EV batteries, bio-based materials, and the jobs nobody talks about | Circular Snapshots
The Circular Economy Show PodcastShow Notes
This month: three stories worth your time.
The WEF published a piece on EV battery recycling that reframes the whole conversation. These batteries contain the critical minerals governments are scrambling to secure. The recycled minerals market could be worth $200 billion by 2050. That value needs to be designed for now, not chased later.
Up until now the policy agenda for bio-based materials, wood, paper, natural fibres, rubber and leather has largely been ignored. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation has published a report that sets out to fix that.
And the International Finance Corporation, alongside five major development banks, put a number on circular economy employment: 121 to 142 million people. Nearly half in repair and maintenance. Over half in the informal economy. The opportunity is real. So is the gap.
Plus four quick headlines on Scotland's material flows, Europe losing critical minerals through its own waste streams, fashion resale and repair policy, and flexible packaging.
More from The Circular Economy Show Podcast
Tourism is on the COP31 agenda in Antalya, Türkiye, on 18 November, with zero waste and the circular economy now firmly part of the climate action conversation. So what does a circular economy for tourism look like in practice?
Zaid Hassan has spent 25 years in systems change, and he thinks the field fooled itself. Beautiful diagrams that feel like progress and change nothing. Skills that AI will take first. Joe Iles asks him what actually works, and why he still ends his new book with three words: it's not that hard.
Most of our clothes contain stretch. That stretch usually comes from a fibre called elastane, which is one of the biggest barriers to recycling clothing at scale.
A hundred trillion dollars of capital lined up behind climate. It was never going to be enough. In part two, Jeremy Oppenheim tells Joe what actually moves a market, from Pakistan's solar boom to a copper mine in Mongolia, and why the voluntary playbook the movement leaned on for a decade has run its course.
Jeremy Oppenheim left a top job at the management consulting firm McKinsey&Co in 2016 to become a Founding Partner of and build SYSTEMIQ, at the high water mark of climate optimism. Then came Trump and Brexit. Ten years on, Joe asks him what the movement got right, and what it got badly wrong, from ignoring the politics of decline to vilifying the very incumbents it needed. And most importantly, what does this mean for how we think about what comes next?