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.

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. 

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.

As more companies commit to innovative circular economy and sustainability strategies and investments, there is an increased need to learn the best practices for successfully communicating these decisions externally. Too often, we hear about what circular approaches companies are taking but not how they are communicating the relevance of those approaches. This session will explore how companies can most effectively communicate to their customers and stakeholders about their circular ambitions, products, and service offerings by focusing on circular solution(s) and the accompanying communications approaches they employed.

During this interactive session, delegates from GreenBiz, GlobeScan, Danone, IKEA, P&G and WWF will share and discuss fresh insights from recent stakeholder and consumer research conducted around the world. Hear what the results mean for major B2C brands and understand the implications for shifting consumer behavior.

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.

This roundtable will discuss how project finance and various other types of capital can be utilized to build the infrastructure required to enable the circular economy.

The world’s plastic pollution crisis can be fixed – but only with the power of business to catalyze solutions across the plastic material value chain. From product and supplier decision-making to influencing consumers, retailers and FMCG companies play an especially critical role in helping fix the pain points along the broken plastic system. But as large-scale problems call for large-scale actions, how do these companies tackle the problem in a way that’s consistent and reflects the systems-change we need to see?

Join the discussion led by World Wildlife Fund’s Erin Simon, who’s packaging engineer expertise and conservation-driven approach is helping companies answer this question and adapt practical approaches to one of the world’s most complex crises.

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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.

Most of the choices that determine whether or not a product is circular are made at the design phase. However most of people involved in new product development are non-designers. In this interactive session, we’ll map out key stakeholders, and discuss best practices and concepts that non-designers should know so they can effectively design for circularity. You’ll learn how to write a design brief so that it will be easier to achieve circular goals, and easier to evaluate the options that your design teams develop.  Last, we’ll cover other essentials like trade-offs, material selection, end-of-life strategies, and alternative strategies for your design and production teams.  

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.

Everybody loves the idea of circular water management, but we’re a long way from making it happen. In fact, we don’t even agree on what circular water management is. That’s a problem, because we face a projected 40 percent water deficit by 2030 and businesses are already feeling the effects of mounting water scarcity. But it’s also an opportunity, because our margin for progress is wide-open. This breakout is a live brainstorming session with the best water minds from a variety of companies on the front lines. What does circular water management mean to them? Which obstacles are they finding on the journey and what are the best ways to overcome them? And how are they propagating these best practices up and down the supply chain? The answers will determine the actions we take to ward off a crisis and safeguard sustainable growth in the crucial next decade.

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.

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.

From lighting fixtures to furniture to clothing and accessories, more companies are exploring models for providing products-as-a-service (PaaS) through rental or leasing arrangements, pay-per-use transactions and subscriptions that reimagine the concept of ownership. What does it take to design and manufacture products that can be “sold” in this manner? What’s the best pricing model? How will this shake up expectations for service and maintenance? And how can companies adapt their own financial models to make this transition? Learn from several organizations at the center of this exciting disruption.

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.