Circular Economy
WUN Treaty Is a Once-in-aLifetime Opportunity to End Plastic Pollution
The current negotiations for a UN treaty to end plastic pollution highlight that tackling the world’s plastic problem is no longer a utopian ideal, but an urgent mission.
de Vries, Editorial Lead, Ellen MacArthur Foundation
Jo
ith 170 trillion plastic particles floating in the world’s ocean, it is clear that plastic pollution is a global problem that needs a global solution. The UN treaty negotiations in Paris last month represented a major stepping stone in finding such a solution as parties agreed to start developing a treaty text.
Canada has already been championing the Golden Design Rules for plastic and publishing guidance on problematic plastics to avoid, through the Canada Plastics Pact (CPP) – part of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s global network of Plastics Pacts. By embracing a circular economy approach, these Plastics Pacts support their members in redesigning the world’s relationship with single-use plas-
tic: eliminating all unnecessary plastics and those that pose a high risk to the environment; innovating to ensure that plastics that are needed currently are reusable, recyclable, or compostable; and creating models that design out single-use plastics through reuse models, which offer one of the biggest opportunities to cut plastic leakage, as well as lower emissions and pressure on natural resources.
Like so many global challenges, there is no single solution, but by adopting an interconnected set of circular economy measures, the treaty could be a landmark moment in ending plastic pollution once and for all.
Circularity Addresses Climate Change and
As the urgency to combat climate change grows, it’s becoming clear that current efforts to cut carbon emissions will fall short. To achieve climate targets, we need to think beyond tailpipes and solar panels.
Embodied carbon: unveiling the hidden emissions
Products we use daily contribute 45 per cent of our carbon emission target through their lifecycle. Production, consumption, and disposal processes generate significant emissions. This presents both a challenge and an opportunity for governments, businesses, and individuals.
The circular economy: a sustainable pathway for emissions reduction
The circular economy offers a transformative approach to address embodied carbon, optimize resources, and reduce emissions. By embracing circular principles, businesses, governments, and individuals can play a vital role in creating a sustainable future.
Exploring circular business models
Five key circular business models drive the transition to a circular economy:
• SHARING PLATFORMS: Collaborative use of products and resources to minimize production demand
• PRODUCT AS A SERVICE:
Shifting from ownership to service-based models
• PRODUCT LIFE EXTENSION: Repair, refurbishment, and remanufacturing to extend product lifespan
• CIRCULAR SUPPLIES: Using discarded materials and renewable energy to promote resource efficiency
• RESOURCE RECOVERY: Optimizing resource consumption through improved design and manufacturing processes
Join the movement: how to take action on the circular economy
Delve deeper into the circular economy's potential at the 2023 Canadian Circular Economy Summit. Engage in discussions on transitioning markets, creating demand, and achieving climate goals. By fostering change at the market level, we can drive widespread implementation of circular practices. Discover more about the circular economy and its business models through detailed articles on our website. Gain practical guidance, inspiring examples, and deep insights to propel your organization's circular journey. Together, let's accelerate the transition toward a sustainable, circular economy.
Utilizing the Circular Economy to Boost Innovation and Competitiveness
To address the climate crisis, we must first fix the economy by moving away from our current linear industries and supply chains.
Paul Shorthouse Managing Director, Circular Economy Leadership Canada
By adopting a circular economy approach, Canada has a unique opportunity to simultaneously foster innovation, enhance competitiveness and supply chain resiliency, and achieve its net-zero climate goals, benefiting the long-term prosperity of people and planet. Talk about a win-win!
Fostering innovation
The circular economy encourages innovative thinking and problem-solving by requiring a shift from the "take-make-dispose" mindset to one that promotes resource conservation, the reuse of materials, and the design of products with extended lifecycles. This shift necessitates the development of new technologies, materials, and business models. By embracing circularity, Canada can nurture a culture of innovation, inspiring entrepreneurs, startups, and established businesses to create sustainable solutions, such as advanced recycling methods, eco-design, and sharing platforms.
