Not yet another pill - The only way is the systemic way.
Eva Gladek is the founder and CEO of Metabolic, a consulting, research, and venture building firm focused on tackling global sustainability challenges and advancing a circular economy. Eva founded Metabolic in 2012 with the mission of transitioning the global economy to a fundamentally sustainable and circular state. In her years of consulting work and concept development, Eva has advised hundreds of organizations, ranging from progressive cities such as Amsterdam to global NGOs like WWF, as well as industry leaders in nearly every economic sector. She is also the acting CEO of Systemic—Metabolic's new software arm—and co-founder of DayRize, an e-commerce platform facilitating sustainable consumption.
Hi Eva, it’s a pleasure to host you for a conversation. We are now living in a very particular period - what many perceive as a critical tipping point for the destiny of humankind. In this context, the Build Back Better movement is gaining momentum as the opportunity to build a radically different system. Despite the most virtuous intentions, I sometimes perceive solutions proposed therewith as lacking substance. What’s your view?
There are a lot of different groups focusing on this build back better topic and a lot of it has been on green recovery plans. The European Commission—very thankfully—has decided that the new Green Deal is the direction forward despite COVID. And, in fact, that it can be used as a way to get out of the economic crisis caused by the current pandemic. The original term, New Deal, dates back to the post-Great Depression economic recovery efforts in the United States. The idea was that large amounts of public investment could trigger a trickle up effect: give people lots of employment and rebuild society. At that time, the effort largely focused on investments in new infrastructure.
Similarly to that era, we're in a critical period where we need infrastructure investments. For example, in the transition to renewables and the renovation of houses to become climate neutral. We should also be investing in the redesign of cities to become resilience hubs that are both more sustainable as well as pandemic-proof. But despite everyone’s best intentions, I fear that we’re going to waste this crisis, by focusing on recommendations that—while they push for a greener and more equitable economic development pathway—still play into the current economic model – and reinforce the current patterns that got us into this mess in the first place.
Why is that?
Because most of the build back better strategies all emphasize, almost above all else, job creation and economic growth. This is clearly what panicked policymakers want to hear – and even in pushing a green agenda, this is the honey that will make any pill easier to swallow. But we don’t simply need jobs: we need fundamental economic reform. And even though the writing has been on the wall for decades, we’re not having enough deep conversation on this topic.
“We don’t simply need jobs: we need fundamental economic reform”
What sits at the core of your critique of the current system?
The structural inequality in our economic system has resulted, ultimately, in the fact that just a relative handful of people globally have over half of the global wealth. In fact, the rules of the economy are designed to concentrate wealth among a few individuals. But as the rich have gotten richer—by continuously taking more than their fair share of the pie—a parallel process has been playing out that has made it harder and harder to find meaningful, dignified work that actually offers a living wage.
Over the course of the last century, enormous increases in industrialisation and automation have resulted in a vastly efficient economy that has rapidly expanded its production capabilities with the help of machines and fuel. We can just consider the recent (and ongoing) COVID lockdowns, where in many cases only “essential” workers were allowed to continue working outside of their homes - this certainly does not include everyone. The economy has gotten so efficient that you can argue there isn’t enough work to go around for everyone - even in an ideal setting. We are able to produce sufficient food, housing, energy, and entertainment for the entire population with a fraction of the workforce that was once needed to do so.
“The economy has gotten so efficient that you can argue there isn’t enough work to go around for everyone - even in an ideal setting”
Yet for most of us, the only significant mechanism for getting access to the wealth that is generated in our highly efficient economy is through selling our time—our labor—for money. And we can never fairly compete with the handful of people who control the majority of the capital, machines and resources in getting access to a fair share of this wealth - there’s only so much labor we can do each day. What is worse is that as a consequence of this reality, many available jobs are either pointless or horrible, and most of them only exist to keep a broken system growing at the expense of both human and ecological health.
