A STUDENT AT the University of Cambridge’s Institute for Manufacturing has created and launched a new Circular Economy Toolkit project, which aims to encourage businesses to save resources and adopt a sustainable business model.
A number of workshops and materials will be made available free of charge to interested businesses, advising them on how they can save money and reduce their environmental impact whilst operating within a circular economy.
The toolkit is divided into seven main areas, each of which represents an opportunity for companies to ‘create more sustainable products and services’.
These are:
- Design, Manufacture and Distribute
- Usage
- Maintain/Repair
- Reuse/Redistribute
- Refurbish/Remanufacture
- Product Recycling; and
- Products as a service
The project creator, Masters Student and dissertation researcher Jamie Evans says that the project is valuable as ‘living on a finite planet’ means that a linear economy of production and disposal is ‘simply unsustainable and wastes huge sums of materials and resources’. He argues that instead, businesses should see waste as a potentially valuable resource and an opportunity to ‘improve their green potentials’.
The news follows the announcement in June by the Environmental Services Association that adopting a circular economy could generate up to 50,000 UK jobs and create £3 billion.
The first ten companies to participate in workshops and provide feedback by 6 September will be given workshop start kits. The project runs until the end of August 2013.
Read more about the circular economy toolkit
