Q: What do you think the main achievements of this innovative circular BM are?

A: Circular Business Models based on reuse and recycling will typically focus on how to obtain higher profits from waste. But most of the time citizens don’t know where their waste ends up.  We realised though that where smartphones and clothes are concerned, a large majority of people do actually want to know what happens to these products once they are disposed of. So we took a different approach and developed a traceability module which actually provides information to the consumer on whether their waste was recycled or reused. Being able to provide this information is a great achievement because it engages consumers and makes citizens feel part of the whole process.

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Another important achievement has been connecting manufacturers, recyclers and end-users and sharing information flows in the same space, something that is not common to businesses in general.

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Q: What were the main challenges you were confronted with on your journey towards making this BM a reality?

A: Obviously, a smartphone user wants his new phone to last for several years but both the manufacturer and the recycler benefit from the disposal of the product as  early as possible. The biggest challenge was finding a means acceptable to recyclers and manufacturers of creating a fair, impartial and simple method to estimate incentives for the end-user. We had to find a balance between lifetime, recycling/reuse possibilities and avoiding loss of materials, such as metals, minerals and plastics, by recycling).

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Equally, identifying the benefits of our model for each stakeholder, such as recyclers, manufacturers, incentive givers, end-users, municipalities, waste managers, was another major challenge for us.

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Finally, applying the same business model to very different products such as WEEEs or biowaste required us to identify synergies between these sectors.

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Q: In your opinion, what were the most important innovations that resulted from your work for the CIRC4Life project?

A: The most important innovation has to be the eco-credits method. The eco-credits method is a way to provide incentives to end-users and was developed using a co-creation model involving end-users, recyclers, manufacturers and academia. The method takes into account the scarcity and the recyclability of the raw materials making it scientifically robust but at the same time easy to apply.