Expert view: The Circular Economy with Joe Murphy
Joe Murphy manages the Circular Economy 100 business network at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which works with businesses, governments and academia to accelerate the transition towards the circular economy.
The circular model is not just an idea or a nice story, it’s backed up by hard analytics: the World Economic Forum and the United Nations have already picked this up, and we have worked with the likes of McKinsey. The economic narrative differentiates the circular model from other sustainability models: it has to pay, otherwise it will never take off.

This isn’t about altruism. Let’s suppose you are a textile manager, for example. You have to buy materials and dyes. You put your products on the shelf and sell them. Suppose you implement a take-back scheme and get back a bunch of textiles.
If you can feed those back into your supply chain, you don’t need to buy as much virgin material, you can sell your product again and generate more revenue from the same material.
In principle the idea is simple. The reality of the way we live, work, make and use things is really complex: our economy is a complex system. Shifting some of those simple principles into the real world requires innovation, creativity, new ways of solving problems, new ways of thinking about problems and new ways of working.
Big businesses are highly optimised and organised to deliver on their goals of producing and selling a product or service. There is a legacy of materials and technology that have been invested in, and also the way the business is structured and organised. Shifting that structure is not easy; you can’t just drop tools, there has to be a transition element.
“You need to design the system around people to be more effective in the way that system operates”
Relying on users of products — on consumers — to solve this problem through their purchasing power or purchasing decisions in my opinion is not the right way. It’s very difficult to change or incentivise people’s behaviour to effect systemic change. You need to design the system around people to be more effective in the way that system operates.
A more attractive proposition would be to rely on the business to look at how it creates and perceives value. For example: the opportunities to create a longer-term relationship with customers. It requires taking a holistic view of how you perceive value, a long-term view — thinking about your role as a business and not fixating on the traditional way of earning revenue, which is selling products to customers.
IMAGINE: Exploring the brave new world of design and manufacturing,
is a SPACE10 publication investigating manufacturing in the digital age, materials of tomorrow and circular economies.
Read the last part:
Final Thought: Imagination and action — Where do we go frem here?
IMAGINE is also available as a free download. Grab your own copy here.