There would be no reason for us to demand jobs or fear automation if there were genuinely functioning mechanisms for us to collectively share in the spoils of the technological advancement that we have collectively contributed to. This is a complex topic that we could spend hours unpacking. But, the bottom line for me is that the build back better efforts should be seen as an opportunity not just to focus on job creation within a growth economy that is entirely unequal and fueled by a damaging exponential growth trajectory—but instead to really look at fundamental economic reform. That is, we should propose a shift to the kind of system that will actually lead to a just, regenerative, circular economy - where incentives are aligned to create these kinds of beneficial outcomes for everyone.
Taking into account the benefits accruing with a fair sharing of automated production, what kind of jobs do you see having a role in this system?
To be clear, humans get a lot of meaning from work; it’s not just about earning money and surviving. And even in this very different economic system I’m speaking of, there would be jobs. But our relationship with work would likely be much different. There would be no need for pointless work; we would embrace automation. Machine labor could potentially be taxed as one mechanism for redistributing wealth more broadly. Many of us could genuinely embrace shorter formal work weeks and spend more time on meaningful uses of our time: creativity, learning, teaching, social interaction, caring for one another.
We could focus our efforts on occupations that are fundamentally human: generating new knowledge, innovating. But this shift is only possible if we restructure the economy away from its current incentives and patterns - build in essential failsafes against runway concentration of wealth and create mechanisms for redistribution, while creating fair reward systems that still motivate people to develop, progress, and innovate. Unfortunately there’s no mention of this kind of more radical restructuring in any of the build back better programs I have seen.
You're a champion of systems thinking, and you just mentioned some of the biggest challenges we are facing, from inequality to climate change and systemic poverty - with pandemics coming and going in waves. When we search for the interconnections among these challenges and their root causes, is it the economic story that we need to look into?
Indeed - that is one of our core hypotheses within Metabolic. If you look at the data, it seems to make very clear sense that the structure of our economic system is indeed the fundamental root cause, which is resulting in a lot of these other problems. To break it down in very simple terms: the economic system that we've designed, fails—it basically collapses—if it doesn't grow. That is because if you put your money in the bank, that money is lent out to speculators, who use it to make investments, with the assumption that those investments will grow. And it's also the expected returns that are gambled on. So—basically—we're gambling on the future expansion of the economy.
“The economic system that we’ve designed fails—it basically collapses—if it doesn’t grow”
If the economy doesn't actually grow as projected, then the banks default on those loans and then the money is gone. This is a kind of model that locks in the demand for growth. That's also put in place by things like interest rates, and the fact that when we calculate the returns on investments in the future, the standard is to use a Net Present Value calculation where you value the money in the future a lot less than you value the money in the present. That, fundamentally, creates short-termism in the economy and bakes in this growth imperative.
What other system dynamics are at play that lock us in the current trajectory?
Something called success to the successful, for example. This is a common system dynamic, a kind of positive reinforcing loop. It basically boils down to the fact that if you have money or capital, it becomes very easy for you to earn more money and capital. And over time, this winnows out a very small group of winners who are continuously, more easily, able to earn that money, whereas the rest of the population falls through the cracks. That entrenches systemic poverty and inequality. It also means that the people who have that increasingly small concentrated amount of wealth, have the incentive to keep that system in place and to keep it running.
Now, it's bad enough on a social level where it creates these different, baked-in inequalities. But it also has huge consequences for the environment, because the way that the economy grows is now highly dependent on resources that we extract from the earth. So for every euro or dollar that's generated, we actually have had to expend energy, we've had to take materials out of the environment, cut down forests, emit CO2, and cause countless other physical impacts. There's this horrible link between the growth economic model, the types of inequality and injustice that we're seeing, and the massive environmental destruction that we've been causing as a species. They're all interconnected.
“There’s this horrible link between the growth economic model, the types of inequality and injustice that we’re seeing, and the massive environmental destruction that we’ve been causing as a species”
The economic and social implications stand out clearly. When it comes to environmental implications, what about this story of the circular economy as being able to decouple growth from resource extraction and consumption?
