Circular economy business toolkit

A new online toolkit from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation aims to support businesses interested in taking the first steps towards circular economy innovation.

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation is an independent charity with the aim of inspiring a generation to re-think, re-design & build a positive future through the vision of a circular economy, which it defines as:

“The circular economy is a generic term for an industrial economy that is, by design or intention, restorative and in which materials flows are of two types, biological nutrients, designed to reenter the biosphere safely, and technical nutrients, which are designed to circulate at high quality without entering the biosphere.”

Towards the circular economy

To accelerate the transition to a circular economy, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation is showcasing existing progress towards circularity from companies around the world, while also providing some of the tools required to stimulate more widespread uptake of these new operating models, and enable businesses to realise the economic opportunity of a circular economy.

The new toolkit draws from the foundation’s report Towards the Circular Economy, which featured interviews with leading global businesses exemplifying aspects of the circular economy and ran a series of deep-dive case studies on signature products in the medium complexity goods sector. The toolkit aims to promote open source advancement of business circularity and will be continually updated by the foundation’s business innovation team.

The toolkit consists of five short sections to guide a business through the first steps of applying circular economy thinking:

• Principle Value Drivers
• Schools of Thought and Innovation
• Efficiency vs Effectiveness
• Key Terminology
• But does it actually work?

This business section of the Ellen MacArthur website also features new case studies demonstrating the circular economy approach:

• Snapshot case studies from Renault, Michelin, Caterpillar and Ricoh
• In-depth analysis of how to move to a more circular business model for mobile phones and light commercial vehicles

Further reading

• Circular economy toolkit for business: available online with other resources for business
• Towards the Circular Economy: report on the economic and business rationale for an accelerated transition towards a circular economy