Inside the conference that’s mainstreaming circular economy

If you woke up tomorrow to a world powered by 100-percent clean energy, the impacts of our industrial system on the environment would still be unsustainable. This is how Hans Bruyninckx, a former executive director of the European Environment Agency, frames sustainability within a materials and resources perspective. A member of the United Nations Environment Programme’s International Resource Panel, Bruyninckx was a keynote speaker at the 2024 REMADE Circular Economy Conference and Tech Summit in Washington, D.C., on April 10–11, 2024.

Transforming how we use and consume materials alongside decarbonization is at the heart of efforts to build a circular economy. Dame Ellen MacArthur stressed this point in her opening address to the conference, the second such event organized by the REMADE Institute (REMADE) in partnership with the nonprofit she founded, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

"'Waste' is not a word in our vocabulary at REMADE—we believe all material has the potential for new uses,” stressed REMADE Institute CEO Nabil Nasr during his address. Nasr also the associate provost for academic affairs and director of RIT’s Golisano Institute for Sustainability.

Ten keynotes and plenaries set the backdrop for nearly 60 academic research presentations. Each peer-reviewed paper featured research from academic institutions such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Yale University, Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), and Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), as well as manufacturers including Caterpillar Inc., Dow Chemical Co., and Michelin, and national laboratories like Idaho National Laboratory and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

REMADE was launched in 2017 and is funded in part by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to enable research and development that spans the private-public divide. Every R&D (research and development) project that REMADE funds is a cross-sector partnership representing the consortium’s more than 165 members across industry, academia, trade organizations, and government-funded national labs.

The diversity of the speakers, presenters, and attendees at the conference speaks to REMADE’s collaborative model, representing in equal parts academic researchers and U.S.-based corporations working at the global level, with a mix of government policymakers as well. Though covering a wide scope of materials and industrial sectors, every R&D project shares a common concern with finding real, practical pathways for enabling circularity.

Many paths to circularity

The REMADE conference was designed to go beyond the what of circular economy to hone in on the how. Mainstreaming circularity won’t be achieved by following just one path or discipline. Below are four key pathways that crossed everything that was presented, discussed, and proposed at the event.

Policy

“There is no way to get to net-zero unless we use circular economy,” says Andrés Clarens about hard-to-abate sectors, such as concrete and cement, as well as steel and aluminum. He is the assistant director for industrial decarbonization at the White House Office of Science and Technology (OSTP).

The White House OSTP serves as an important lever for spurring circular economy innovation. Clarens spoke to attendees about his office’s efforts to address the climate, labor, and justice impacts associated with the production of concrete and cement by finding sustainable alternatives to traditional, mined ingredients.

He pointed to the role that policy can play in commercializing new materials and chemicals that can be used in the built environment. For Clarens, the reality is that a sustainable future will mean building more, not less, of everything. “Circularity is a key tool for meeting accelerating demand for these materials.”

Policy also has a role to play in regulating resource use at the international level, according to UNEP IRP’s Bruyninckx.

“We will not get there by tweaking at the margins,” said Bruyninckx, who is also the former executive director of the European Environment Agency. “We need systemic solutions for systemic problems.”

In summarizing UNEP IRP’s Global Resources Outlook 2024, he described the panel’s call for the creation of international protocols that would see a reduction in resource use in countries with high consumption rates, allowing for more resources in those where people consume little. Put another way, enabling conditions need to be set that will phase out resource-intensive behavior while stabilizing sustainable behavior.

Technology

“We need to be sequestering carbon in the circular economy.”

That’s according to Google’s lead for circular economy, Mike Werner. He introduced how the data giant is applying its powerful machine-learning resources to accelerate recycling rates in the United States and globally.

Search engine users can click on a feature called Recycling Near Me, which gives them access to user-generated data about facilities available locally. CircularNet is a free, open-source machine-learning technology for detecting recyclable plastics in a materials recovery facility (MRF or “murf”). He showed how the software was deployed in a Bangladeshi MRF to recover 50 tons of plastic that would have otherwise gone into landfills.

Google’s research and development arm, Moonshot Labs, is exploring how artificial intelligence (AI) could help MRFs quickly identify high-value materials in the waste they receive. The technology aims to be able to scan any piece of recovered waste and determine multiple characteristics about it at the molecular level. The AI then will use this data to make decisions about what to do with it. Ultimately, as the AI is trained on more and more types of waste, a “ground-truth” dataset will be created that will be shared publicly to propel scientific research and policymaking around recycling.

One of today’s most challenging materials to recycle are textiles. Ninety-two million tons of textile waste are generated each year worldwide—and 85 percent of it ends up in the trash. One major challenge to circularity for clothing and other fabrics is the difficulty recyclers face when it comes to separating out all the different types of materials used to make a single garment. Not only is it time-consuming and costly, making it economically unfeasible, but it usually results in downgraded quality.

But a new transdisciplinary partnership, ReSpool, wants to “change the game on what you can do with recycled fibers.” Kedron Thomas, an anthropologist from the University of Delaware, introduced Fiber Shredder, a proprietary technology developed by ReSpool that shreds fabrics into fibers, which can then be used in high-value applications. The initiative has also innovated processes for manufacturing woven, knit, and non-woven textiles using recycled fibers.

Finding the right technology for circular economy is not always about inventing something entirely new. Sometimes it’s about using technology that’s already available in new ways.

