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.

Circular design doesn’t happen in hindsight: designers must integrate ideas around the circular economy from the inception of the product design process through to the end of a product’s useful life, ensuring true circularity for the materials, components and systems involved. Materials lie at the heart of this process: safe, circular materials choices form the foundation of successful circular design, but not all materials are safe enough or suitable for a circular economy.
Join this interactive session to explore ways to reframe the material health challenge as an opportunity for successful circular design, ensuring your work promotes a safe, circular economy.

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.

This interactive, solution-oriented workshop will provide tangible tactics and strategies for you to consider applying to regional water circularity solutions and collaboration by hearing examples from members of the MN Sustainable Growth Coalition.  This private/public/non-profit partnership aims to advance the circular economy for the growth and prosperity of the region by focusing on water, materials and energy from a systems, social level approach. Hear water-focused takeaways and lessons learned from leaders at Fortune 500 companies. 

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. 

Design thinking is a powerful mechanism to generate breakthrough concepts. It is premised on three elements: empathy, ideation, and experimentation. Biomimicry, the practice of looking to nature for inspired ideas, is a way to radically expand the ideation phase while reducing the number of iterative cycles for experimentation (since the design already works in a different environment). It is also a way to open our hearts with empathy that extends not just to human-centered experiences, but a design that works for all species. This session will also feature a case study of Lockheed Martin’s journey to integrate bioinspired design into the product and technology development process at its famed Skunk Works® to spark innovation and instill a culture of sustainable product design. Join this working session as we practice the power of design thinking coupled with biomimicry design process.

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.

Sustainability is propped up by the three pillars of economic prosperity, social justice and environmental protection and the circular economy has been identified as the optimal economic model for sustainability. Therefore, the concept of a circular economy may seem to inherently include social justice or equity, but does it? Can it? Should it? How does CE to the SDGs? Join Dr. Raj Buch, Circular Economy practice lead for Arizona State University, for a robust conversation on the role of social justice in the circular economy model and how your organization may be missing this element as part of your CE strategy.

Industry trade associations play an important role in providing companies at all levels of familiarity with the circular economy pre-competitive space to benchmark and learn. Join the Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA) for a discussion on how the circular economy is explored within its committees, from student case competitions to education, as part of a larger dialogue on the ways companies can seek and support the unique activities available through their industry trade associations.

With 1.4 million dairy cows in California, dairy farm operations are the largest source of methane in the state. Together, Land O’Lakes, one of the nation’s largest farmer-owned agricultural cooperatives, and California Bioenergy , a renewable energy company—are working with California dairy farmers to generate renewable compressed natural gas (R-CNG) from farm waste. The digesters will help support California’s new standards to reduce dairy and livestock manure-related methane emissions by 40%, by 2030 with also providing a new revenue stream for farmers.

Connect with some of the journalists who shape GreenBiz’s coverage of the circular economy issues and solutions. Learn more about the trends and technologies most likely to capture our attention; discuss our policies when it comes to embargoed briefings and news; and hear about how the team prioritizes incoming pitches and press releases. This will be a roundtable-style gathering, so come prepared to talk.

Matthew will lead a dialogue with participants that focused on the following core question: How might we better capture the hearts and minds of people by connecting circular initiatives in cities to the everyday needs and experiences of people. Rather than focusing on the technical infrastructure of circular industries within cities - we will focus for a moment on what touches peoples lives and influences peoples everyday behaviors. People will have the opportunity to share and reflect on personal experiences within cities that have been meaningful to them - and then will pivot to a series of questions that are designed to provoke thinking connecting human needs (social connection, opportunity, safety, convenience, delight, etc) to expressions of circular economy in cities.

Join collaboration-minded peers for an intimate yet informal roundtable luncheon to share lessons learned and best practices for circularity-focused efforts that leverage cross sector collaboration. In particular, share ideas or challenges about your experiences partnering with private, public and nonprofit sector organizations to advance your organization’s goals.

This solution-oriented conversation will include peer coaching to both troubleshoot and brainstorm approaches that work best for to advance your complex sustainability goals. The luncheon will be hosted by Amy Fredregill, Managing Director of the MN Sustainable Growth Coalition, based on her 20+ years working between sectors and industries to facilitate collaborative dialog and cross-sector initiatives. Your participation in this roundtable luncheon will add value to your Circularity 19 experience by adding tools to your toolbox and networking with peers whom have and are working in a partnership-focused manner.

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.

Circular delivery models will require not just innovation in packaging but a reimagination of supply chains, partnerships and the consumer experience. Learn about new approaches to reusing packaging and hear about the promise and pitfalls from experts in the field.  

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.

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.

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.

What's the role of advanced recycling technologies in keeping materials circulating through our economy and creating circular plastics? 

There’s been a noticeable uptick lately in buzz around chemical recycling, and the promise of technologies that can fix the broken recycling system. However, the technologies, terminology and applications can be confusing and are not widely understood. This session will build on the findings from a recent report by the Center for the Circular Economy at Closed Loop Partners, and explore the landscape of transformational technologies that stop plastic waste, keep materials in play and grow markets. Speakers will discuss the state of the market and highlight the potential for transformational technologies to turn waste plastics back into new materials, decrease reliance on fossil fuels and curb the flow of plastics into marine environments.

Do you want to get more people buying into circular practices and products? Find out how to use storytelling and behavior change strategies to move your audiences to action — from employees and consumers, to suppliers and buyers. Join this session to learn best practices in storytelling and behavior change from those who’ve used these techniques to advance circularity, sustainability, and social impact for leading businesses, government agencies, and nonprofits. Case studies and research results, combined with dialogue and interactive exercises, will give you a foundation and practical next steps for framing for your story and designing your behavior change campaign.

The backlash against planned obsolescence has begun, and products makers of all types — from consumer electronics to industrial equipment — are waking up to a new world of design and service. Advocates of the “Right to Repair” movement are demanding that manufacturers prioritize the development of better maintenance paths for their products, through modular designs and broader availability of components that make repair simpler for the DIY set — and that extend product lives in the process. Policymakers are paying attention: as of early 2019, 20 states including California and Minnesota are actively considering legislation. What does this mean for makers of stuff? How does this philosophy play into circular models of production? Our expert panel weighs in on the implications for product design, maintenance plans, the availability of repair components, intellectual property and more.