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Ellen MacArthur Foundation

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation welcomes you to The Circular Economy Show, a podcast about a new way to design, make, and use things, and how we can build an economy that's fit for the 21st century.

The Circular Economy Show Podcast

In this episode of the Circular Economy Show we discuss Arda Biomaterials' journey of transforming beer by-products into sustainable materials. Brett Cotten, co-founder at Arda, details the company's origins, challenges, and successes, including raising pre-seed investment in 2023 and scaling operations. Amy Tsang from The Mills Fabrica highlights their 360-degree support for innovators, emphasising investment, collaboration, and showcasing technologies. Both discuss the importance of scalability, impact measurement, and the commercial viability of biomaterials, with Brett noting the potential of chemistry-based approaches and Amy highlighting innovative startups including Epoch Biodesign.

If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review or a comment on Spotify or YouTube. Your support helps us to spread the word about the circular economy.

What does it take to scale biomaterials?

Join Fin, Lou and Pippa from the Circular Economy Show as we look back at a year in the circular economy. 

In this episode, the team shares highlights from this year’s show, and talks about some of the moments you might have missed. 

Thanks for listening to the Circular Economy Show from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. Help us grow our audience in 2025 by sharing your favourite episode with your friends and colleagues.

If you’d like to get in touch, email us at podcast@emf.org

Explore the episodes discussed:

Ep 159: How to build a nature-positive circular economy for Europe 

Read the paper.

Ep 157: Inside the world of industrial symbiosis 

Ep 149: Scaling refill and return with GoUnpackaged

We also mentioned our episode with Vincent from Dunia Bora - who features in episode 150: Creating nature-positive nutrition from cacti with Dunia Bora.

Watch the Redesigning Food Series, which Fin mentioned.

2024 in review: A year exploring the circular economy

How do we move from pilots and beyond the ESG hype bubble to scale the implementation of the circular economy and how do businesses lead in this space? In this episode of the Circular Economy Show, host Seb is joined by Lindsay Hooper, CEO for the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL), and Joe Murphy, Executive Lead of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s business network.

Together, they’ll explore the insights from CISL’s Competitive Sustainability report and the Foundation’s business network, offering perspectives on the state of the circular economy and related efforts. What will it take to scale? Join us to find out! 

Read the full report discussed in this episode: Survival of the Fittest: From ESG to Competitive Sustainability.

What should businesses do to scale a circular economy?

In this episode of the Circular Economy Show we meet Zero Waste Scotland, who are working with government, businesses, and communities to make the shift to a circular economy as easy as possible for all. 

We're joined by Peter McCafferty, Business Support Manager at Zero Waste Scotland, and Dr Michaela Hruskova from the University of Stirling. Together we'll discuss the barriers that are stopping businesses from adopting circular practices at scale, informed by the findings of their report: ‘Scotland’s Circular Economy Practices Ecosystem.’ 

If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review or a comment on Spotify or YouTube. Your support helps us to spread the word about the circular economy.

Read the report ‘Scotland’s Circular Economy Practices Ecosystem'.

What’s stopping Scotland from scaling a circular economy?

Circular design is a hot topic, but moving beyond the buzzwords to practical implementation can be a real challenge. In this episode, we go deep with Joe Iles, Head of Design Activation at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, to unpack the essential principles and skills every designer should have in their toolkit.

Joe shares a compelling perspective on circular design - it's not just about creating durable products, but rather reflecting the complex, interconnected systems that make up our world. He explores why circular design ideas often struggle to scale, despite the abundance of innovative concepts out there.

He also shares the key design competencies that are crucial for driving the transition to a circular model, from systems thinking to prototyping and collaboration. 

If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review or a comment on Spotify or YouTube. Your support helps us to spread the word about the circular economy.

Links mentioned in this episode:

The Circular Design GuideThe Jeans RedesignThe Circular Buildings ToolkitFrom ambition to action: an adaptive strategy for circular design

Circular design essentials: What every designer needs to know

The food industry is one of the biggest drivers of biodiversity loss and accounts for a third of global greenhouse gas emissions. But what if food could be designed to regenerate nature rather than harming it? 

That’s the vision behind the Big Food Redesign Challenge. 

