Listen to our special Earth Day 2024 episode where we talk about how to accelerate the path to a circular economy. Sustainability In Your Ear host Mitch Ratcliffe shares lessons learned at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s circular economy-focused REMADE conference, held earlier this month at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Washington, DC. Scientists and business leaders came together to discuss achieving a circular economy and share their research. REMADE focuses on reducing waste and building circular systems in industry, which accounts for 30.2% of human annual CO2 emissions, and the conference focused on recycling, specifically industrializing recycling at scale, so that consumers no longer need to learn to separate materials at home to improve recycling.
As you will hear, this requires huge investments, and it’s a kind of technological utopianism that promises solutions that are so simple people don’t have to think about them. Many of the scientific presentations at the event looked at advanced recycling techniques for plastics, textiles and metals, techniques for decarbonizing industries, and how to design products to be easier to recycle. These important and fascinating efforts will guide us towards a make, recover and remanufacture approach to the products we rely on every day.
Take a few minutes on Earth Day to learn more about the potential benefits of a circular economy.
Editor’s note: This interview aired on May 20, 2024.
