The essential business guide for using reverse logistics to drive profits, growth, and sustainability. Long considered a “necessary evil” of doing business, reverse logistics is quickly becoming the key to staying competitive in today’s dynamic marketplace. In Going Circular, RecirQ Global CEO Rich Bulger reveals its potential for boosting revenue, enhancing customer experience, and supporting the circular economy. Urging a strategic shift, Going Circular showcases how integrating reverse logistics in sales, marketing, and customer retention can achieve broader business objectives, including cost reduction and environmental responsibility. It offers practical strategies for minimizing unwanted returns and repurposing products, fostering sustainable business models and market expansion. Comprising seven comprehensive chapters and three “reUse” case studies, this guide redefines reverse logistics as a vital tool for business resilience and success. A must-read for professionals in the field, Going Circular is a call to action for integrating reverse logistics into evolving business strategies, promising a pathway to sustainable transformation and profitability.
At heart, this book aims to inspire fearless innovators committed to spearheading the future of fashion. It is for all of us looking to make a positive impact in an industry that we love and care about. It is increasingly acknowledged that the practice of design is not exclusive to designers, nor is it found only in studios. The materials, garments, services, shows, supply chains and stores that make up the fashion industry all work the way they do because of innumerable design decisions, made by creatives all over the world. Circular design goes far beyond rethinking single products or services, it has the potential to redefine how the entire fashion system operates. It's a chance for anyone in the fashion industry - regardless of job title - to support the shift to a circular economy where, by design, waste and pollution are eliminated, products and materials are circulated, and nature is regenerated. Circular design is a pioneering practice of design. It is the creative opportunity of the coming decade for the creatives, innovators, and pioneers who seek to reshape the fashion industry.
The next revolution in business will provide for a sustainable future, from founder, CEO and circular economy expert Ron Gonen Our take-make-waste economy has cost consumers and taxpayers billions while cheating us out of a habitable planet. But it doesn’t have to be this way. The Waste-Free World makes a persuasive, forward-looking case for a circular economic model, a “closed-loop” system that wastes no natural resources. Entrepreneur, CEO and sustainability expert Ron Gonen argues that circularity is not only crucial for the planet but holds immense business opportunity. As the founder of an investment firm focused on the circular economy, Gonen reveals brilliant innovations emerging worldwide— “smart” packaging, robotics that optimize recycling, nutrient rich fabrics, technologies that convert food waste into energy for your home, and many more. Drawing on his experience in technology, business, and city government and interviews with leading entrepreneurs and top companies, he introduces a vital and growing movement. The Waste-Free World invites us all to take part in a sustainable and prosperous future where companies foster innovation, investors recognize long term value creation, and consumers can align their values with the products they buy.
Waste to Wealth proves that 'green' and 'growth' need not be binary alternatives. The book examines five new business models that provide circular growth from deploying sustainable resources to the sharing economy before setting out what business leaders need to do to implement the models successfully.
In concomitance with the growing developments around the circular economy concept in the region, the resource recovery and recycling of industrial production residues is increasingly being envisaged in the European Union and its member states. The role of the recycling industry has become ever important in this context. The shredding industry is based on shredding discarded products such as end-of-life vehicles, and municipal white goods, and subsequent retrieval of (primarily) metals. Shredder fines (or fines) is a heterogeneous fine-granular production residue of this industry, which is currently disposed of. Shredder fines presents, and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future, several challenges that need to be addressed. It creates a disposal problem given the shrinking landfill availability and incurs handling costs to the shredding industry. Furthermore, it reduces our resources efficiency in general. This thesis aims to contribute knowledge on the challenges of facilitating the valorisation of shredder fines in the context of Sweden. In doing so, the current situation concerning fines and its management was investigated by addressing the research questions; 1) What is the resource potential of fines generated at the studied shredding plant, and 2) Why is the current disposal-oriented management of shredder fines sustained in Sweden. There, a systems perspective was employed, where the research questions were addressed on the material, actor, and institution levels, based on three scientific articles, which are appended. The studied material carries a certain amount of potentially recoverable resources, nevertheless shows a significant need for upgrading pertaining to the user requirements and regulatory standards of different recovery applications. The full recovery of fines requires integrated processes that could simultaneously harness these resource opportunities and resolve the material constraints. When it comes to the current practice of managing fines in Sweden, the utilisation in landfill covering offers the shredding companies a secure outlet for the material, given it is a well-established practice that has evolved over decades of operations and there is still a significant demand for landfill cover materials. Additionally, it provides shredding companies with a legislatively-compliant low-cost disposal option for managing fines. On the other hand, the complex materiality, lack of marketability of secondary raw materials (SRMs), and unfavourable governmental regulation of waste recovery create strategic disincentives for shredding companies in opting for fines valorisation. Fines valorisation calls for change in the well-established current practice of utilising the material in landfill covering. Thus, drastic policy measures such as phasing out landfilling and mandating resource recovery and recycling of fines are required to remove the incentives for fines disposal and compel the shredding industry to seek valorisation alternatives for its management. In order to ensure long-term sustenance, applications based on fines valorisation need favourable and more predictable circumstances and settings on different societal levels. There, secure outlets for potential fines-derived SRMs is one of the essential elements. Governmental interventions to create demand and alleviate valorisation investments via market and financial instruments play a significant role in that regard. The other primary requirement to facilitate fines valorisation in the long term is to set clear market and regulatory playing rules. Established supply and demand structures would enable clear pricing mechanisms for fines-derived SRMs and accurate economic assessments of fines valorisation, thus reducing the investment risk for shredding companies. On the other hand, clear regulatory standards and favourable regulatory practices would reduce the uncertainty of the realisation of valorisation applications and gain trust among actors.
Global consumption of raw materials currently goes beyond the earth's regenerative capacity, but the circular economy offers a more sustainable model which also provides new business opportunities. Mastering the Circular Economy is an introduction to circularity from a business and value chain management perspective. With many reflections and exercises throughout, the book draws a direct link between relevant recent theory and practice and offers students and practitioners a deeper understanding of the topic. It looks at both the macro and micro context of the circular economy, from the government and societal view to the impact of new business models in an individual company. Starting from the corporate imperative of moving from linear to circular business models, Mastering the Circular Economy covers the associated opportunities and challenges for organizations, from regulation and risk to value chain collaboration, reverse logistics and product quality. Part two of the book helps students to pull together everything they've learned and see how the concepts play out in the real world by guiding them through application in the online business simulation game The Blue Connection (free basic access is included with the book). Readers are continuously asked to reflect on the choices they would make in different roles to demonstrate a full understanding of the strategic and operational implications of the circular economy.
The Component: A Personal Odyssey towards Another Normal is the Oosterhuis' personal account of four decades of architectural and societal thinking, designing, building, and theorizing. It is an orchestrated yet non-linear series of subjects all leading toward the creation of a parallel world called "Another Normal." Another Normal is as of now a hypothetical parallel world. Nomadic international citizens are the inhabitants of Another Normal. Urged by the climate crisis, the food, energy, and water nexus, and the COVID-19 pandemic, Another Normal demonstrates the inevitable data-driven techno-social architecture of the physically built environment and the metaverse. Besides robotic production on demand of almost anything – when, where, and as needed – Oosterhuis' proposes a dozen strategies that run in parallel to establish Another Normal, among others: ubiquitous basic income, global birthright to own a generous piece of land, distributed production of healthy food, clean energy, and drinking water, ownership of private data and personal avatars in the Web 3.0, autonomous electronic transportation, ubiquitous shared responsibility for clean production and waste treatment techniques, ubiquitous home delivery, working from anywhere for any period of time, and decentralized real-time peer to peer banking. The organic real and the synthetic hyper-real co-evolve naturally in Another Normal, where a mix of strong and simple legislative, planning, and design rules create complexity, diversity, fairness, and equality.
In the 2010s, leaders of the DeafBlind community in Seattle called into question the community's dependence on sighted interpreters and sought new ways of communicating, interacting, and navigating through touch. This effort became the "protactile movement," and it spread quickly across the country. In Going Tactile, Anthropologist Terra Edwards draws on thirty months of ethnographic fieldwork with DeafBlind artists, intellectuals, political leaders, and community members, to show how autonomous spaces away from sighted norms were created and life was re-imagined. In doing so, she offers a new perspective on the nature of language, its limits, and what it means to find a new way of being in the world.
Circular Economy Re-imagine the future of economics and society Are you excited about a regenerative, efficient, and waste-free future? You should be! The circular economy is making short work of old-school (and wasteful) ways of thinking. Players in the circular economy are re-imagining business processes and material lifecycles to reduce waste, improve efficiency, and make their families’ futures brighter and more prosperous. You’ll learn to transform the way you live and work and feel great about being part of the solution to many of the world’s energy and environmental problems. Inside... Why Take-Make-Waste is outdated Finding opportunity in ecology The 6 R’s of circular economies Rethinking material lifecycles Turn trash into treasure Creating careers in circularity Why circular ideas are healthier Make, use, reuse, repair and recycle
