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Program

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Logistics & Infrastructure

Tuesday, June 18th, 2019
8:00am to 12:15pm
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Circularity Summit: Packaging and Brand Integrity (Invite-Only)

Summit
Minnesota Room

A growing number of consumer brands are exploring new packaging types, whether in response to direct pressures or in pursuit of new business models and revenue streams. But doing so is not without peril. First and foremost, companies must maintain their brand integrity and value proposition while they tweak or transform one of their principal assets: their branded packaging. In this half-day, invitation-only event, representatives from the plastics and packaging value chains, along with leading packaged goods companies, will explore the promise and pitfalls for brands seeking to transition packaging to circular materials and models.

Request an invite to the summit here. 

  • All-Access Pass Required
  • Invitation Only
  • Sign-up Required

Speakers

  • Joel Makower
  • Shana Rappaport

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8:30am to 10:00am
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Target Field Tour (Sign-up required)

Activity

Join us for a tour of Target Field! During your guided 90-minute tour of Target Field, you'll see areas of the ballpark many guests normally don't see. These spaces may include the Herb Carneal Press Box, clubhouse, dugout, suite level, Bat & Barrel, Delta SKY360 Club, Budweiser Roof Deck, and Thompson Reuters Champions Club. Guests will be exposed to the art work, displays of memorabilia, environmental and sustainability features of Target Field, as well as Twins history. Sign up for the tour here. 

  • All-Access Pass Required

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8:30am to 12:15pm
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Foundations of the Circular Economy

Tutorial
St. Croix 1

This half-day tutorial, designed for attendees from all sectors and backgrounds and presented by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, will provide a foundational understanding of the circular economy — a model that fundamentally reimagines the traditional “take-make-waste” linear industrial model in favor of a system that designs out waste and pollution, decouples economic growth from natural resource consumption, increases resource productivity and regenerates natural systems.

The first part of the tutorial session will tour through our circular economy journey to date. From theory through to action, The Foundation team will start by explaining the guiding principles and then take participants through a series of case study examples which illustrate circular design spanning products, business models, and system level innovations.

To some, the circular economy concept can feel academic and detached from reality. The second part of the session will take a more in depth look at how we can 'sell in' and convince stakeholders to invest in circular economy initiatives. Much of the work concentrating on the circular economy to date has centred on deep analysis of the broader economic opportunity. Translating the theory into practical opportunities for colleagues working at the coal-face of operations, or executives faced with competing priorities, can present a critical challenge.

Fortunately, the circular economy is a big idea with many entry points. Significant work has already been completed by many diverse organisations of all sizes to demonstrate that the theoretical upside can be translated to real commercial opportunities today. Some of these organisations are already taking giant leaps towards circular economy models.

  • All-Access Pass Required

Speakers

  • James George
  • Joe Murphy

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Circular Packaging 101

Tutorial
Wayzata Bay

The Sustainable Packaging Coalition will traverse the most important considerations around recovering packaging, ensuring packaging is recoverable, and using recovered materials as inputs for new packaging in the Circular Packaging 101 workshop. With a keen emphasis on the business case for sustainable packaging and consumer perceptions around sustainable packaging, we'll discuss best-in-class examples of strategies to optimize packaging for different channels, designing a package to be successfully recycled or composted, and best practices for sourcing virgin and recycled materials. To put it all in context, we'll explore challenges and opportunities around recycling and composting infrastructure, as well as what happens when waste escapes collection and becomes ocean pollution. Throughout the workshop, we'll touch on corporate goals around each topic and look at both incremental and radical approaches to reaching them.

  • All-Access Pass Required

Speakers

  • Adam Gendell
  • Tristanne Davis

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The Amazing Race (to Circular Business Models): Insights from the Fashion Industry

Tutorial
St. Croix 2

There is race among apparel and footwear companies, with both new and established players vying to unlock the potential benefits of circular business models. The insights generated in the process can help inform broader innovation across many other industries in a transition to a circular economy.

Join this tutorial to learn how the fashion industry’s experience illustrates key elements in building a circular business model. Participants will be invited to take part in a fun, interactive competition to better understand the challenges and opportunities companies face when testing and scaling new models.

Facilitated by World Resources Institute (WRI) and QSA Partners, the session will review the innovations needed to overcome an “implementation gap” between talk and testing. WRI and QSA will share early insights on behalf of a group of organizations—supported by C&A Foundation’s Bridging the Gap initiative—working with fashion industry leaders to put circular economy ideas into action.

(No experience in the fashion industry necessary. Only shirts and shoes required.)

  • All-Access Pass Required

Speakers

  • Eliot Metzger
  • Austin Dickerson
  • Gerrard Fisher
  • Kristina Bull
  • Elizabeth Reichart

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4:00pm to 5:00pm
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What Is a Circular City?

Breakout
Minnesota Room

By 2050, two thirds of us will live in cities. However, our urban centres are grappling with the effects of our current take-make-waste economy. Under this ‘linear system’, cities consume over 75% of natural resources, produce over 50% of global waste, and emit between 60-80% of greenhouse gases.

