#measuringcircularity

English Version Jacco Verstraeten-Jochemsen, Lead Business Strategy at Circle Economy joined us in October at our Re-think Circular Economy Forum to talk about why and how we should measure our progress towards a Circular Economy. Circle Economy is an organization that strives to accelerate the practical and scalable implementation of the Circular Economy, which is why they are working to effectively measure circularity levels of different companies in Europe. The desire to create a tool to measure the levels of circularity arose from the realization that although economic growth has been exponential in recent decades, many other parameters have grown at the same time: these include material extraction, CO2 emissions, water scarcity, and loss of biodiversity. This is why, in 2018, Circle Economy started to study how the circularity of the global economy can be measured and, after that, they also introduced new methods to measure the circularity of a country and of a company. This is fundamental because if you can’t measure how circular you are, you can’t improve on that. Circle Economy also found out that people are still not aware of how urgent the situation is. When asked how circular the global economy might be, most people assumed that the level of circularity globally would be between 25 and 50%, when it is truly 9%. This means that only 9% of our materials is cycled on a yearly basis, through several different strategies: reusing, composting, recycling. This also means that more than 90% of materials on a yearly basis are lost, landfilled, or incinerated. But how does this work in practice? How can Circle Economy measure the circularity of a company? Jacco presented as an example the results they obtained when analyzing the Danish company Rockwool, which is one of the biggest producers of insulation materials for buildings in...