There's this whole idea that we're going to be able to decouple environmental impact from economic growth, but—thus far—it’s not really proving to be all that simple, despite our best efforts with eco-labels and sustainable products. That's because there is a very strong disincentive to reduce growth as a whole. And because, fundamentally, decoupling has a limit. There's been this whole top-down drive or culture of consumerism that has been put in place to basically get people to consume more and more stuff. Because that is one of the things that can continue the motor of the economy.
But if you have a finite planet, with finite resources, and also a population that really shouldn't continue growing, after a certain point we have to accept the fact that there's no more growth to be had. There are only so many pairs of shoes or new cell phones you can buy. And even though products that are designed to be fully “circular” and compliant with various eco-labels will have much less of a negative environmental impact, there’s a limit to that logic; they will still have some kind of impact, which will be multiplied by however many of these products we consume. We should, in fact, be creating a system that disincentivizes pointless consumption—rather than increasing those incentives—if we actually want to achieve this decoupling. Which, again, isn’t possible unless you redesign the economy so that it doesn’t collapse if it doesn’t grow. A lot of the change that has to happen is really systemic.
“After a certain point we have to accept the fact that there’s no more growth to be had”
Any ideas on how to achieve that?
We have—first of all—to rewrite the basic rules of the economy, to remove these incentives for short-termism and these feedback loops that keep advantage in specific individuals. The economy has to no longer be dependent on growth in order to function. And there are many alternatives that have been theorised in steady-state economic models, for example. Why does a company have to grow? Why does an economy have to grow if it produces enough resources to keep things the way they are, where you know you’re going to be able to get a great salary?
Let’s say a company is producing crackers - there are only so many crackers that people need, and you don't need to produce more than that. We have a lot of data that we can derive from the total human population - we know how many calories people can consume and how many crackers they can have. If a company was designed to produce enough and basically take the value generated through that to provide livelihoods, that would be fine. Just make enough crackers to pay the bills - and provide people with an essential good while you’re at it. And the entire economy could work that way. But that's not something that people are interested in seeing a shift toward, because those who control the reins benefit tremendously from the existing growth model: they get to collect all the excess profit.
If the growth model is a major problem, can a degrowth model be a solution? Do you find it a compelling narrative for socio-economic change?
Well, I think, as a societal narrative, it's probably not that attractive - it's even hard to sell a city a steady-state economic model. Let me give you an example - people like gambling. They like the idea of playing the lottery and imagining the chance that despite their pretty bad lot in life they might have a winning ticket that will change everything and suddenly land them at the top of the pecking order. I think that is actually one of the reasons that—despite the fact that people understand that this whole system is rigged against them—they are still kind of holding out for this idea of making it huge and getting to the top. And that kind of opportunity to be insanely rich is not readily associated with a degrowth model.
Why are we so attached to this growth narrative?
The whole idea of growth has also been pushed through sustainable development agencies as being essential for achieving wellbeing. There's this false narrative that says that if the economy doesn't grow, then no more wealth is created to be redistributed to the population as a whole. But, in fact, a lot of studies have shown that, in order to achieve the level of physical resources necessary to have a satisfying, healthy, and fulfilled life, you actually don't need so much. And beyond a certain amount of wealth, the returns on wellbeing go down significantly. That threshold number is surprisingly low. I don't remember exactly, but it's something like 15,000 to 20,000 euros a year in salary. Beyond that, your wellbeing returns go down.
“There’s this false narrative that says that if the economy doesn’t grow, then no more wealth is created to be redistributed to the population as a whole”
Growth is associated with a few of these very powerful narratives - this possibility of making it big, the fact that it’s essential for creating sufficient wealth to go around worldwide. It’s also associated with the idea of innovation - that you need economic growth for progress and innovation. However, I believe all of these arguments to be limited or false.
Going beyond the battle of narratives - what’s the role of degrowth in the current situation?
When we talk about a degrowth model, one of the most important things to note is that we've grown the throughput of the economy to a certain level where it's unsustainable already. We know that we're consuming way more resources than the planet can sustainably produce. Every year, there is Earth Overshoot Day—which gets earlier and earlier in the year—when we have consumed the sustainable output of the planet for the year. Last year, it was at the end of July. So, understandably, to get to a sustainable economy, we have to start shrinking its total size - or at least its resource throughput - to a certain baseline. But this is very different than a continuous state of degrowth - which probably just has people imagine us going back to the Middle Ages.
