157 Liz Bui of Yulex: safer, sustainable materials

Liz Bui takes us behind the scenes at Yulex, a material science company that’s replacing extremely useful, but problematic petroleum-based products with natural rubber alternatives. Liz Bui is Chief Executive Officer at YULEX, based in the USA. She began her career in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry where she spent 20 years in senior roles. On top of managing all operational and business matters at YULEX, Liz is an intellectual property and transactional lawyer, a PhD scientist and also an adjunct professor at the University of San Diego School of Law. Originally from Vietnam, at the age of six Liz escaped on the day Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) fell to the North Vietnamese forces. She and her siblings, without their parents, were war refugees aboard a fishing boat until they were rescued by a US aircraft carrier. Like other Vietnamese refugees from that period, she was granted permanent residency and a new life in the U.S. We’ll hear about the origins and mission of Yulex and its long-term collaboration with Patagonia to develop natural rubber foam for wetsuits, replacing neoprene, a petroleum-based material. Liz explains some of the key principles underpinning Yulex’s approach to innovation, and how these are fundamental to helping it scale out and create benefits right across its value network. Liz talks us through some of the environmental and health issues associated with neoprene, and explains how Yulex is making it easier for suppliers to use natural rubber instead. She tells us about Yulex’s latest material innovation, Yulastic filaments - a sustainable alternative to petroleum-based elastane, aka spandex. And we hear how Yulex's Equitable AG program supports rubber smallholders in Southeast Asia, distributing 50% of the profits back to them.

We zoom out to the economy part of the circular economy, to talk about the Post Growth concept, with Marcus Feldthus. Together with Oscar Haumann, Marcus founded the Post Growth Guide back in 2023, as a learning space for people who want to understand the social and planetary boundaries so as to make real sustainability strategies, avoiding greenwashing, going beyond compliance, and leading the way forward for their business and wider industry. The platform has a growing membership community and offers explainers, case studies, online courses, books, and public talks. Marcus Feldthus is an entrepreneur from Denmark with a Master's Degree in Business from Copenhagen Business School. Marcus, with Oscar Haumann also started a consultancy called Abel, back in 2015. Marcus will explain the concept of Post Growth, its historical roots and what its aiming to achieve, and we talk about how the circular economy fits into a Post Growth system. We discuss how Post Growth is gaining traction and how it aligns with some of the other approaches to progressive economic, including degrowth and regenerative economics. Marcus tells us more about the Post Growth Guide and course, about his new book, “The Economies of Small Scale”, coming out soon, and why conversation starters are a great tool to help us all think about this from practical, business perspectives.

Martin Tomitsch and Steve Baty have written a brilliant book called Designing Tomorrow: strategic design tactics to change your practice, organization and planetary impact, published earlier this year. Martin Tomitsch is a Professor and Head of the Transdisciplinary School at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). As a design academic and educator, Martin advocates for the transformative power of design to envision speculative futures and drive positive change. He has written lots of academic articles and seven books, including Making Cities Smarter and Design Think Make Break Repeat. Steve Baty was the inaugural CEO of the Australian Design Council, co-founder of Meld Studios and co-founder of UX Australia. He is a Director of the Product Stewardship Centre of Excellence and served two years as the President of the Interaction Design Association. Steve focuses on the integration between strategic design and traditional architectural practice, especially for improving our public spaces, infrastructure and services. You might be noticing interest around supporting responsible innovation in ways that consider all life – human and other-than-human. That might be badged as life-centred, regenerative or post-anthropocentric design, and Martin Tomitsch and Steve Baty say these approaches share an important goal, to ‘reach an operational status where human activity no longer exceeds the planetary limits.’ In Designing Tomorrow, Martin and Steve bring together several design philosophies, to help designers, strategists and policymakers amplify their impact, shift their perspectives and empower them to create lasting positive change inside organizations. We’ll talk about some of the concepts and tools they introduce in the book, why we need to carefully consider who is involved in a system and the broader implications of our design decisions, and ways to change our mindsets – including about stakeholders, our sphere of influence and how to think about strategic decisions.

