Sustainable innovation: shaped for the circular economy
2 October, 2015 / Articles
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Knee-deep in half-empty paint pots, the residues of a lifetime’s home improvement projects now destined for the refuse tip, Keith Harrison felt a stab of regret — and the stirrings of an opportunity.
“I kept thinking I could do something with it, the paint had an intrinsic value. It would have been a huge waste just to throw it away,” says the former industrial chemist.
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He launched Newlife Paints on the south coast of England in 2009. Remanufacturing eco-paints from leftover paint, the novice entrepreneur is joining the “circular economy”.
Advocates insist that circular economics is more than upmarket recycling. It involves designing goods at the outset that will be easy to repair, reuse or remake from their parts. The aim is to devise production processes that avoid waste; keep high- and low-value materials separate; and, like Mr Harrison, enable spent goods to be remanufactured to their original condition, rather than salvaged for their components or recycled into lower quality products.
Philips, Renault and other big industrial companies are among the pioneers of the circular economy. But when it comes to devising bold alternatives to the “take-make-dispose” model of growth, start-ups are joining in and sometimes showing the way. As Joss Blériot, who leads on policy at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which promotes the circular economy, puts it: “Start-ups are free to innovate in ways that big companies sometimes aren’t.” Yet, lacking the benefit of well-resourced facilities, established routes to market and well-known brands, they also face many challenges.
Scaling up
Mr Harrison set up on his own because he was nearing retirement and impatient to put his ideas into practice. He developed his technology, which involves removing leftover paint from tins that have been diverted from landfill, and blending and filtering them to produce colour-matched new paints.
He started in his garage, later renting a small manufacturing plant. But with limited resources he struggled to scale up production of the paints, which he sells online and through retailers. So, in 2013, Mr Harrison began licensing his technology as his main route to market. Waste company Veolia began making Newlife Paints under licence this year. “By licensing we can have more impact and spread internationally, ” he says.
Procurement impasse
Enthusiasts for integrating circular economy principles into manufacturing argue that longevity, avoided disposal costs and potential resale value outweigh the small cost increases that attach to goods specifically designed or reformulated for reuse. But paying more today for a saving tomorrow is not necessarily what procurement managers with short-term budgets are looking for.
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This at least was what C-Tech Innovation, a UK company, and the Nonwovens Innovation and Research Institute, which develops new textiles, concluded when they wanted to commercialise a technology to prolong the life of uniforms. Every year thousands of tonnes of workwear ends up in landfill and incinerators before it has worn out. With the new technology, Wear2, clothes are sewn with a yarn that fragments when exposed to microwaves, so they can be pulled apart and remade into new garments. Company logos on the clothes can be easily removed if made with the yarn, leaving them ready for reuse or resale.
To avoid being blocked on price early in discussions, Rob Bell, a director at C-Tech, advises circular economy innovators to make contact with the management board of potential clients. As decision makers, they should have a better overview of the company’s overall strategy. “[Operational] people often say: ‘I like the idea, but if it costs more than my usual supplier, I won’t buy it,” he says. To do otherwise might cost them their bonus. The support of a managing director, he adds, helped Wear2’s developers sign a licence with Northern-Ireland’s Hunter Apparel Solutions.
Reaching consumers
When it comes to wooing consumers to circular brands directly, getting the semiotics right can be decisive. Mr Harrison first named Newlife Paints “Sussex recycled paints”, before swapping to “eco-paints” when he realised consumers took “recycled” to mean “cheap”.
He has also launched an upmarket brand, called Reborn Paints. The development was part funded by Akzo Nobel, maker of Dulux Paints, which has been working with him as part of an initiative led by Innovate UK, a government agency. Blended with extra minerals — such as Cornish clay, for a nicer finish — the range is aimed at affluent householders with a green conscience.
It pays to plan ahead
For the economics of circular systems to be viable, the procedures for recovering materials must be well planned. Wear2 developers focused on work wear because it is usually handed back to the issuer once finished with. This creates an obvious and easy recovery path.
Sometimes generators of waste realise there is value in the rubbish they are giving away and start to levy a charge instead of paying for its removal — as with brewers’ grains, which found a secondary market as animal feed.
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Bio-bean is a London start-up that turns old coffee grounds into a source of energy. It collects them via waste management contractors from freeze-dried coffee factories, high-street chains and kiosks in transport hubs to turn into biomass pellets, which are sold to heat offices and homes. Those companies do not wish to extract the value themselves, but this could change. To protect itself against this potential development, Bio-bean is investing in technology and exploring what more value it can extract from coffee grounds, starting with oils for biodiesel. It is also analysing other sources of urban waste.
Once it can prove its technology works on several kinds of refuse, it plans to license it to waste producers wanting to become waste processors. Then, says Arthur Kay, co-founder: “We’ll transition from a green manufacturing business into a technology business.”
Also experimenting is New York-based Ecovative Design, which makes an alternative to plastic packaging that is grown from crop waste and mycelium, the root-structure of mushrooms. Its best-known product, Mushroom Packaging, which it licensed to the packaging company Sealed Air, protects merchandise such as electronic goods in transit.
Now Ecovative is commercialising a mycelium-based board designed to replace engineered wood, and its chemical adhesives, in furniture. Other projects include mycelium-based insulation and grow-it-yourself kits to enable consumers to invent their own uses for mushroom materials. “When you design a sustainable alternative, you essentially take on a constraint for which you cannot charge. The cost to the planet of existing materials, such as plastics, simply isn’t counted, which makes sustainability quite a difficult path to take,” says Eben Bayer, a co-founder.
Undeterred by the challenges he has encountered, Mr Harrison is suggesting to manufacturers how they could plan more imaginatively for the afterlife of their products. One suggestion is adding more symbols to packs to assist sorting waste paints into types. “At the moment we’re fighting fires, because the paints we pull out of the waste stream today were manufactured five or so years ago, when the circular economy was barely on the horizon,” he says.