For me, the important point is that the economy needs to equilibrate at a certain level of throughput that is appropriate for the size of the human population. We also need to install certain types of guardrails based on the planetary boundaries. We know that there's only so much land that should be dedicated to human use, and the rest should be left as wilderness. We have to define this safe operating space and then keep ourselves within that. It really is ultimately about creating a steady-state model - at least in terms of resource throughput. Getting to a “safe and just” operating space will inevitably require adjustment or recalibration of the current size of the economy as it is now. To get to that point, you can say there would likely be a period of degrowth. But focusing on degrowth as an alternative economic narrative may not be the most compelling way to talk about it.
“The economy needs to equilibrate at a certain level of throughput that is appropriate for the size of the human population”
Earlier you touched upon the limits and challenges of decoupling. And, as you said, international institutions and development agencies often embrace this narrative. But if the circular economy is not a mechanism for decoupling, what is it best seen as?
I wouldn't categorically say that the circular economy is not a mechanism for decoupling - I think it very much can be so. My thinking on decoupling is a little bit more nuanced. I certainly think that decoupling is possible. We know that the best practices available for, let's say, food production—like closed greenhouse systems with water recirculation—can drastically reduce land and water footprints and, if properly done, even energy footprint. So you can really decouple the total amount of resources needed to produce certain types of outputs. And that's true for a very broad range of products and manufacturing systems.
The problem is that the way circular economy and decoupling measures are being implemented in our society are highly constrained by the growth imperative. Ultimately, what you see on the macro level is that we're not being successful at decoupling, despite adopting these types of measures and ways of thinking. There have been various estimates about how much decoupling we need, and obviously this is a moving target. But for a long time, there was the statement that we need to have a tenfold (ten times) absolute decoupling of material throughput in order to bring ourselves into a safe operating space. And that would be despite any kind of additional population growth - the resource throughput still has to go down tenfold in absolute terms.
“The problem is that the way circular economy and decoupling measures are being implemented in our society is highly constrained by the growth imperative”
What we've seen is relative decoupling - we’ve gotten more efficient per dollar or per euro generated. But overall—because of increases in the overall size of the economy and the population—resource throughput has continued to go up, just a bit slower. We're very, very far from achieving this tenfold absolute decoupling.
Does that mean that we have been focusing on a fragmented picture—putting efforts into making the small bits more efficient—rather than looking at it as a structural improvement on the whole system?
Exactly. When I talk about it in some of my presentations, I point out that it's because we're not using a systemic approach, even within the constraints of the current growth model. People are focused on optimising certain parts of the system that don't necessarily need to be optimised, or not paying attention to rebound effects. As a simple example, you can consider cars. You can take a car and redesign it to use 10 times less resources and 10 times less fuel. And therefore, in theory, you could try to achieve decoupling in that way. But what it turns out is that when we increase the efficiency of individual devices—especially energy-using devices—people simply use them more - so much more that it actually overwhelms the initial gains that you've got from that efficiency gain.
“People are focused on optimising certain parts of the system that don’t necessarily need to be optimised, or not paying attention to rebound effects”
Partly, the reason for cars in particular is that we're so dependent on them. In many countries, if you don't have a car, you can't get to work. You can’t do what you need to do with your life. The demand for that service is very minimally elastic. And the reason is because we've designed the system around the car to really demand that. The entire infrastructure and fabric of our cities has been designed to be very dependent on this kind of mobility. If you want to achieve decoupling—say in the mobility space—you actually have to start redesigning urban environments, public transport systems and how those are incentivised, where people are living relative to where they're working, the walkability of environments.