Bert Bras, a researcher at Georgia Tech’s Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, looks for opportunities to reduce the energy demand of the aluminum industry, a hard-to-abate but critical materials sector that still relies largely on natural gas. He analyzed how the large cylinders of aluminum in a facility—referred to as “ingots”— are processed before they are rolled into sheets. Using a variety of simulation models, his team found that processors spend a lot of energy reheating ingots that cool down while waiting to be pressed. By reframing the hot ingots as “heat energy batteries,” Bras discovered ways to optimize how they are stored and handled. For example, a crane operator could use a thermal camera to select the hottest ingots for pressing so less energy would be spent getting them up to the right temperature.

Product design

“I spent the first half of my career designing products that went into a landfill,” says Brian Hilton, a sustainable design technical program manager at RIT, to explain how he came to apply circularity to industrial product design.

Hilton leads research to develop a design for remanufacturing (DfR) module that can be installed into popular, off-the-shelf CAD (computer-aided design) platforms. By focusing on remanufacturing, a process for restoring a product or component to a like-new-or-better condition, Hilton wants designers to be able to make practical decisions that will make it easier to recover value from, or to restore, a product. Ultimately, the point of DfR, according to Hilton, is to minimize what needs to be done to remanufacture it.

Or, as he put it: “How do you get the most out of product without remanning it?”

A researcher from Cisco Systems Inc. (Cisco), Ajay Ranjith Vempati, showed how the company is evolving its design processes to incorporate circular economy principles to drive corporate sustainability. At one point in this new design process, employees are invited to do a “circular economy teardown”— a product is torn apart and the group thinks about how it might be redesigned with circularity in mind.

A researcher from Cisco Systems Inc. (Cisco), Ajay Ranjith Vempati, showed how the company is evolving its design processes to incorporate circular economy principles to drive corporate sustainability. At one point in this new design process, employees are invited to do a “circular economy teardown”— a product is torn apart and the group thinks about how it might be redesigned with circularity in mind. 

Collaboration and national security 

Since circular economy is inherently about the whole life cycle of a product, it’s not possible for a company to shift to circularity all by itself. Collaboration and circularity go hand in hand. 

“[Circular economy] will require reimagining what we do, where we do it, and how we do it,” said Theresa Kotanchek, the vice chair of the National Academy of Engineers’ National Materials and Manufacturing Board, to welcome attendees to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, where the REMADE conference took place. “This is exactly what we do at the National Academies.” 

“Amazon made a goal to get to net-zero by 2040,” explained Sarah Dimson-Tararuj, head of programs and strategic projects for Amazon Climate Pledge.

Dimson-Rararuj explained how meeting this goal relies on creative partnerships with other companies. For example, Amazon worked with Rivian, a manufacturer of electric vehicles, to electrify its fleet of delivery trucks. During a panel with other businesses, she discussed how the world’s sixth-most valuable company has built strategic collaborations to create product standards and certifications and extend the life of their information technology assets.

Jeff Marootian, principal deputy assistant secretary for the DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy

“We are constantly look for new ways we can collaborate,” said Jeff Marootian, principal deputy assistant secretary for the DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.

“Amazon made a goal to get to net-zero by 2040,” explained Sarah Dimson-Tararuj, head of programs and strategic projects for Amazon Climate Pledge. 

Dimson-Rararuj explained how meeting this goal relies on creative partnerships with other companies. For example, Amazon worked with Rivian, a manufacturer of electric vehicles, to electrify its fleet of delivery trucks. During a panel with other businesses, she discussed how the world’s sixth-most valuable company has built strategic collaborations to create product standards and certifications and extend the life of their information technology assets. 

“We are constantly look for new ways we can collaborate,” said Jeff Marootian, principal deputy assistant secretary for the DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. 

REMADE is one important vehicle the DOE uses to power that collaboration, but there many others. Marootian explained how the Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office (AMMTO) has launched a series of funding opportunities, such as the Re-X Before Recycling Prize and the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) to Advance Domestic Manufacturing program. These are designed to propel industry forward in the clean energy market, which he estimates will be worth $23 trillion by 2030.

“We look at circularity from many different angles to find ways it can advance the transition to clean energy,” explained AMMTO’s director, Chris Saldaña, during a government panel discussion. 

AMMTO links national security very closely with sustainability. With that in mind, Saldaña laid out how circular economy contributes to the office’s strategy for securing the domestic supply chain, advancing economy-wide decarbonization, and increasing the competitiveness of U.S. manufacturing.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is also leveraging cross-sector partnerships to uncover ways in which circularity can support its activities. Like the DOE, the DoD sees in circular economy a coherent strategy for strengthening the security of U.S. domestic material supplies.

“Our warfighters can’t use it if our manufacturers can’t make it,” noted Jeff Pacuska during the same government panel. Pacuska leads the Office of Future Technologies Transition at the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command – Soldier Center. He pointed to the potential of circularity supply chain logistics sophisticated enough to forecast exhausted supplies and resources.

“I look at something that is very complicated and say, ‘That’s a great opportunity for the New York Climate Exchange,” said Stephen Hammer, who is the chief executive of the $700-million, 400,000-square-foot hub that set to be built on Governor’s Island starting in 2025.

The driving idea behind the Exchange is interdisciplinary collaboration, according to Hammer. He explained during his keynote how the campus would provide a space to blend arts and culture, policy, and science together to creatively communicate climate and related issues to a wider audience.

“There is an opportunity here — we just haven’t capitalized on it yet,” he said. “There is a need for circular economy to be integrated into strategies.” 

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Learn more about the 2024 REMADE Circular Economy Tech Summit and Conference at REMADE, where details for next year’s event will be available in the near future.