Circling Sustainability and Responsibility: Exploring Synergies between the Circular Economy, Synthetic Biology and Responsible Research and Innovation

I was recently involved in a project relating to the circular bioeconomy, and you can read about this work in a new article ‘The Sustainable Path to a Circular Bioeconomy’ published in Trends in Biotechnology.

You can find out more information about the background to this project in the following blog which was originally published on the Nottingham SBRC website and is reposted here with permission.

Circling Sustainability and Responsibility Project and Workshop

Funding

This project was funded by the University of Nottingham’s Governance and Public Policy (GaPP) Research Priority Area and the Nottingham Synthetic Biology Research Centre (SBRC).

Project Team

Dr Carmen McLeod is a Newcastle University Academic Track (NUAcT) Fellow in the Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment, School of Architecture, Planning & Landscape, Newcastle University. (Dr McLeod is a former SBRC Senior Research Fellow and lead of the Circling Sustainability and Responsibility project.)

Dr Sarah Hartley is Associate Professor in the Department of Science, Innovation, Technology and Entrepreneurship at University of Exeter Business School and Assistant Director (Engagement), Global Systems Institute, University of Exeter.

Penny Polson is PhD candidate at University of Manchester Alliance Business School, and Research Assistant on the Circling Sustainability and Responsibility project. 

Dr Eleanor Hadley Kershaw is Senior Research Fellow and lead of the Interdisciplinary Responsible Research and Innovation Group (IRRIG) at University of Nottingham Synthetic Biology Research Centre.

The Project

In order to explore emerging connections between the circular economy and novel biotechnology applications, social scientists Carmen McLeod (Newcastle University, formerly University of Nottingham) and Sarah Hartley (University of Exeter) led a project called: Circling Sustainability and Responsibility: Exploring Synergies between the Circular Economy, Synthetic Biology and Responsible Research and Innovation (January-July 2019). The promotion of synthetic biology as a vehicle towards a more sustainable future by UK and EU policy makers has also been closely tied to the science governance framework Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). The concepts of the circular economy, sustainable bioeconomy and RRI share similar elements – especially the idea of circulating resources and distributing responsibility – and appear to position synthetic biology in particular as a form of what has been described by some analysts as ‘sustainability-orientated innovation’.

The Workshop

In April 2019, the project held an interdisciplinary, multisectoral and international workshop to explore the linkages between circular economy, bioeconomy and RRI and the implications of the emergent concept of circular bioeconomy at both national and international policy levels. Delegates included social scientists and humanities researchers, bioscientists, policy makers and representatives from industry, as well as the Ellen McArthur Foundation.

Click here for the Workshop Agenda and Participant List.

The workshop also included a public keynote delivered by Ken Webster (University of Exeter Centre for the Circular Economy; Former Head of Innovation at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation) on ‘Closing loops and opening minds? Is a ‘circular economy’ business as usual or a harbinger of change?’ (pictured below).

Ken Webster
University of Exeter Centre for the Circular Economy;
Former Head of Innovation at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation

Introduction to the circular economy

The notion of a ‘circular economy’ has been gaining a lot of traction lately. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, in particular, has raised the profile of this radical rethinking of how goods are produced and consumed, aiming for an economy that is ‘restorative and regenerative by design’. The circular economy is presented as an evolution from previous movements to incorporate sustainability goals, but with an additional focus on an economy that promotes the continuous circulation and recovery of resources, rather than a linear one, focussed on making, using and disposing.

Redesigning products with the end-of-functional-life in mind is one of the underpinning values of the circular economy, which aims to reduce both waste and demand for ongoing resource extraction. Many people are becoming increasingly aware of the plastics entering oceans, of how ‘fast fashion’ is being dumped in landfills, and of gas emissions creating climate change and pollution. There is growing concern about the extraction of finite natural resources – but there is uncertainty about how to tackle these issues at a systems level.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

The concept of “renewable” resources is often discussed in the context of energy, but significant amounts of other resources that are in limited supply (beyond fossil fuels), are also extracted for products. This ranges from precious metals used in smart phones, to copper used for wiring. Furthermore, fossil-derived petrochemicals form the basis of many everyday materials, such as plastics and synthetic rubber. While supermarkets are beginning to offer more options for reducing plastic packaging and straws will be eliminated from mainstream use by 2020, there are still significant steps to take in order to make manufacturing practices and consumer cultures sustainable in the UK and beyond. The idea of a circular economy offers possibilities for addressing these challenges by designing and connecting products for extended product life and for assimilation back into manufacturing of new items.

The potential role of industrial waste in the circular economy

The circular economy is proving increasingly popular among research funders, policymakers, industry and business globally. A key case that is often highlighted by proponents of the circular economy is the potential for industrial waste to become a sustainable and renewable resource, reflected in recent UK policy such as Enabling Technologies for a Sustainable Circular Bioeconomy: A National Industrial Biotechnology Strategy to 2030. In particular, synthetic biology has been forecast to revolutionise the national bioeconomy, with feedstocks from waste gases playing a key role in these expected environmental and economic benefits. This process involves bioengineering bacteria to feed on waste gases, in order to produce fuel and chemicals without using traditional petrochemical sources. An early exemplar of how this could operate in practice can be found in the work of start-up company, LanzaTech, who have developed a process that ferments waste emissions from a steel mill to make ethanol.

Key discussions points from the interdisciplinary workshop

Rental models, ownership and power within a circular economy

One strand of the workshop discussion centred around the circular economy as an enabler of new business processes through rental models, where ownership of manufactured products (and therefore responsibility for their reuse and recycling back into the system) are retained by those who create the product. It has been well established that ownership creates power dynamics, where individuals and companies become more influential based on how much they own. Participants in the workshop suggested that switching to predominantly rental models still maintains structures where “owners” retain a greater proportion of wealth and power. There is no doubt that the idea of increased responsibility of manufacturers for products is appealing, particularly considering recent scandals which have found coffee cups to be non-recyclable, or recycling waste sent overseas for processing, but dumped into landfills instead. Presumably the extension of manufacturer-owner responsibility throughout the product lifestyle would make steps towards avoiding underhand practices such as these. But the workshop discussion also shed light on less beneficial impacts of adopting the manufacturer-owner rental model, such as the disempowerment of users in deciding how to recycle their products, which is (potentially) enabled through current systems.  

The pursuit of happiness: the good life through circular living

One of the engaging aspects of the circular economy is that it offers a framework for a systems-level approach that potentially not only mitigates current harm, but offers seemingly workable positive solutions. There was general agreement in the workshop that this framework needed to be carefully considered before implementation. Participants raised the question as to what the circular economy would look like if it was not driven by guilt, fear, and/or our responsibility to do no harm, but rather towards idealised conceptions of what our lives should look like in the future, and how such lives can be serviced by truly sustainable practices. Ideas of “circular living” and “the good life” were raised in relation to what the individual or collective level of the circular economy might look like. This might entail redesigning systems to match our collective visions of happiness in more sustainable ways than are afforded by current systems. However, this topic brings significant questions and challenges of its own. Is it possible to develop common and collective visions of “circular living” or “the good life”? Can the CE meet these needs or desires? What are the values we associate with goods and ownership and might these differ between and within societies, communities and individuals?

The challenges of networks and scale

Workshop discussion also focused on the problem of how individual people or companies could not ‘be circular’, or achieve circularity, on their own and that in order to enable a circular economy, there needed to be collaborative and systems-oriented thinking and action. This was further related to the notion of distributed responsibility, which might be necessitated by the complex networks and ecologies in which products (and people) are embedded, that they are made up of, and that they pass through during their manufacture, lifetimes, and after use. The contribution that biotechnology – especially synthetic biology – could make within the circular economy was discussed. The potential for synthetic biology applications to use waste gases as feedstock had a positive response. However, there was also discussion about the potential limitations of just focusing on ‘carbon recycling’ in biotechnology applications, rather than taking a broader ecological and systemic approach. In other words, there is a need to develop approaches for thinking beyond the immediate process of converting waste gases to products. Consideration should also be given to the uses and impacts of those products, the sources of waste gas feedstocks, and the multiple other inputs, outputs, actors and relationships enacted through a circular economy system which involves synthetic biology and waste gases. This could include factoring in all of the materials that are needed to support the process, such as bioreactors, and also extend to consider the socio-cultural and ethical implications of such processes.

Concluding thoughts – democratising decision-making in the circular economy

Overall, the workshop discussion identified that lives could be radically changed by implementing a circular economy, both at a local and global scale. It confirmed that while the mechanisms of the circular economy have been relatively well thought through, particularly in relation to some product cycles and sectors, insufficient attention has been paid to ‘the social’ in relation to circular economy, and the social aspects of circular economy may generate important challenges. The idea of the ‘missing social’ has been raised as a critique of the circular economy (both at the workshop, and more widely) and needs further consideration. This is perhaps not surprising, considering that the field of sustainability has faced challenges in incorporating the “social” pillar alongside environmental and economic sustainability goals. In order to begin to take into account the highly complex and networked nature of contemporary production and consumption systems, the concept of RRI was discussed as a way of extending decision-making capacities to include a more diverse pool of stakeholders and further distributing responsibility for the circular economy. However, while RRI might be a promising approach for considering broader dimensions of responsibility, a new set of important questions emerged through the workshop discussion, regarding how the circular economy might be mobilised across varied and complex social contexts.

These included:

• Is the circular economy valued enough by all relevant actors to gain enough traction? Are there inherent challenges in creating something with such radical and ambitious goals? Are these goals shared?
• Will those who steer conversation be a “coalition of the willing” with predetermined agendas?
• How can we create a decision-making process that is not inherently top-down/oppressive?
• How can multiple notions and practices of circular economies be enabled, rather than a singular circular economy?
• Is there a risk that responsibility will be devolved down to the individual consumer, negating the accountability of large corporations and other private and public organisations who currently have (or should have) significant responsibility, both in their own creation and treatment of waste and in how they build products to last?
• What sort of research is needed to place circular economies in context and consider their social, systemic and ecological dimensions?