That's the kind of system-level intervention that would lead to decoupling, whereas people are really often focused on the object level - intervention or optimising one particular piece, without looking at the root causes for why that piece is so highly in demand. That's actually just a microcosm of the bigger problem that we're facing, where we actually need to be redesigning the rules of the economy to really achieve that decoupling properly. The circular economy is a mechanism for decoupling, if it's delivered and applied systemically, and targeted at the right level - but it's often not being done that way.
You expressed critical remarks about the current narrative of a ‘New Deal’ predominantly centred around job creation. When we talk about circular jobs, I often hear a focus on repairing and recycling jobs. This looks—to me—as an easy way out of the discussion, only scratching the surface of the true implications that a circular economy will have on the job market. What do you think those implications will be?
A lot of the definitions that I've seen for circular jobs I do find superficial indeed, like you're saying. A lot of them are focused on repair and remanufacturing sectors, and also on the support systems for that. Sometimes definitions of circular jobs are phrased extremely broadly - for example, considering all jobs in architecture “circular” because there's a potential for buildings to be designed in a circular way. If you really envision what a circular economy would look like in the end, one of the important driving outcomes is that we would close certain resource cycles on much smaller spatial scales, which will lead to the reorganization of value chains and the redistribution of production. This could have quite broad implications for the nature of jobs and their distribution.
How would this impact local jobs available to people?
For the kinds of jobs that have to do with physical production and manufacturing based on commonly available resources, we would likely be looking at much more decentralized and smaller-scale businesses based on local context. Whereas certain resource flows, like metals that are very scarce—and need specialised technologies to reprocess—would be dealt with on larger scales, nutrients and food production would be dealt with on an intermediate scale.
You have a different scalar approach to how you ideally are processing and cycling these different types of resources depending on their ubiquity. That would lead to a different type of fabric—economic and physical fabric of cities and regions—where they have different types of processing and resource centres based on this flow of materials on an idealised scale.
And—starting from where we are right now—how can we achieve such a scalar approach?
That has to happen organically through different incentives. It's not that you masterplan this - you create the types of incentives that result in this type of pattern. I think that there would be, bottom-up, new types of value chains that emerge as a result of these resource flows being available. More regionally-specialised products and goods and services will be built around the value chains that are present in that region, eventually moving toward a much more biobased and renewable-based set of flows. For example, you can think of new types of artisanal products based on alternative types of textiles, and having these things processed locally, in green production and manufacturing hubs that link the creative industry and also automation, to reduce trivial and unpleasant labour.
“It’s not that you masterplan this - you create the types of incentives that result in this type of pattern”
Of course, there's also a lot having to do with circularity that isn't just about physical things and materials. There are many opportunities in the tech space, such as developing systems for tracking and tracing materials and being able to understand where they're going and what state they're in. A lot of intellectual work is required to manage and oversee this. There's also work to do in Earth observation and remote sensing - making sure that we have sensors to provide us with feedback about how we're managing resources on the planet. There would be a lot of creative labour beyond that.
I think that moving towards circular systems would open up a lot more space for jobs that are particularly human in nature - things that require creativity, interaction, design, relations between people. There would actually be a lot more space for that type of employment once we have optimised and stabilised a lot of the basic resource flows. So, the way that the job and employment market would look like in a circular economy, I think is quite different from how it's often described around, like ‘everyone's going to be a bike mechanic’.
“Moving towards circular systems would open up a lot more space for jobs that are particularly human in nature - things that require creativity, interaction, design, relations between people”
Another point of discussion relates to circular business models and their fit for different materials and types of products. As an example, product-as-a-service in the fashion industry—like leasing a t-shirt rather than selling it—might lead to the consumer taking less care of the product or using it as additional consumption to standard consumption. That is, it might have adverse effects in terms of overall resource consumption. What’s your perspective on this point?
I don't think there's such a thing as an inherently circular business model. Frankly, it all depends on whether you have the appropriate business model for the context of what you're selling. And, for me, if you have a business model that appropriately incentivises preserving the highest quality components and materials in circulation, then you can say—in this context—it’s a circular business model. I've always made fun of the idea of leasing clothing and the suggestion that this is automatically circular. For me, the idea of product-as-a service makes a lot of sense when you have complex products that are made of very high-value critical materials that you need to make sure are returned back to a place where they can be processed centrally. Whereas, for most clothes, it would make more sense to just have very good, centralised recycling infrastructure for fabric - which, in most cases, is not in place.
