Transitioning towards a more sustainable future requires overcoming our current linear approach to resources use. However, transitioning to a Circular Economy (CE) is not unproblematic and comes with its own challenges. In this workshop, we will present a Circular Decision Tree developed at DRIFT, a leading Dutch research institute in the field of sustainable transitions. We invite you to reflect with us on the uncertainties, paradoxes and dilemmas of decision making in CE transition, and to learn and discuss about the proposed heuristic, and to identify its potential practical benefit within your and other fields.

This workshop is run under the Sustainable Urbanisation Global Initiative (SUGI) funded project called WASTE FEW ULL that is looking at inefficiencies in the Food, Energy, Water (FEW) nexus through an Urban Living Laboratory (ULL) approach. See https://wastefewull.weebly.com/ .

This workshop has already been successfully run in Rotterdam, with participation from Industry, local government, regulators, consultancies, academia and the not-for-profit sector. This Bristol workshop is open to anyone with an interest in sustainable transitions, the Circular Economy, circular innovations and/or the Food–Energy–Water Nexus.

We are delighted to invite you to this free online event

Background for the development of the Circular Decision Tree

Current societal problem:

Funding and support for sustainable innovation is commonly indiscriminate/unsystematic/ disproportional to the potential contribution of the innovation towards the transition to a circular economy. “Circular innovations” can be transformative, non-transformative, or counter-transformative to this transition. Often business models or innovations that close loops may actually be an optimization of a linear economy, leading to lock-in of the current regime. Thus, there is a need for a paradigm shift and change towards a different type of decision-making logic.

There is a fundamental problem observable in our daily decision-making: often, we are making decisions based on linear decision-making mechanisms. This contributes to strengthened inertia supporting the linear economy, which leads to greater resistance to change – hence, counter-transformative. The current way of decision-making can be counter-productive to reducing waste inefficiencies because of its support for incremental innovation. This need for a new type of decision-making logic led to the development of the framework for the decision-making tree we pose as one potential solution.

Knowledge gap:

Case studies of small, incubated pilots of such a decision-support tool (DST) for intentional waste reduction are sparse at best (CLEWS in Qatar, ICLEI for FEW), and none targeting circularity on a practical level could be found. A few loosely related tools have been developed by and for academics, but none currently exist to assist practitioners in navigating their decisions – thus, there is an enormous gap between knowledge in scientific literature/environmental impact databases and the accessibility and implementation of this knowledge in practice.

Goal:

This tree aims to answer the question: How can policymakers, investors, societal activists, businesses and entrepreneurs contribute towards circular innovations to support the transition towards a circular economy?

Heuristics and Decision Making in the Circular Economy