It’s just numbers: A ROSI view of corporate sustainability

Bio-based and Biodegradable Industries’ David Newman says he is a ‘circular economy sceptic’. Here, he looks at the 2021 Circularity Gap report, which he says suggests the world’s economy has become ‘more linear, not less’. I have long been a sceptic on the circular economy. The core of my argument has been that the continuously declining real value of raw materials, and in general of manufactured goods, has meant that repurposing them, reusing them, recycling them or even (in the case of food waste) composting them, has cost more than producing new products from virgin raw materials sources. It has been cheaper to throw them away. This is the Jevons Paradox of course; increased production efficiency and consumption of a product will cause its price to fall. Scarcity has rarely been at play in recent economic history.

Van Oord is working with Ansys (NASDAQ: ANSS) to speed environmental sustainability while expediting new product designs for the offshore wind turbine industry. Ansys is aiding Van Oord engineers in their development of cutting-edge wind turbine foundations, helping them increase product quality and deliver new innovations to market faster than ever before.  Designing wind turbine foundations typically requires Van Oord engineers to invest considerable time developing numerous complex, dynamic analysis finite element models.

Old milk containers, juice jugs and toy cups are not the type of products usually associated with high-concept furniture, but two designers in Hong Kong have taken these and other items and upcycled them into stylish pieces of public furniture. Tasked with creating a collection of 12 benches for the town hall in Sha Tin, in Hong Kong’s New Territories, the co-founders and design principals of HIR Studio, Howard Chung and Irene Cheng, turned to the Shing Mun River for inspiration. “The Shing Mun River is the soul of Sha Tin,” says Chung, who grew up in the area. “But even though the river quality has improved over the years it is still quite polluted, so we really wanted to do something to help alleviate the problem of plastic pollution in the water.”

First Insight and the Baker Retailing Center at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania asked senior retail executives and consumers in the U.S. how sustainable practices are impacting consumers’ shopping habits and purchase decisions. The results point to a profound sustainability knowledge gap between these two cohorts, which presents opportunities for retailers not only to bolster their reputations and enhance consumer loyalty but also to increase profits. Retailers and consumers are disconnected on factors ranging from consumers’ willingness to pay more for sustainable products to their utilization and preference for resale/recommerce models.