
Are circular cities the key to future-proofing Europe? | Circling Back
The Circular Economy Show PodcastShow Notes
Could rethinking our cities through a circular lens be the key to future-proofing Europe whilst offering exciting investment opportunities?
Join us in the third of our five-part Circling Back series of the Circular Economy Show, to hear host Lou Waldegrave speak with Julia Okatz from Systemiq and Joss Bleriot, Executive Lead for Policy and Institutions at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.
They discuss how circular economy strategies can, by bringing nature back into our built environments, help us adapt to extreme weather—cooling down cities, restoring green space, and building resilience into every street—while generating substantial economic, environmental, and social benefits. From Paris to Berlin, and cities across the continent, Europe’s urban centres are feeling the effects of heat domes and climate stress. But, the circular economy offers a powerful, nature-positive way forward.
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?