Loic Le Fouest is a leading expert in Customer Experience (CX) with a strong track record of driving customer-centric transformation across the private, public, and not-for-profit sectors. As the head of the CX practice at Clarasys in the UK, Loic helps organisations design customer experiences that drive loyalty, innovation, and sustainable business growth. Clarasys describes itself as The Experience Consultancy — employee-owned, purpose-driven, and dedicated to helping organisations create better experiences for customers, employees, and the planet. Clarasys recognises that circular economy approaches often require fundamentally different relations between providers and users, and it’s keen to understand more about that. In 2022, Loic launched a partnership between Clarasys and the University of Exeter’s Centre for the Circular Economy to tackle what they saw as one of the biggest challenges in circularity — customer engagement. This collaboration led to a report and toolkit on Creating Customer Experiences in the Circular Economy, providing businesses with practical strategies to make circular models work for their customers. Loic is an experienced transformation consultant with over 10 years of consulting and industry experience, and he combines design thinking with his background in product management, digital transformation, lean 6-sigma and change management. Loic shares insights from Clarasys' collaboration with the Exeter team, which looked at how businesses were dealing with challenges around user adoption and acceptance across the food and beverage and household appliances sectors. The research team looked at the new aspects of roles, behaviour and relationships for consumers/, and Loic explains some of the key findings around that, including ‘consumption work’ and ‘key moments that matter’ for customers. The study also found that firms were struggling to launch and scale successful circular business models, and Loic talks about two kinds of approaches to that - ‘inside out’ versus ‘outside in’.

We hear insights from Anette Timmer of DESSO by Tarkett, a leading carpet brand that was an early adopter of circular economy principles. Anette Timmer began her journey with DESSO almost 18 years ago, and has played a central role in the business’ transition to a circular economy model. Anette helps to bridge the gap between the vision and execution of circular transformation, using marketing and communications to educate audiences about circularity; develop stakeholder trust and transparency; inspire behaviour change among customers; and build advocacy and momentum across the wider industry. Anette is a strong advocate for cross-industry collaboration, where businesses share experiences, and work together to create systems to circulate products and materials. DESSO is now part of Tarkett, and has a long-held belief in designing with people and planet in mind, and over a decade ago, it made a bold commitment to place circularity at the core of its ambitions. Moving towards a closed-loop system has involved a total change of mindset within the business. DESSO calls its commitment the Beauty of Circularity, and it drives the business to do more with less at every stage. - Annette unpacks the three pillars of Desso's beauty of circularity strategy: designing products to live multiple lives; developing innovative materials that are made to be remade; and building systems to return flooring at end of life to complete the circular journey. And sometimes, synchronicity steps in to lend a hand!

Markus Terho tells us about the Lifestyle Test, a web-based app for anyone who’s concerned about global warming and wants to be a part of the solution by adopting a positive and sustainable lifestyle. It’s already available in 10 countries across the EU and has 350,000 users. Markus describes himself as a corporate responsibility veteran, with over three decades in the industry. He is the CEO of Sparkter, a boutique sustainability consultancy to help simplify and make sense of sustainability. Before that, Markus was the chief sustainability officer at Nokia and has been a director at the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra. Markus is passionate about helping people to find their own way to build a good life that is also sustainable. Almost 70 per cent of Europe’s climate emissions and almost all of the damage to nature can be traced back to people’s everyday lives – how we eat, live, move around and consume. In less than 10 minutes, The Lifestyle Test gives you clear and tailored tips about simple positive and sustainable lifestyle changes that can help you save time and money and improve your quality of life. Markus explains how the test was first developed and how it’s evolved since, and explains some of the ways it’s been shaped for each different country it’s in. He goes onto explain what kind of things it covers and how it works from a user’s perspective, including the high proportion of circular economy suggested actions. Markus highlights the way conversations about climate often result in feelings of guilt and shame, and how the app is designed to help us feel we have agency, with some insights from well-established models for successful behaviour change. And we hear what’s in the pipeline for future developments, including ways to link more sustainable behaviours to other primary motivators, such as health or convenience.

Clarissa Morawski, CEO of Reloop Platform works with governments, industry stakeholders and NGOs to develop policies for a packaging circular economy. Clarissa brings nearly 30 years of technical, analytical and communications experience in waste reduction operations and policies. She started her own consulting business in 1998 and co-founded the Reloop Platform in 2015. As CEO, Clarissa works with stakeholders and partners to develop smart, practical and effective policy frameworks and operational recommendations, and combines her no-nonsense communication skills with science to make the case for ambitious policy. Reloop Platform's mission is to accelerate the global transition to a circular economy by working at the centre of policy-making with governments, industry stakeholders and NGOs. Reloop’s primary objective is to prevent waste, by reducing production and consumption, re-using packaging wherever possible and collecting materials properly for closed loop recycling. We talk about a recent report, the Global Recycling League Table, that Reloop produced in partnership with Eunomia; and Clarissa highlights key elements of the recent EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulations. Clarissa shares some insights on how to make sure policies actually make a difference and don’t get sabotaged by various vested interests; we hear how mindsets are changing, and brands are starting to see litter as a real issue. We discuss Deposit Return Schemes and which ones are seen as best-practice, and we cover some of the issues affecting the safety of virgin and recycled packaging materials.

