Louise Kjellerup Roper on Inside Ideas

What you need to know about the circular economy

Louise Kjellerup Roper is my guest today on Inside Ideas. Louise is CEO of Volans, which became the first British company to certify as a B Corporation nearly a decade ago. And it has a storied history stretching back further than that, to its initial launch at the 2008 WEF Annual Summit in Davos, where 3,000 copies of its then new book, The Power of Unreasonable People — published by Harvard Business Review Press, took centre stage in shaping the debate on social innovation, entrepreneurship and impact.

Today the Volans website says it ‘works with business leaders to effect change that will not only benefit people and the planet, but help future-proof [their] organisation for decades to come’. And Louise, who heads up the team, is responsible for this mission and ensuring Volans makes the biggest possible positive impact.

But one area Louise feels is currently failing to make its impact on the public consciousness is the circular economy.

“There is a hesitancy sometimes to push an agenda onto ‘normal conversations’, to start explaining the circular economy — people say: ‘recycling you mean?, well no — circular means that you are designing something with a systems lens so that it can be re-used.”

A guest lecturer at both Cranfield University and the University of Exeter, Louise, who studied PPE at the University of Oxford after leaving her native Denmark, is also part of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s CE100 network, where she is striving to shift the needle when it comes to achieving a greater understanding of the circular economy.

“I’m still amazed by how many intelligent people in this space don’t really talk about it or know what the circular economy is. So I think there’s still a huge job of communicating,” she adds.

We second that and today’s podcast is another opportunity to win over a few more converts to understanding what it is and why we need it now more than ever.

Article from INNOVATORS MAGAZINE.

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