Driving greater competitiveness
A circular approach can not only reduce costs, enhance productivity, and improve resource efficiency, but can also differentiate Canadian products and services in the international market. By embracing circularity, Canadian businesses can attract investors, gain a competitive edge, and strengthen the country's economic position.
Enabling more sustainable supply chains
In a circular economy, supply chains become more resilient, sustainable, and cost-effective. By optimizing material flows, promoting local sourcing, and fostering collaboration among stakeholders, Canada can develop more transparent circular supply chains that reduce waste, emissions, and environmental impacts.
Accelerating our net-zero climate goals
By embracing circularity, Canada can significantly reduce its carbon footprint and conserve natural resources. The circular economy approach minimizes waste generation, promotes recycling and reuse, and encourages renewable energy adoption. By integrating renewable energy sources into production processes and adopting energy-efficient technologies, Canada can make substantial progress toward achieving its net-zero emissions targets.
Unlocking new economic opportunities
The circular economy offers Canada the potential to unlock new economic opportunities across various sectors. Embracing circularity can lead to the creation of new jobs, stimulate entrepreneurship, and drive investment in sustainable industries. As global markets shift toward a more sustainable and circular paradigm, Canadian businesses that proactively adopt circular practices will be better positioned to seize market opportunities, attract customers, and thrive in a rapidly changing economic landscape while simultaneously reducing environmental impacts.
It's time for Canada to seize this opportunity and lead the way in the circular economy revolution. At the first Canadian Circular Economy Summit, more than 400 leaders from business, governments, and civil society from across the country will come together to advance the circular opportunities for Canada. Be there or be square!
We All Play a Role in the Success of the Paper Packaging Circular Economy
The paper packaging industry is an extremely successful example of how the circular economy can function.
As a circular economy, the paper packaging industry mostly uses recycled materials to provide innovative and environmentally sustainable packaging solutions for Canadians.
The industry uses a renewable resource from sustainably managed forests and primarily utilizes recycled content for the production of paper packaging, which keeps valuable raw materials out of landfills and reduces the need to use fresh trees. In fact, fewer than half of one per cent of Canadian commercial forests are harvested for paper packaging.
Canadians actively recycle their paper packaging and the industry utilizes that recycled content in the production of new materials, ensuring a high level of recycled content in packaging. Most domestic shipments (81.7 per cent) of the three major paper packaging grades in Canada — containerboard (corrugated boxes), boxboard cartons (such as cereal and shoe boxes), and kraft paper (paper bags) — are made from recycled content. The small, but essential, act of recycling is critical to ensuring that paper products get remade into new products again and again.
Using less, making less, and recycling are critical to ensure a healthy, sustainable planet. Let’s all do our part to recycle all paper products and continue to build on the successful paper packaging circular economy, protecting our environment and precious resources.
Paper Packatging: One of Canada's Original Circular Economies
Paper Packaging: One of Canada's Original Circular Economies
How Canada’s Railways Are Moving the Circular Economy Forward
Parliamentarians are studying electronics, metals, and plastics recycling. Rail is green transportation and Canadian railways are growing the circular economy.
Ben Chursinoff
Canada’s railways are a backbone of our economy. They also help underpin the circular economy and enable its expansion.
Rail is green transportation. While moving 50 per cent of Canada’s exports, railways represent just 3.6 per cent of Canadian transportation emissions. Trains are already three to four times more fuel-efficient than trucks. Rail fuel efficiency has improved over 25 per cent in recent years. And railways have invested more than $20 billion over the last decade in infrastructure, technology, alternative fuels, and more.
Moving circularity forward
Canada’s railways moved more than 116 million tonnes of recycled and recyclable products in 2022 alone. This includes metals, minerals, plastic, rubber, and more.
The Quebec North Shore and Labrador Railway operates a metal scrap yard that helps divert waste.
The Southern Railway of British Columbia serves a metals recycling customer to ship its shredded, segregated metals so they can be transformed into new products and given new life.