As major engines for economic growth and job creation, cities are also looking to the circular economy agenda to unlock economic, environmental, and social benefits. This session will explore how city leaders are using the transition to a circular economy to create jobs for their communities, providing safe and affordable places to live and improving how people and good throughout the city.

Speakers

  • Carrie Freeman
  • Rosemary Han
  • Jamie Harkins
  • Ashima Sukhdev

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Now What? Unpacking Product Takeback

Breakout
Wayzata Bay

Voluntary product take-back schemes are an effective way for companies to reduce waste, engage consumers, reclaim valuable materials and establish a more circular supply chain. But once a company has successfully recovered a product at the end of its usable life, what next? Join reverse logistics and take-back experts from IKEA, I:CO and Best Buy for a conversation about how to determine the appropriate path for used products that keeps materials at their highest and best use, complies with health and safety regulations and also pencils out.

Speakers

  • Lisa Davis
  • Jennifer Gilbert
  • Mark Ashurst
  • Nate Omann

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Cultural Conditions for Circularity

Breakout
Spring Park Bay

What if the limitations to realizing a circular economy lay not only in new and innovative approaches, but also in enabling cultural conditions critical for them to take hold? What if, in our quest for more, better, faster, prettier, newer… we lost the thread between who we are and what is happening around us? What if the role of business needs to start, not just with circular practices, but with designing for connection between people? These are some of the questions we are exploring as we consider how to design for the the cultural conditions for a circular economy - be it within cities, neighborhoods, businesses or for a given product or service. Please join IDEO and Gehl as we navigate the human potential within and for the circular economy.

Speakers

  • Lauren Yarmuth
  • Matthew Lister

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Wednesday, June 19th, 2019
8:30am to 9:30am
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Emerging Trends in Circular Fashion

Breakout
Wayzata Bay
From clothing as a service to digitally enabled tracking to end-of-life recycling, hear how emerging circular business models and products can help break the cycle of fashion waste. 

Speakers

  • Danielle Joseph
  • Michael Colarossi
  • Katrin Ley
  • Sneha Jhaveri

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Sell It Again: How Retailers Are Embracing Recommerce

Breakout
Minnesota Room

This session will explore how retailers are using returned consumer products to implement more circular business models through recommerce. Customers return $390B of merchandise annually and return rates for ecommerce purchases can reach 40%. Meanwhile, resale of consumer product (or recommerce) is an 18B market, with online recommerce disruptors growing up >30X faster than traditional retail. This session will focus on how retailers and brands have changed their own business models to adapt to the growing trends around returns and recommerce. You will hear about challenges, successes, and how a move towards circularity is fueling innovations in reverse logistics. 

Speakers

  • Ann Starodaj
  • Nicole Bassett
  • Peter Whitcomb
  • Blaine Kriesel

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Getting to Zero Waste in Retail: Tools and Tactics

Breakout
St. Croix 2

Join Walmart, REI, Nordstrom and the Retail Compliance Center, an initiative of the Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA), for an interactive discussion around the evolution of Zero Waste as a concept and how its principles are being applied in a retail context on the larger path towards circularity. The discussion will look beyond facility certification, for what is means to strive for Zero Waste for a physical product and packaging-based industry.

This session will also include a preview of the RILA Sustainability Leadership Advisor, a decision support platform under development from the RILA Retail Compliance Center that enables retail organizations to map and optimize their sustainability programs, such as waste management, and leverage industry data and customized guidance.

Speakers

  • Erin Hiatt
  • Tiffin Shewmake
  • Anna Vinogradova
  • Sue Long
  • Chelsey Evans

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1:30pm to 2:30pm
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Making Water Circular Again: The Future of Technology & Infrastructure

Breakout
Spring Park Bay

In nature, water is the ultimate circular resource. All the water that we’ll ever have already exists, and it is constantly moving through the hydrological cycle. In the last century, however, we’ve spent billions of dollars to make water fit our linear economy. We take water (usually from the ground) à treat it à use it à treat it again as “waste” water à dump it (usually into surface water). And now, the pipes we laid 100 years ago are crumbling beneath our feet. The EPA estimates we need $800 billion in investment in the next 20 years to keep the level of drinking water service we have today. But all that would get us are shiny new pipes in an old linear model, not designed for the realities of a changing climate. Meanwhile, in places as different as Amsterdam, Australia, Ghana, and India, new water service delivery models are cropping up that are far more efficient, cost effective, and most importantly, recognize the truly circular nature of water. In this panel discussion, we’ll explore different water service business models (such as community owned and decentralized treatment at the point of use); the rise of “smart” water technologies to optimize both energy and water use and recovery; and progress towards full water reuse in different sectors.

Speakers

  • Amy Skoczlas Cole
  • Paige Novak
  • Phil Rolchigo
  • Eve Troeh

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Can Materials Marketplaces Work?

