he said. “So, we’re a part of the solution but not the entire solution.”   Barriers and enablers   Another panel on “Leading Disruption” focused on those limitations and issues for other businesses.   Hosted by Susan Goldberg, National Geographic’s editor in chief, the panel included Jacob Duer, CEO of The Alliance to End Plastic Waste; Jim Fish, CEO of Waste Management; and Halsey Cook, CEO of Milliken and Co., the parent company of fabric resource Milliken Specialty Interiors.       The panelists delved further into the barriers and enablers of the circular economy that they have witnessed in trying to address the model in their own businesses.   “Sustainability has to be both environmentally and economically viable in order to be truly sustainable,” said Fish. “That’s one of the biggest points.” He noted barriers to that include issues with reselling imperfect recycled materials to consumers who expect perfect product, finding ways to make selling low value plastics profitable.   Additionally, Duer said that the lack of waste management systems across the world make effectively disposing of plastic nearly impossible. To combat that, The Alliance to End Plastic Waste has partnered with companies to source funds to create practical solutions for waste management. At the time of the forum, Duer and his partner companies had pledged $1.5 billion to fund the research.   “I think that’s an indication of companies’ commitment,” said Duer.   For Milliken’s Cook, an important aspect is the economic incentives as controlled by consumer demand and willingness to pay higher prices for goods made with higher recycled plastic content and things like that. More research and technological advances on the part of all businesses will be crucial, too. Milliken, which doesn’t produce recycled plastics itself, makes additives that can help strengthen and change recycled plastics’ characteristics. There, Cook said, Milliken has the chance to make the recycling process easier through investments in tech and research, something all companies have to be willing to make despite the initial investment costs.   “What we’ve seen as time has gone on is that the unintended consequences of businesses that have a blind eye toward their communities or towards their environment end up becoming very risky enterprises,” Cook said. “If you don’t take a view towards the impact of your business across all your stakeholders, you can pay a huge penalty that would ultimately impact your shareholders, too. So your bottom line matters, but it’s not the only thing that matters.”