CN diverts 90 per cent of its waste from landfills through reduce-reuse-recycle-renew programs.
CPKC has an agreement to send half a million legacy rail ties to a facility in Dunmore, Alta., each year, where they’ll be turned into renewable liquid fuels.
These are just a few examples of how railways are practising circularity and moving it forward for all Canadians.
Our railways are at the forefront of green innovation. With the right investment incentives, rail can go even further.
The Canadian beverage industry is leading the way in its embrace of the circular economy and enhanced producer responsibility.
Over the past 40 years, the Canadian beverage industry has emerged as a frontrunner in its commitment to developing world-leading extended producer responsibility (EPR) systems. Across Canada, producers take full financial and operational responsibility to collect and recycle their products and packaging to ensure recyclable materials are used.
Canadian Beverage Association (CBA) member, Ice River Sustainable Solutions, a leader in in-house recycling supply chain and innovation in greener packaging, have set a new standard for sustainability in the beverage sector. By integrating a recycling facility within its production process, the company has developed a circular economy for polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic. Its sustainable business model, along with Ice River’s 100 per cent recycled PET water bottle, has significantly reduced its carbon footprint and minimized its need for virgin materials without compromising product quality or safety.
The Canadian beverage industry has exemplified the circular economy's transformative power and enhanced producer responsibility. The sector has showcased its commitment to sustainability and environmental stewardship by internalizing recycling supply chains and embracing greener packaging innovation.
Metal Tech Alley, is looking to transform the West Kootenay region in British Columbia into a major hub for recycling lead and lithium-ion (electric vehicle (EV)) batteries — and, in the process, to promote sustainability and improve the industrial circular economy in the region.
We know the push to promote EVs is global. In Canada, Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault is proposing new regulations stipulating that 20 per cent of all passenger cars, SUVs, and trucks in the country will need to run on electricity by 2026.*
This shift can help to address climate change, but it also creates a waste product: used batteries. Fortunately, it's possible to recycle those batteries — the Kootenay region in Western Canada is in an ideal position to reap the benefits from that.
tenay (specifically, in Trail, B.C.). Metal Tech Alley (MTA) wants to tap into that potential and expand the existing operations to boost the industrial circular economy in the area.
As a first step, the organization is conducting a feasibility study to identify what the region needs — and what it already has — to become a major battery-recycling hub in Western Canada. The study will also assess how the expansion can boost local economic development and growth.
After publishing the study, MTA's next step will be crucial: funding. According to the organization, the project will need funding from government agencies and other sources — possibly a great opportunity to invest
Right place, right time
Krista Scaldwell
Don’t Bin Bottles and Cans! Canada’s Beer Industry Leads the Circular Economy
Bringing all beer containers and packaging back to an authorized return location is the choice that makes Canada’s original circular economy work.
D.F. McCourt
Waste is a choice. That’s the fundamental idea at the heart of the circular economy. Sometimes it’s a choice made by consumers, sometimes by government, often by business. But somewhere along the way, someone decides that a linear chain from extraction to use to disposal is easier and more profitable than reusing, recycling, and conserving.
So much of our economy has been built on this linear model for so long, suggesting there’s another way we can feel new and radical. But there was a time when the circular economy was the default. A time when full milk bottles were delivered to your doorstep and empty milk bottles were taken away to be washed and refilled the next day. Over the decades, innovation and market forces replaced that system with increased single-use packaging, including plastic bags. But, in Canada, there’s one industry where this original circularity is still going strong, for over 95 years to be exact.
“The idea of the circular economy for the beer industry in Canada predates the term ‘circular economy’ itself,” says Rachel Morier, Director of Sustainability at The Beer Store, Ontario’s beer retailer, and also Chair of the BC Brewers’ Recycled Container Collection Council (BRCCC). “Collecting empty containers made business sense from the beginning. You're not repurchasing new materials and you're not having empty trucks on the road — or empty horse and buggies, back in the day.”
