In 2018, the Foundation alongside the UN Environment Programme launched the Global Commitment, the biggest global voluntary effort to tackle plastic waste and pollution. In this podcast episode, we hear from Sander Defruyt, Plastics Lead at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, who reflects on the progress and learnings to date from five years of the Global Commitment, the need for a legally binding global treaty to end plastic pollution, and what makes him feel optimistic about the last five years.

Learn more about the Global Commitment Five Years In

Welcome to The Circular Economy Show Podcast.

Join the team from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation as each week we explore the innovations that can address issues such as climate change, waste, pollution, and biodiversity loss.

Get ready to be inspired, informed, and empowered. Subscribe now so you never miss an episode.

In this week’s episode, Jess Mevel travels to Bordeaux, France, to learn how Back Market is working to make refurbished tech better than new.

Back Market is an online marketplace founded in 2014, who are on a mission to help make refurbished electronic products more reliable, affordable, and better than new.

To conclude this bite-sized series on regenerative design, in this week’s episode, Neil Harwood, Associate Director at Arup, elaborates on his company’s efforts to deliver nature-positive projects in different parts of the world. We’ll have an insight into their results with A30 in Cornwall and the Sea Wall project in Shenzhen, South China.

Arup is a global collective of designers, engineering and sustainability consultants, advisors and experts dedicated to sustainable development, and to using imagination, technology and rigour to shape a better world.

Have a look at the projects Neil describes in this podcast episode

Learn more about the work of Arup in developing a circular economy for buildings

In the penultimate episode of our bite-sized series on regenerative design, this week we hear from Janine Benyus, author of Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, on how to combine ambition and biomimicry to create regenerative infrastructures in our cities. 

Learn more about the connection between circular economy, biomimicry, and doughnut economics

Find out more about biomimicry and the work of Janine Benyus

As part of our bite-sized series on regenerative design, this week, we hear from Nicole Miller at Biomimicry 3.8's Project Positive about key ways it can be scaled within companies and communities.

Project Positive is a group of change agents dedicated to raising the bar on what acting sustainably means—driven by a sense of urgency to move beyond arbitrary reduction goals to science-based targets and actions that are generous to the ecosystems, employees, and communities we operate. 

Learn more about how biomimicry can help us develop regenerative built environments.

In this week’s bite-sized episode we hear from Michael Pawlyn, known for his work in biomimetic architecture and innovation. Michael uses nature-inspired design to create fundamentally different results for business, people and the environment in spaces and buildings.

Ep 92: Redesigning the future

What dynamics prevent us from moving from a linear to a circular economy? In this episode, Kate Raworth, author of the book Doughnut Economics, shares with us an inspiring reflection on how we need to collectively rethink our economy to ensure that no one falls short of life's essentials without overshooting the boundaries of our environment.

Shifting mindsets: a regenerative future - Summit 22

Systems and the circular economy: Deep dive

In this episode, we hear from Costa Samaras from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, to learn how policy is helping the circular economy to take hold in the USA.

Find out more about the role of policy in the circular economy.

As the brand behind products including Ben and Jerry’s, Hellmann’s and Marmite, Unilever represents an important opportunity to scale a circular economy for food. In this episode, we’ll hear from the company’s Vice President & Managing Director, Eric Soubeiran, about how the business is shifting towards a regenerative and nature-positive approach in the creation of its products. We’ll also hear from The Sustainable Food Trust’s Patrick Holden, who partnered with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation to launch the Big Food Redesign Challenge earlier this year.

Join the Big Food Redesign Challenge

Listen to the Redesigning Food series