Breakout
St. Croix 2

Materials matching has been tried many times before, often with limited results. Recently there has been renewed interest by a number companies looking to increase the amount of recycled content in their products and countries looking divert more waste from landfills. It’s time to find out if materials marketplaces can scale and provide the services to support circular strategies.

Speakers

  • John Gagel
  • Lauren Smith
  • John Davies
  • Andy Mangan

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2:45pm to 3:45pm
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Circular Backbone: Designing a Digital Infrastructure

Breakout
St. Croix 2

As the circular economy gains traction we navigate not only how to design new products and services, but also what enabling infrastructure needs to be in place for these new systems to work and scale. From clothing to electronics, food, transportation, and more; Most of the tools that we need to unlock a circular future exist, the question is how we will use them. Please join IDEO for an interactive session focused on co-designing key and enabling infrastructure required for a set of specific industry challenges to realize their circular potential.

Speakers

  • Lauren Yarmuth
  • Christopher Krohn
  • Michelle Tulac

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Compostable Materials and the Circular Economy

Breakout
Deer & Elk Room

How can bioplastics and compostable materials be a part of a circular economy solution for plastics? This breakout session will hear from organizations that are actively working in the bioplastics and plastics supply chain and are involved in commercializing bioplastic resins, products and/or circular solutions for plastic pollution. The panelists will discuss the potential of bioplastics and why they believe compostable materials and organics recycling are a necessary component to unlocking a viable circular economy and a part of the solution to global plastic pollution. The audience would learn the basics of bioplastics - definitions of terms, differences between materials, current and future applications, end-of-life characteristics, challenges to greater market adoption, and failures/successes - as well as the challenges in developing, implementing and scaling circular solutions for the organics loop.

Speakers

  • Andrew Falcon
  • Kaj Johnson
  • Kelly Williams
  • Janice Tran
  • Jackie Suggitt

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Leveraging Place-Based Programs to Improve National Recycling Rates

Breakout
Excelsior Bay

Testing Circular Economy principles and forging new and deeper collaborations among businesses, NGOs, governments, and other strategic stakeholder groups are necessary to unlock the value of the Circular Economy, and accelerate scalable solutions across global supply chains. This workshop will focus on how companies can work with cities to accomplish their recycling and recovery objectives and more effectively scale them nationally, leveraging Beyond 34 as a use case.

Speakers

  • Scott Breen
  • Anna Vinogradova
  • Rajesh Buch
  • David Herberholz

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4:15pm to 5:15pm
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Artificial Intelligence and the Circular Economy

Breakout
Spring Park Bay

Artificial intelligence can be a valuable tool to help accelerate and scale the transition to a circular economy while creating new forms of value. Given humanity’s inefficient, waste-ridden industrial systems, AI can help solve some complex problems that stand between the current linear system and a more circular one. Hear from companies across industries that are leveraging AI for CE through product and material design, operating new business models and optimizing infrastructure.

Speakers

  • John Atcheson
  • Matanya Horowitz
  • Faith Legendre
  • Shana Rappaport

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Return to Sender: Reverse Logistics in the Age of E-Commerce

Breakout
Deer & Elk Room

The e-commerce and returns goods market is rapidly expanding as The Wall Street Journal estimates post retail sales of returns at about $554 billion in 2016 and growing at about 7.5% per year. The returned goods market and logistics associated with the product movement and disposition has many facets, ranging from product liquidation and reuse, remanufacturing of products, traditional recycling, creating energy, as well as managing regulated items with hazardous characteristics that must be managed in compliant and environmentally responsible ways. This session will focus on how to turn the challenges of returned products into opportunities to become an industry leader.

Speakers

  • John Davies
  • Tom Carpenter
  • Ann Starodaj
  • Mike Newman

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Going Glocal: Balancing Regional Context and Global Footprints

Breakout
Excelsior Bay

How do brands and retailers balance regional context with national and international footprints? Recycling systems are inherently local, influenced heavily by city and state-level ordinances and regulations, the proximity of end markets, cost of waste and existing infrastructure. At the same time, supply chains and manufacturing are increasingly global. Standardization is a commonly suggested solution, but where along the value-chain does that make sense? Join the discussion to hear from global retailers and mission-based non-profit recyclers to explore the challenges and opportunities of regional circularity. 

Speakers

  • Dylan de Thomas
  • Lynn Hoffman
  • Kate Bailey
  • Matt Kopac

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Thursday, June 20th, 2019
8:30am to 9:30am
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Digitizing Takeback: Embracing Technology to Create Circular Value Chains

Breakout
Spring Park Bay

The convergence of disruptive technologies like the internet of things, blockchain, and artificial intelligence is fundamentally reshaping our economy. In 2008, there were already more “things” connected to the internet than people. As this trend continues, we will gain unprecedented insight into the condition, location, and history of objects in our physical world. How might we harness this digital revolution to accelerate the development of circular value chains? In this highly interactive session, panelist will explore how companies are employing track-and-trace technologies to innovate new business models, enhance product takeback programs, and promote circular value creation. 

Speakers

  • Faith Legendre
  • Anita Kedia Schwartz
  • Abbey Burns

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