In this episode of The Circular Economy Show, our guest host Lucy Parker, Senior Partner and Sustainable Business Global Lead at Brunswick Group, explores how we can take learnings from the Challenge to create a food system that is better for people, nature and climate.

We hear from:

 • Jonquil Hackenberg, CEO of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, who shares insights about the Big Food Redesign Challenge and what it has helped achieve
 • Wendy Schmidt, President and Co-Founder of the 
Schmidt Family Foundation • , who supported the Challenge, explores the power of philanthropy as a catalyst for innovation
 • Douglas McMaster, Michelin-starred chef and owner of the world’s first zero waste restaurant, 
Silo • , who was a participant in the Challenge, tells us why it’s important to ask the question ‘what if we could do the whole thing differently?’

If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review or a comment on Spotify or YouTube. Your support helps us to spread the word about the circular economy.

Learn more about the Big Food Redesign Challenge and explore products that keep nature in mind. 

Find out more about the Challenge participants, or watch a video version of this episode, on our YouTube channel.

Food for thought | How do we fix our broken food system?

The circular economy is inspired by living systems and one of the schools of thoughts that explores this model is Biomimicry. In this episode Michael Pawlyn explains why ecosystem thinking is key to a regenerative circular economy. Michael Pawlyn is director of the architecture practice Exploration and author of Biomimicry in Architecture

 

This podcast series presented by Colin Webster explores the recently published book A New Dynamic 2: Effective systems in a circular economy. Each programme features an interview with authors of the book’s chapters. These leading experts on architecture, agriculture, design, business or engineering, provide unique insights that reflect on the necessity to develop a whole-system approach to re-think our economy.

Michael Pawlyn - Ecosystems as a unifying model for cities and Industry

Remanufacturing allows us to use product components again at high quality while reducing energy demand by - in some cases - 80%. Given the material constraints we face, why this is not happening at a wider scale? In this episode, Nabil Nasr puts forward what he sees as the issues holding back remanufacturing. 

Nabil Nasr is Associate Provost for Academic Affairs and Director of the Golisano Institute for Sustainability at Rochester Institute of Technology; he is also founder of the Centre for Remanufacturing and Resource Recovery.

This podcast series presented by Colin Webster explores the recently published book A New Dynamic 2: Effective systems in a circular economy. Each programme features an interview with authors of the book’s chapters. These leading experts on architecture, agriculture, design, business or engineering, provide unique insights that reflect on the necessity to develop a whole-system approach to re-think our economy.

Remanufacturing and the circular economy

Our agriculture system is under a greater strain than ever before. The growth of global green yields has fallen behind global population growth, and artificial fertilisers and pesticides are reducing the soil's ability to renew. “We need to take a different direction”, say Martin Stuchtey and Morten Rossé, who explore ways to reshape our food system.

Martin Stuchtey is the Director of the McKinsey Center for Business and Environment.

Morten Rossé is an Expert Associate Principal with McKinsey’s Sustainability & Resource Productivity practice.

Towards a regenerative food system

How does a country go through a renewable energy transition? Well, no country has done it before and there is no blue print to follow, but Germany is leading the world in this front. In this episode Patrick Graichen provides a comprehensive picture of the situation and explores future developments. Patrick Graichen is executive director of Agora Energiewende, a think-tank and policy laboratory working towards the success of the energy transition or Energiewende. Listen to the previous episodes of _A New Dynamic podcast series _

_This podcast series presented by Colin Webster explores the recently published book A New Dynamic 2: Effective systems in a circular economy. Each programme features an interview with authors of the book’s chapters. These leading experts on architecture, agriculture, design, business or engineering, provide unique insights that reflect on the necessity to develop a whole-system approach to re-think our economy. _ Order your copy of A New Dynamic 2: Effective systems in a circular economy

The renewable energy transition - insight from Germany’s energiewende

In this episode, we explore topics including life-friendly chemistry, optimising materials using AI, and how we can develop and scale biomaterial use. Alysia Garmulewicz — the Founder of Materiom, and Associate Professor of High Tech Entrepreneurship at the Facultad de Administración y Economía, Universidad de Santiago de Chile — joins us to explain more.

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Visit Materiom's website

Watch Alysia speaking at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation's Summit 21

Learn more about the Foundation

Life-friendly chemistry, biomaterials, and AI — the future of the circular economy

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