Nearly a century of sustainability Canada’s beer bottle return system has been in existence for nearly a century. In Ontario, The Beer Store has been operating a circular system since 1927, and it has since expanded from bottle collection to other beverage alcohol containers, including aluminum cans and wine and spirit containers, including glass, Tetra Pak, and PET. In fact, The Beer Store has collected over 170 billion containers for reuse or high-end recycling since its inception. It also accepts
secondary packaging to make it easier for consumers to simply return containers in the package that they’re sold in. This is similar to the BRCCC’s program in B.C., which is responsible for the management of alcohol aluminum cans, refillable glass, and related secondary packaging in the province. As a result, these programs achieve over 90 per cent return rate for refillable bottles.
This consistency has been made possible by conscious collaboration between brewers and the retail distribution network prioritizing reverse logistics. “We’re all working together with the same common cause,” says The Beer Store President and CEO Roy Benin. “What’s good for the environment can also be good for business. It’s a choice we make.”
The beating heart of the brewers’ return network is the industry standard bottle, a single standardized design utilized by brewers across the country, which represents the largest scalable reuse solution in the country. “If you're a brewer in Quebec and you want to try having your sales out in B.C., then another brewer in B.C. has the ability to take possession of that bottle once it’s empty,” explains Morier. “This way, the brewer doesn’t have to ship those bottles all the way back. The environmental savings from the avoided greenhouse gas emissions are significant as a result. It’s pretty cool.”
Recycled aluminum also plays an important role as manufacturing aluminum from recycling materials uses only five per cent of the energy needed to make a brand new can and customers appreciate that more brewers are offering their product in aluminum cans.
Glass is a huge environmental win — when it’s reused
So long as a bottle stays within the beer industry logistics system, it can be collected, washed, and refilled many times, travelling on the return legs of product delivery runs that were happening anyway. This is incredibly potent for a material like glass, which is heavy and energy-intensive to produce, but also incredibly resilient and chemically inert. Most glass containers have a larger carbon footprint during manufacture than an equivalent plastic container, and yet the balance tips dramatically once that container is refilled just a few times. In Ontario, glass beer bottles are currently being refilled an average of 16 times before being recycled.
For this to work, however, it’s essential that these containers are returned to an authorized return location or to The Beer Store in
Ontario, rather than ending up in the recycling bin or, worse, the trash. When beer bottles are col lected in residential curbside recycling alongside everything from pickle jars to shampoo bottles to soup tins, they get broken and the glass gets heavily contaminated, which results in a much lower yield of recycled glass where the unusable, contam inated glass may be landfilled. And so, new initiatives in Ontario and B.C. are working to promote education to all consumers, young and old, on the real benefits to direct deposit-bearing containers to be returned. The environmental benefit over curbside recycling is enormous. The financial benefit is shared — so collect those deposits! And there are social benefits on the community level as well.
“Every month, The Beer Store has a dedicated charity that aligns with the company’s core values, and communities are welcome to host their own bottle drives as well,” says Morier. “As just one example, we’ve raised over $21 million in partnership with the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society of Canada.”
Benin emphasizes that this return system, and the good it does, is a point of pride among The Beer Store’s 6,500 employees. “It’s not the most glamorous part of the job,” he acknowledges, “but we all know it makes a big difference.”
Caring about the impact of waste is a choice that Canadian brewers have made. Fully committing to the reverse logistics involved is a choice that Canadian beer retailers have made. Actually bringing those empties back to the store and ensuring they remain in the country’s oldest and strongest circular economy? That’s a choice for Canadian beer drinkers to make.
How One Company is Working to Transform More Plastic Waste into a 21st Century Resource
Aduro Clean Technologies’ novel, next-generation technology turns mixed plastic waste into a valuable resource, and is moving to become a leader in circularity.
Tania Amardeil
Only a fraction of recovered plastics can be mechanically recycled to make new products by blending with virgin plastic derived from petroleum. Plastic waste is in concept a very cheap material, but collecting and sorting it adds significant costs. Its decomposition in nature takes time, making it a problem when dumped into the environment. And even when it does eventually degrade, microscopic plastic particles are released into water, and those find their way into the tissues of aquatic animals.