“It all depends on whether you have the appropriate business model for the context of what you’re selling”
There's no real need to have this kind of specialised return service, which, incidentally, has more problems with it - you have a lot more reverse logistics expenses because you have to ship these things back to a specific place. That costs energy to do. You also create this weird situation where if all products are sold as a service, suddenly all materials are only owned by the few companies that sell these products - that becomes like a private material stock, if you take this to its conclusion.
Moreover, the cost structure is very punitive. If you don't own anything—you just have subscriptions for everything—you have to pay for all of that to these corporate overlords who own your goods. You're just on the line, you're even further divorced from a basic access to resources that you need in order to live. I don't think that there's anything wrong with the model of just selling things, as long as there are really good instructions and systems for getting those products repaired if needed, good incentives in place for that, and also—very importantly— good, centralised recycling infrastructure.
And, in some cases product leasing—like the Pay-Per-Lux model from Philips—I think has a lot of good things going for it. It works very well in large volume corporate settings like airports where it's been deployed. There are good reasons to lease a copy machine instead of buying it. But it’s not rigorous to assume that you can take a model that works well in one situation and extend it to all cases; leasing will sometimes result in more environmental impact than outright sales - it all depends on the context.
“Leasing will sometimes result in more environmental impact than outright sales - it all depends on the context”
One of Metabolic main areas of action is consulting private and public organisations in the transition to a circular economy. In this role, you require to be a challenger - challenge the old beliefs and structures of companies and take everybody to a systemic perspective. How is your strategy in trying to challenge the way up from individual interests—of single employees, departments, board, shareholders—toward a true systemic perspective?
With our consultancy, we do work with lots of companies, and we are always working toward providing new perspectives and getting people to look at complex topics from a different angle. We teach a lot about systems thinking and systems change as well as many of the topics that I'm discussing now. You're right, within organisations—depending on where people are situated—they have different degrees of influence for how they can actually deploy this knowledge. And I've definitely seen a lot of people get very frustrated with their inability to really create change in the system.
Ultimately, companies—especially publicly-traded companies that are responding to shareholders—have to behave according to the rules of the game. You can't particularly fault them for the growth imperative that they have built-in, and the expectations that they're having to address. There are a lot of really good individuals in these organisations who are trying to do their best to—within the constraints of that system—change the way they're operating, by finding circular business models and practices that overlap with these demands for returns on investment.
In some cases, there are quite some success stories where they're able to make simple tweaks to product designs, change the way things are operating or introduce new products and services that are fundamentally more sustainable. There are a lot of organisations that are trying very hard. And I do think that is also partly as a result of people getting more aware of these issues. But, ultimately, what I see is that they keep running into a wall: the fundamental drive for growth and expansion. The need to generate returns for shareholders trumps the well-meaning interests of most of the individuals working within these organisations.
“The need to generate returns for shareholders trumps the well-meaning interests of most of the individuals working within these organisations”
In the end, when it comes down to a choice between one or the other, very rarely we see companies choosing to make a loss or reduce growth in order to actually achieve these higher-level ambitions. That is profoundly frustrating to observe. That's also why I keep talking about the fact that we need fundamental economic reform, because, without that, even these very well-meaning people in these organisations are not going to be able to fundamentally enact change - they’re locked in a kind of machine.
What advice would you give to these well-intentioned people to actually achieve the change they want to see? When it comes to leadership, we always talk about the highest level of an organisation - how can individuals in middle positions also lead towards change?
Within these organisations, of course, there's a lot that you can do in a middle management position: you can bring in outside speakers, you can bring in inspiration. I think it's really important to try and get audiences at the C-board level, to wake people up and basically get them to understand that this isn't a game - we're actually facing critical tipping points that could make the Earth—if not uninhabitable—not a nice place for humans to continue living. I think that these are really important issues to continue putting out there.
