As the Festival of Circular Economy returns for its fourth year, Circular Online brings you live updates from it’s two jam-packed virtual days.
Day 1 will look at the future of the design landscape, current business model challenges and practical use-cases of circular economy models in operation.
Day 2 takes us through the design lifecycle, from materials and products, to infrastructures and supply chains for a circular economy.
Day 2
EPR: Cost, Compliance, and a Circular Future
Packaging designers and producers are facing a seismic shift as new Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) regulations begin rolling out this year.
In a session titled EPR Packaging Laws: Designing for New Legislation, Dr Margaret Bates (Head of UK pEPR Scheme, Defra) and Sophie Thomas (Founder, etsaW) explored how these new rules will fundamentally alter how packaging is created, costed, and ultimately, disposed of.
Under the EPR scheme, producers will now be charged based on the recyclability and sustainability of the packaging they place on the market. “It’s a shift from ‘design what you want’ to ‘design what the system can handle’,” Bates explained. “If your packaging is hard to recycle, you’ll pay more. If it’s refillable, reusable, or fully recyclable, you’ll pay less.”
We need to stop treating end-of-life as an afterthought
This eco-modulation approach aims to reward good design and penalise wasteful practices, effectively embedding circularity into the cost structure of packaging decisions. Thomas highlighted how this will change internal conversations within companies: “Design teams have long been overruled by marketing departments wanting glitter or metallic finishes. Now, those embellishments come with a price tag.”
Crucially, EPR isn’t just about recycling—it also encourages reuse systems, refill models, and material reduction. Businesses will only pay once for reusable packaging, incentivising longer-lasting design.
Bates confirmed that support mechanisms like VAT exemptions, behaviour change campaigns, and technical advisory committees are being put in place to aid this transition.
The session also tackled the role of designers in the EPR landscape. Thomas called for clearer communication across the value chain: “Designers aren’t always packaging experts—they rely on specifiers and suppliers. We need simple, transparent tools that help every stakeholder understand what’s recyclable, what’s not, and what costs what.”
Bates agreed, noting that more guidance and labelling clarity is on the way, alongside expanded legislation in areas like textiles and the built environment.
Ultimately, EPR isn’t just a policy—it’s a market signal. “We need to stop treating end-of-life as an afterthought,” Bates said. “If it’s not recyclable, refillable, or reusable—don’t put it on the market. That should be the default.”
Circular Restaurant Interiors? We’re Lovin’ It! Anthesis & McDonald’s Use-case
Day 2 of the Festival saw Sarah Griffiths, Associate Director at Anthesis, and Guillermo Mijancos, Construction Manager at McDonald’s, break down how they’re making McDonald’s restaurant interiors circular.
Since 2021, Anthesis and McDonald’s have worked to develop a tool to measure the embodied carbon, water, and circularity impacts of interior restaurant decors.
The tool is designed to compare environmental performance across different material/product types and interior design schemes.
Mijancos explained the assessment process, which begins when McDonald’s develops an initial design specification for a new restaurant décor.
From there, potential suppliers are contacted for environmental product data across all material categories.
Supplier data and Ecoinvent data are then analysed to track the best and worst-performing materials by category. This allows McDonald’s to set sustainability targets for décor schemes. Material analysis is then reviewed, and best-performing materials are targeted for specification.
New sustainable materials are tested for performance capabilities; for example, durability in high-use areas. The final step sees the overarching décor performance monitored and enhanced over time.
Griffiths went on to explain that the tool established a 14% baseline for circularity in interior décors, and found by making some, of what she called, ‘no-brainer’ changes, McDonald’s increased this in many designs to 39%.
Both speakers then told Festival delegates that to move forward with increasing the circularity of the décor schemes, they’ve considered several interventions.
These include implementing take-back schemes with suppliers, tracking and increasing disassembly in practice through reuse networks and other partnerships, and introducing increased recycled content, as well as specifying a minimum %.
Both Griffiths and Mijancos then spoke about the next steps of their collaboration, which included evolving the tool to include an overarching sustainable score/rating to encompass circularity, water and carbon metrics.
Building in Circularity and Sustainability at Unusual HQ: Corstorphine & Wright
In this use-case-focused session, Jonny Plant, Director of Corstorphine & Wright – an award-winning architectural practice – shared insights into an innovative project where a circular focus was at the heart of a new office’s construction
Unusual Rigging HQ was a design and build project that embedded circularity into every stage of the process.
Founded in 1983, Unusual Rigging is a dynamic company offering a variety of different services ranging from refurbishing the flying system of a century-old theatre and hanging artworks in one of London’s famous museums to developing flying scenery in a West End show.
The company operates to circular principles as the products it uses are all dissembled and returned to its site once a job has concluded.
Unusual Rigging wanted to reflect these circular principles in the design of its new headquarters, so enlisted Corstorphine & Wright.
Plant explained that Corstorphine & Wright used the project as a test bed to develop its own processes for designing and building to circular principles.
Corstorphine & Wright worked to the Greater London Authority’s (GLA) six principles of circular design: building in layers, designing out waste, designing for longevity, designing for adaptability or flexibility, designing for disassembly, and using systems that can be reused and recycled.
Plant told Festival delegates that the biggest driving principle in the project was designing for disassembly and the practice worked hard to ensure everything in the office was mechanically fixed, including its timber frame.
As well as the GLA’s six principles, Corstorphine & Wright also focused on using reclaimed products and materials.
The practice did this by reusing steel for the steel frame and reusing raised access floors throughout the building. They also utilised reclaimed landscape materials from local demolition sites.
Plant told Festival delegates about the environmental impact the project achieved. Using low-carbon concrete in the substructure saved 18.9 tonnes of CO2 compared to business-as-usual designs.
Utilising reused steel saved 19.9 tonnes of CO2 and constructing the building with a timber structure saved 21.5 tonnes of CO2.
To drive home the environmental impact of designing to circular principles, Plant showed delegates that the Unusual Rigging HQ build had an estimated total embodied carbon of 364kg of CO2 per square metre. The current average is 950kg of CO2 per square metre.
Case Study: From Pineapple Waste to Planet-Saving Textiles
What if the future of sustainable materials was hidden in plain sight—in pineapple fields? At the Festival of Circular Economy, Raquel Prado-García, Head of Research & Sustainability at Ananas Anam, took attendees inside the journey of transforming agricultural waste into a globally recognised circular textile: Piñatex.
In a session titled Reworking Fibers for Circular Materials, Prado-García explained how her team upcycles discarded pineapple leaves—once burned or left to rot—into a durable, plant-based alternative to leather and textiles. “We don’t touch the fruit,” she clarified. “We work with the leaves, a by-product of harvesting, and turn them into value.”
The process is low-impact and largely mechanical, avoiding bleaching and minimising emissions. Beyond environmental benefits, it provides local farmers with an additional revenue stream and helps prevent air pollution caused by uncontrolled agricultural burning.
We’re not just selling materials. We’re co-developing solutions.
But Ananas Anam isn’t stopping at Piñatex. Prado-García outlined how the company runs in-house life cycle assessments (LCAs) to identify the most environmentally intensive parts of their process—specifically purification and fibre structuring. “We don’t guess. We use data to guide improvements,” she said, citing plans to automate and optimise water and energy use through cross-industry partnerships and scientific collaboration.
These partnerships are key. From yarn spinners to research labs and universities, Prado-García emphasized the power of “transdisciplinary” work—bringing together science, engineering, and design to create scalable innovations. “We’re not just selling materials,” she said. “We’re co-developing solutions.”
That collaborative spirit has led to products as diverse as fashion collections, automotive interiors, and experimental yarns, with the team now eyeing new industries—including music equipment cases.
Still, challenges remain: scaling production, navigating manufacturer resistance to change, and avoiding overconsumption. “Just because a product is successful doesn’t mean we should overproduce it,” she warned. “True sustainability is not about more—it’s about enough.”
Asked what drives adoption, Prado-García kept it simple: “Make it beautiful, make it comfortable, and people will wear it.”
Ananas Anam’s case study is a compelling reminder that circular design isn’t about reinventing the wheel—it’s about reimagining waste, reworking systems, and doing more with what the planet already gives us.
Day 1
Keynote: A Future Forward Perspective on Circular Living
‘We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.’ – R. Buckminster Fuller.
In a fascinating Keynote, Dr Sally Uren OBE, Executive Director & Chief Acceleration Officer, Forum for the Future, shared this quote from the renowned architect to show how achieving a circular economy by 2050 is within reach.
Dr Uren told delegates that if we are serious about circularity, it starts with changing our mindset.
If we carry on what we’ve been doing and thinking in the same way, we will carry on with the same systems, Dr Uren said.
On the first morning of the Festival, Dr Uren explained what she sees as four business transition trajectories: profit supreme, shallow gestures, tech optimism, and courage to transform.
Profit supreme prioritises profit over societal challenges, shallow gestures involve superficial commitments, tech optimism utilises technology, and courage to transform focuses on bold ambitions for positive impact.
Interestingly, Dr Uren explained that while the profit supreme trajectory may not be good for climate resilience, it can encourage circularity driven by input cost.
Dr Uren went on to say that the key to unlocking a circular economy is to understand the world as a set of interconnected systems.
“When we think about circularity and waste management, we think about a set of material streams. If we really want to achieve this transition, we need to understand the interconnectivity between material resource streams and value chains,” Dr Uren said.
Concluding an insightful keynote, Dr Uren shared a quote from science fiction author William Gibson: ‘The future is already here it’s all around us, it’s just not evenly distributed.’
Changemaker Session: Design must lead, not follow
At the Festival of Circular Economy, a provocative session titled Design at the Crossroads laid bare the growing tension between visionary design and cautious corporate culture—and called for a shift in power.
Experts Mark Shayler and Paul Foulkes-Arellano didn’t mince words: sustainable transformation won’t happen unless designers are empowered early, treated as systems thinkers, and supported by clients willing to break the mould.
Design, they argued, is “the most powerful environmental tool we have”—but it’s often brought in too late, boxed into briefs that treat circularity as a bolt-on rather than a foundation.
“We’re still treating 20% recycled content like that’s the summit of sustainability,” Shayler warned. “It’s not. It’s barely the foothills.”
The session urged businesses to rethink how they work with designers—starting with mindset.
We’re still treating 20% recycled content like that’s the summit of sustainability
Too often, marketing directors and executives “quake” at the idea of system-wide change, fearing the boardroom more than the breakdown of the planet. The result? Performative “design theatre” in place of real innovation.
Yet there was hope. Designers today are refusing briefs from clients not ready to engage meaningfully with circularity. They’re choosing to work with businesses who, as Shayler put it, “have already turned up at the station.” AI is also proving a powerful ally—turning complex ideas into clear graphs that win over skeptical CFOs and unlock funding for genuinely circular innovation.
But the biggest takeaway? We need better clients. “Clients like you and me,” joked Shayler, “iconoclasts willing to break things up.”
Designers were also urged to rediscover their inner “activist”—to use workshops not just to ideate, but to radicalise. When designers embed circularity into their practice and their presence, real change can ripple across supply chains and boardrooms alike.
Textile Futures: Circular Business Models in Action
This expert panel dived into the intriguing subject of the future of textiles by examining what their circular business models look like in action.
Chaired by fashion industry expert and education consultant in circular design and responsible business Katarina Rimarcikova, the panel each had the floor to give an overview of their businesses before the session rounded off with questions from delegates.
Michael A. Cusack, Chief Sustainability Officer at Advanced Clothing Solutions (ACS), spoke about how the business began by renting out Scotland’s traditional dress: kilts.
“Kilts are so expensive, it makes sense to rent. This is how we were born,” Cusack said.
Since ACS was founded in 1997, the company has grown and evolved from renting out highland wear to formal wear, many other types of clothing, and even tents.
Despite operating in the rental market for almost 20 years, Cusack said it wasn’t until 2018 that the penny dropped that ACS was a circular economy business.
Cusack was giving an environmentalist a tour of the site and speaking about how much he admired the innovations he saw in the circular economy. The environmentalist stopped him and said that ACS were one of the innovative circular economy business models Cusack was praising.
Going back even further, all the way to the 1940s, Mattia Trovato, spoke about how Manteco has been pioneering recycled wool for almost a century.
During the 1940s, there were no imports of the finest wools into Italy,” Trovato, Head of Communication & Sustainability Expert at Manteco, said. “We had to find a way to keep producing wool fabrics out of necessity.”
Over the years, the company has never lost its DNA of wool recycling. Then in the early 2000s, the 3rd generation of the family that founded Manteco decided that circularity was the future of textiles.
Investment into research and development put the company in a good place when demand for recycled wool boomed in 2020 when trade was impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Trovato explained to Festival delegates that Manteco sources scraps from textile producers and manufactures something new from these ‘waste materials’.
The biggest challenge of getting this source of material flowing was convincing the entire supply chain to collaborate on giving a new life to what was previously considered scrap material.
Remanufacturing: A Gamechanger for the Future of Circular Economy
“Remanufactured goods are everywhere. They cutting costs and ensuring circularity, without compromising performance,” Agnese Metitieri, Circular Economy Ventures Lead at CIRCULEIRE, said to open her fascinating talk.
CIRCULEIRE is an Irish industry-led public-private partnership dedicated to circular innovation. Metitieri shared insights from CIRCULEIRE’s report on remanufacturing but opened the discussion by explaining what remanufacturing is in practice.
Remanufacturing is a term often used incorrectly as an alternative to repurposing, restoring, remaking, or a multitude of other terms. To clear up any misconceptions, Metitieri set out steps of the remanufacturing process.
Step 1 is when a company manufactures a product and sells or leases it to a customer. Step 2 is when the product eventually becomes worn or parts break.
Step 3 sees the product returned to the manufacturer or remanufacturer, who disassembles it, inspects the product, and replaces any parts that are worn or broken.
Step 4 involves the product being reassembled and stress-tested. If applicable, any software or firmware updates are applied.
The final step sees the new, remanufactured, product offered on the market again with a ‘good-as-new’ or ‘better-than-new’ warranty.
Metitieri emphasised that the remanufactured product is technically not the same as the old one, and it is treated as a new product.
She also told Festival delegates that remanufacturing is much more efficient, and potentially easier when a product is designed from the outset to be remanufactured.
Metitieri concluded her session by explaining how remanufacturing can have a positive impact on the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution.
Diving into the insights of CIRCULEIRE’s reports, Metitieri highlighted that remanufacturing has the potential to reduce resource extraction by up to 80%.
She explained that remanufacturing could also achieve a cut in carbon emissions of up to 93% and decrease production costs by up to 65%.
Design-Led Collaboration to Close the Circularity Gap
Designers, data analysts, policymakers, and waste specialists gathered for the session: Waste Not: Building End-of-Life into Business Models, where the central message was clear: end-of-life needs to be designed from the start—and no single part of the value chain can go it alone.
Chaired by Dr Adam Read MBE (SUEZ UK), the panel featured experts from across the sector, including Melody Carraro (Veolia), Tabitha Skeats (FCC Environment), Doug Simpson (GHD), and Gaspard Duthilleul (Greyparrot).
Together, they tackled one of the biggest challenges facing the circular economy: how to reduce waste before it’s created—and ensure new innovations don’t outpace the infrastructure needed to deal with them.
Carraro emphasised that good packaging design means thinking beyond aesthetics or volume. “A beautifully designed material that can’t be collected, sorted or recycled is just expensive waste,” she warned. Bioplastics were singled out as a rising issue—technically compostable but often rejected by existing facilities due to misalignment with real-world systems.
Circularity needs to be baked into regional strategies—linked to incentives like VAT relief for reuse
Duthilleul’s contribution brought AI into the spotlight. Greyparrot’s analytics are helping processors identify waste streams in real-time, generating actionable insights to improve recovery rates and efficiency. “It’s not just data for data’s sake,” he said. “It’s about closing feedback loops between design and disposal.”
Meanwhile, Simpson and Skeats called for stronger cross-sector collaboration. Modular design, adaptable assets, and clearer policies were identified as key to unlocking circularity, particularly in construction and urban planning. “Circularity needs to be baked into regional strategies—linked to incentives like VAT relief for reuse,” Simpson argued.
The session concluded with a rapid-fire debate on the most vital driver of change. While all agreed material innovation and policy reform matter, the room largely settled on a unanimous truth: nothing shifts until behaviour does.
“Design, data and infrastructure matter—but unless people are empowered and excited to do the right thing, none of it sticks,” said Carraro. “Systemic change starts with human change.”
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