A lack of awareness of the principle and poor clarity regarding the terminology of the circular economy are major stumbling blocks to its progression, a new CIWM report has found.

Written by Ray Georgeson, Director of Ray Georgeson Resources, and Dr Jane Beasley, Director of Beasley Associates, ‘The Circular Economy: what does it mean for the waste and resource management sector?’ report was released by the Chartered Institution of Wastes Management (CIWM) at an event at the House of Commons yesterday (4 November), as part of John Quinn’s 2014/15 presidency.

Report findings

Setting out to explore what the circular economy means to and for the waste and resource management sector, the study has been based on responses from over 600 CIWM members and other industry leaders from across England, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.

It found that while there is still uncertainty over what the circular economy means and what it can achieve, more than 80 per cent of respondents were either ‘very’ or ‘reasonably’ familiar with the term. The majority of respondents said that they thought the circular economy was associated with moving away from a linear economy towards both greater resource efficiency through increase recycling of products and materials, and the ‘designing out of waste’.

Further to this, around one third of respondents said that term is used frequently within their organisations, although 44 per cent said they thought that the term was not understood by the business (with 36 per cent saying that their businesses did understand the term, and 19 per cent 'uncertain').

Despite this acknowledgment of the circular economy being used in business, only 27 per cent of respondents said they were doing even a ‘modest’ amount of planning for the circular economy. However, there was firm disagreement over the belief that the circular economy is a theoretical principle that cannot be put into practice (with only 63 respondents agreeing with this statement).

A lack of awareness and poor clarity of terminology regarding the circular economy, along with feelings of ‘little’ or ‘fragmented’ leadership on the issue, were identified as key barriers to its take-up. Other hurdles identified included short-termism (41.7 per cent), economics (38.5 per cent), and lack of a policy framework (37.8 per cent).

Of all UK nations, respondents cited Scottish and Welsh ‘policy makers, research organisations, reprocessors and consultancies’ as the best prepared for the circular economy, while local authorities and English policy makers and retailers were identified as the least prepared. (This reinforces the messages of recent reports released by the Environmental Audit Committee and the Environment, Food & Rural Affairs Committee, which outlined that although the UK central government ‘recognises the opportunity’ of resource efficiency and the circular economy, rather than ‘scaling up its work, it is cutting it back’ and is generally ‘lacking leadership’ in this area.)

Report recommendations

As such, the report recommends that CIWM help clarify the meaning of the circular economy and bring about its wider uptake by:

• developing a Circular Economy Action Group to engage stakeholders within and beyond the waste and resource management sector, focusing initially on four priority areas: communication; knowledge; skills; and influence;
• developing a Circular Economy Policy Statement that signals to stakeholders outside the industry the intent of CIWM to develop the circular economy;
• delivering an Action Plan with a route map to assist organisations in moving towards a circular economy;
• embedding the circular economy into CIWM’s training and membership offering, as well as its internal structures, strategies and future planning;
• facilitating the dissemination of circular economy developments and practice; and
• supporting other circular economy initiatives, such as the RSA’s The Great Recovery.

Circular-economy thinking a ‘mammoth task and one that cannot be accomplished single-handedly’

The 2014/15 CIWM President, John Quinn, said: “Circular Economy is about collaboration, none of us deal with it working alone. This report is just the starting point – many people have a role to play and there is a real opportunity to be taken.

“We should be helping to bring the different parts of industry together, championing and communicating to a range of audiences the role we play in collecting, sorting and reprocessing quality secondary materials that are essential to the success of the circular economy concept…This means building circular-economy thinking in at all educational levels which is, of course, a mammoth task and one that we cannot accomplish single-handedly.”

Touching on government leadership, Quinn concluded: “One of the messages we will be seeking to emphasise is the need for more joint working and discussion between the four UK governments; all of them have good ideas, but none of the have a monopoly on them.”

Lord Deben, Chairman of the Climate Change Committee (pictured, right) and former Secretary of State for the Environment, added: “If you set high standards then you get high standards. Take Scotland, for example, which has set high targets which are very difficult to reach, and hasn’t met for the last two years, but they are a lot further than they would be if they had set a standard which would have been easy to get to. So I do beg of you to raise the standards and be on the side of better standards, even though it’s more uncomfortable. If you don’t do that, we’ll never move forward fast enough to solve the problems we have.

“We need to make laws that are effective, not just make laws to obey them. In party politics, we don’t always get things right. So we in business, who carry things through, have got to try all the time to see the legislation achieves its end. So that’s why it’s important that we help make the legislation on producer responsibility, packaging, waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE), do what we want it to: renew and recycle. We spend our time making the best of the resources we have been given, which seems to me to be central in our battle against climate change.”

Read the ‘The Circular Economy: what does it mean for the waste and resource management sector?’ report.