I’ve been reflecting on what’s come up over the last series, in episodes 141 to 149. How do we create the conditions for our ideas to spread? Do we fully understand the systems that circular products or services will be embedded in or affected by, how those work, and what keeps them going? It’s likely there will be multiple systems, and some of these will be cultural, invisible and hard to disrupt. How much can you change? Could you create a new system that integrates with what’s already there? We also look at who you need to convince – your target customers might have a wide range of characteristics and motivations, and they probably want approval – even permission - from colleagues, family or friends. Often, you’ll need to convince other parties – supply chain partners, distributors, investors, employees and more. What’s the value proposition to them? What pain points are you relieving, and what benefits can you offer? Some circular solutions can solve multiple, disparate problems, either by design or from beneficial side-effects. Are you making this clear, and could it help you get more buy-in, attention and support? The last series covers episodes 141 to 149: 149 Giulia Ziino of CircularPlace: generate value from underused assets 148 Tim Forslund of Sitra: circular solutions for nature 147 Dr Alexandra Leeper of Iceland Ocean Cluster: smarter ways to create value 146 Dr Monika Hauck of Repair Rebels: Making repairs easy & fashionable 145 Evolena de Wilde of Faircado: your AI-powered second-hand shopping assistant 144 Chris Allen of Decathlon: ever-evolving circular design 143 Michael Colarossi of Avery Dennison - Digital Product Passports 142 Anna De Matos of Iceland Tool Library – igniting circular communities 141 Joel Tasche of CleanHub: scaleable solutions to plastic pollution

Giulia Ziino is a co-founder of CircularPlace, a digital platform that helps organizations generate value by reusing and repurposing underutilized products and equipment. These services are needed more than ever, by a wide range of organizations. The pandemic, working from home and now hybrid working upturned the entire concept of workspaces, and organizations need to resize, relocate or restructure on a regular basis. That usually means changing office layouts. Manufacturing businesses may need to update or replace machinery and equipment to reflect changing specifications or what’s selling well in their product mix. And hotels and hospitality venues need to keep their furniture and equipment looking fresh and attractive – and some rooms or areas might look tired, with others hardly used. All of this means that furniture, equipment and other items become available, and often these might be in as-new condition, or just lightly used. Even if they are more worn, they may be suitable for refurbishment, repair or remanufacturing. The CircularPlace platform is available as a white-label solution, and facilitates the sale or donation of equipment, furniture and other unwanted items, either within the company or to external buyers. This provides tax benefits as well as reducing GHG emissions and waste. CircularPlace was founded in 2021, and clients now include Microsoft France, Sodexo, Schneider and Fedex. Giulia Ziino joined CircularPlace as a late-stage co-founder, bringing international experience and initially taking on the role of Chief of Staff, where she focused on expanding and stabilizing the brand. Now, as Chief Marketing Officer, Giulia is building a robust presence for CircularPlace in the B2B circular economy space and driving impactful storytelling around sustainability. We’ll hear how CircularPlace helps clients with asset and inventory management, with logistics, and provides an impact calculator to measure carbon savings. We hear what’s encouraging companies to look at these solutions, and how the platform links clients with specialist resellers, improving the value recovered as well boosting the existing reuse markets.

Tim Forslund works on the circular economy at the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra. As a key part of his work at Sitra, Tim has analysed how circular economy strategies can help tackle biodiversity loss, including through the circular bioeconomy. We’ll be talking about Sitra’s latest handbook for businesses, CIRCULAR SOLUTIONS FOR NATURE, which helps companies aiming to integrate circular business models into their operations so they can address biodiversity loss. Sitra’s handbook includes a primer on the interconnections between circularity and nature, and sets out a three-step approach for action: 1. identifying critical biodiversity impacts in the value chain; 2. using circular solutions to tackle these impacts; 3. designing the circular transformation journey. Sitra is a public fund, think tank and future house. The circular economy has been a central part of Sitra’s work for more than 10 years. In 2016, it led the work for the world’s first national circular economy roadmap, and in 2017, it started the World Circular Economy Forum. CIRCULAR SOLUTIONS FOR NATURE is the third of Sitra’s handbooks for business, following on from its publications on technology and the chemical industry.