There are also a lot of initiatives that you can take on, like setting up innovation programmes or pilots, and really driving forward - becoming a champion for topics like sustainability and the circular economy within the organisation. But, ultimately, I think that the constraints of these organisations will catch up to all of them, no matter what role they're in. They can either decide to try and move the needle—do the best for the 5% or 10% that they are in within this organisation—or they can take a much more radical approach and decide not to work for these organisations.
Instead, they could focus their efforts, time and energy on setting up companies that are fundamentally different, that provide the same services as these large, publicly-traded companies, but in a very different way. Set up a cooperative or a not-for-profit company that provides common services. Try to step out of the economy and create new models for the economy, and bring your friends along. One of the things I've said in the past is that one of the best ways we could really start to make this transition happen, is to starve organisations of our talent - move out of this and just build another economy from the bottom up.
“One of the best ways we could really start to make this transition happen is to starve organisations of our talent - move out of this and just build another economy from the bottom up”
If everyone took this as a charge, if we have new new rules that we've agreed upon and a new ethical code that we're basing our activities on, you can actually cut the system short, move out and set up something new. Now, that is not an easy proposal. I think it requires a coordinated movement. And that's one of the things that we're working toward putting out: a vision of how the economy could and should look like, and a transition plan for how individuals can take steps to move toward that. It's not easy. It's also not something that we fully have the answers to. And it's a process. But I think that ultimately we're going to need to do something like that - something more radical.
You have recently launched—in the role of co-founder—dayrize.com: an online consumer marketplace giving consumers better tools to make informed, sustainable purchasing decisions. This looks like a great service for people already interested in sustainability - how can this become a shopping place for the mainstream, and not only for a sustainability niche?
Dayrize is an e-commerce platform whose overarching objective is to bring consumption within planetary boundaries and to make it easy for people to to do that. And we are in fact, very much focused on designing the platform for the mainstream. Sustainability nerds like us will also enjoy it and get a lot out of it, but if we really want to bring consumption within planetary boundaries, this has to be appealing to the general population. Though people who are outright climate change deniers are probably still outside of our reach.
Throughout the western world we’ve seen a dramatic increase in the number of people who are aware of and are concerned about environmental issues —especially climate change—but they don’t know what to do about it. Importantly, they also don’t want to be inconvenienced. The idea behind Dayrize is that we do all of the difficult number crunching for you and make it very clear and easy to pick products that will reduce your environmental footprint across a range of key dimensions. A large focus is on making it a very smooth, easy shopping experience that takes away all of the confusion around sustainable purchasing and makes people feel good about their choices.
At the same time, though the concept may be simple there are many complex elements and powerful tools behind the scenes that make this possible. We are hoping to trigger a market transformation by requiring radical transparency from brands and product manufacturers. For each product that's listed on the platform, we're documenting a range of environmental impacts. There is also a minimum threshold for being able to be listed on the platform in terms of certain impact areas. We've harmonised all eco-labels, so you don't have to understand the two-hundred and fifty different options that are out there. Lastly, we will also be giving users of the platform feedback on how well they are staying within their fair share of the planetary budget for land, water, and carbon emissions. Still, this sends a very powerful message to the market, to the brands to start retooling and improving their performance on these different areas of impact.
“We are hoping to trigger a market transformation by requiring radical transparency from brands and product manufacturers”
Any final message, Eva?
As a final thought, I think that the movement toward science-based targets—and understanding and translating planetary boundaries into actual limits for our economic activity and the impact that we can have on the Earth—is very important and it's slowly getting integrated into what companies are thinking about and doing.
I also think that in terms of discussing the circular economy, it's really important to bring these two ideas together. It doesn't matter if resources are circular indefinitely in a kind of perfect circular economy, if we're still way outside of the boundaries, which is what it is technically possible. We have to bring these two trends of thinking together. Even though circular economy approaches can create a huge amount of abundance for everyone, we're still not living on an infinite planet.
September 2020
A conversation between Eva Gladek & Emanuele Di Francesco
Recommended Links:
