Des King | A Christmas wish: consumers doing their circular economy duty

Daisy is currently director of urbanism forSustransand will bring with her a wealth of experience in policy and public realm design, gained through work as an architect and urban designer in India, Singapore, England and Scotland. She is also a member of the Edinburgh Climate Commission and Scotland’s Climate Assembly’s Evidence Group, so will contribute expertise in this area to support the council’s zero carbon goals.

Earlier this month D-Wave Systems, the quantum computing pioneer that has long championed quantum annealing-based quantum computing (and sometimes taken heat for that approach), announced it was expanding into gate-based quantum computing.
Surprised? Perhaps we shouldn’t be. Spun out of the University of British Columbia in 1999, D-Wave initially targeted gate-based quantum computing and discovered how hard it would be to develop. The company strategy morphed early on.

In 2016, under the leadership of the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra, Finland was the first country in the world to prepare a national circular economy roadmap. This roadmap provided a plan to move the country away from a ‘make-take-waste’ linear economy model to one that protects resources and eliminates waste along value chains. The roadmap has proven a strong tool in starting a circular change and creating a strong commitment throughout the Finnish society. Thanks to the roadmap, the country could take clear steps for a circular transition and compile key stakeholders’ views on the essential changes and actions required for the circular transformation. Today, Finland has a variety of ongoing circular economy activities in several sectors, a governmental program for advancing circular economy, and the highest number of circular economy higher education courses in the world.