Chemical recycling is a way of accelerating the decomposition in a controlled process that also increases the value of the waste. And thanks to a novel, next-generation technology developed by Canadian company Aduro Clean Technologies, chemical recycling gives plastic waste a second life, making its recovery and reuse more affordable and sustainable.
A new way of viewing plastic waste
“Plastic is an integral part of our lives,” says Stefanie Steenhuis, Head of Brand and Marketing at Aduro Clean Technologies. “We cannot live without it — it saves lives in medical applications, keeps our food fresh, and is a part of nearly every industry you can think of. We need to start seeing it as a resource for creating recycled plastic products with the benefit of reducing dependence on petroleum and mitigating the plastic waste issue.”
Originally focused on improving the quality of Alberta bitumen, Aduro has over time extended its technology play into new applications.
We need to start seeing it as a resource for creating recycled plastic products with the benefit of reducing dependence on petroleum and mitigating the plastic waste issue.
“When we founded the company, we didn’t realize how far it could go,” says Ofer Vicus, Aduro Clean Technologies co-founder and CEO. “As we evolved our technology through R&D, we realized we had a core chemical platform technology that could be applied to solve problems differently and more elegantly compared with alternatives.
After going to work on renewables, we recognized the possibility to extend our approach for chemical recycling of plastics. And now we’re looking beyond that to handle waste tire rubber.”
A novel technology
The key to Aduro capabilities is its Hydrochemolytic™ Technology (HCT). “‘Hydro’ means water and ‘chemolytic’ refers to the mechanism of deconstructing the large molecules,” explains Vicus.
Aduro has redirected and reconfigured
HCT to plastics. Simply put, it transforms large, stubborn molecules of low value into smaller, lighter molecules of higher value. Materials with undesirable characteristics are converted into materials that are more useful, the result being a tremendous uplift in market value.
“You can think of plastic as being made of long molecules that are like pearls on a very, very long string,” says Steenhuis. “What makes our technology so unique is that it cuts these molecular chains, as if with scissors. Rather than rupturing them, our tech nique gently clips them apart into smaller pieces.”
A new way of doing things
The chemical deconstruction process is elegant and low cost yet works on plastics that are most difficult to handle, converting them into components useful as either fuels or in chemical recycling to produce new, virgin plastics in a circular regime.
“The technology is highly con figurable, allowing cost-effective implementation on scales small to large, and also application to diverse waste plastic streams,” notes Vicus.
The innovative, proprietary technology is also highly tolerant to contaminants, whether in the form of waste residues or plastic resins that sneak through in plastic pre-sorting and cleaning. This lowers overall costs for chemical recycling and opens up the possibility to get more plastics into the recycling stream — addressing the global issue of plastic pollution in a more tangible, high-impact way. “Currently, less than 10 per cent of plastic waste globally is recycled because of different economic or chemical factors,” says Vicus.
“The Aduro technology promises to overcome these and, most importantly, to permit small-scale decentralized deployment in remote municipalities to increase the volume of recycled plastic.”
Leading the way in circularity
The Aduro Clean Technologies vision is to partner with governments, cities, the private sector, and non-profit organizations dedicated to turning waste plastics into resources for the 21st century. Realizing that vision involves directing HCT towards ever-broader feedstocks to meet customer objectives, which are driven by demanding regulatory, social, environmental, and economic considerations.
There’s no question — the creative team of Aduro scientists is taking on challenges that are both very difficult and very important: unlocking value from waste plastics that pollute our lands and waterways; improving the characteristics of bitumen through a greener conversion process; and increasing the economic value of renewable oils in scalable operations that can be implemented locally.
Stefanie Steenhuis Head of Brand and Marketing, Aduro Clean Technologies
Ofer Vicus
Co-founder & CEO
Aduro Clean Technologies