The Circular Economy Show Podcast

Welcome to another episode of Circular Snapshots. In this episode, we highlight some of the circular economy stories that mattered from August to October. The World Circular Economy Forum makes its South Asia debut and sets its sights on New York. Over 70 developing countries push for an ambitious plastics treaty. The EU Circular Economy Act is weeks away. Octopus Energy and CATL plan to make shared infrastructure for truck batteries. A new report asks why textile recycling can’t get financed.
To find out more about each of these stories, follow the links below:
World Circular Economy Forum: Sitra’s write-up of the forum, its investment takeaways, the Circular Awards winners and WCEF2027 in New York. WCEF: World’s leading circularity event reveals how to unlock investment.
Plastics treaty: what came out of the Bangkok talks and what’s next. This is CIEL’s take, and CIEL is a campaign group, so the framing isn’t neutral. Countries unite behind effective multilateralism during plastics treaty talks in Bangkok.
EU Circular Economy Act: the European Parliament’s tracker for the Act. It’s neutral and will update when the proposal lands. Legislative Train: Circular Economy Act.
Swaptopus: Octopus Energy’s own announcement of the venture with CATL. Big on Batteries: Octopus and CATL team up to unlock electric trucking across Europe.
Textile recycling finance: a summary of the Accelerating Circularity report 'Systemic Bankability of Textile-to-Textile Recycling'

Tourism is on the COP31 agenda in Antalya, Türkiye, on 18 November, with zero waste and the circular economy now firmly part of the climate action conversation. So what does a circular economy for tourism look like in practice?
This week on The Circular Economy Show, Pippa is joined by Patricia Dueñas from Iberostar Hotels & Resorts and Virginia Fernández-Trapa from UN Tourism. Together, they make the case that circular tourism needs local infrastructure, consistent policy, coordination at destination level and a proven business case.
That makes the year ahead an important one. With 2027 named the UN’s International Year of Sustainable and Resilient Tourism, businesses and destinations have a chance to take this on together.
Here’s the link to the white paper discussed in the episode: https://waveofchange.com/resource/circular-tourism-in-practice/
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Zaid Hassan has spent 25 years in systems change, and he thinks the field fooled itself. Beautiful diagrams that feel like progress and change nothing. Skills that AI will take first. Joe Iles asks him what actually works, and why he still ends his new book with three words: it's not that hard.
Zaid is a strategist, facilitator and writer. He has advised organisations across the globe including the World Bank, Oxfam, WWF and more. He is the author of the Social Labs Revolution (2014) and more recently How To Evolve And How Not To (2026).
Find out more about his work here:
https://xinx.co/
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Most of our clothes contain stretch. That stretch usually comes from a fibre called elastane, which is one of the biggest barriers to recycling clothing at scale.
In this episode of the Circular Economy Show, Seb Egerton-Read sits down with Georgia Parker of Fashion for Good and Lewis Shuler of Paradise Textiles (Alpine Group) to discuss why the industry reached for elastane by default rather than by intent.
They discuss how their project, 'Stretching Circularity' brings together brands, innovators, supply chain partners, and ecosystem experts to generate data on performance, recyclability, commercial feasibility, and mapping the barriers to scale.
The goal is to speed up the development and adoption of lower-impact elastane solutions. Although no single fibre will replace elastane, and no single company can solve it alone. Today's bio-based and recycled alternatives are fragmented and early stage, which is why coordinated and compounded industry action is needed to match the scale of the problem.
Links:
Stretching Circularity - https://www.fashionforgood.com/case-study/stretching-circularity-project/
The new bottom line - https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/policy-levers-for-resale-and-repair/report
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A hundred trillion dollars of capital lined up behind climate. It was never going to be enough. In part two, Jeremy Oppenheim tells Joe what actually moves a market, from Pakistan's solar boom to a copper mine in Mongolia, and why the voluntary playbook the movement leaned on for a decade has run its course.
Conversations with a CE/O is a new series on The Circular Economy where the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s CEO Joe Murphy sits down with leaders whose decisions are shaping the economy and asks one question. We’ve been working on the circular economy for more than a decade, the next 10 years will look nothing like the last, so how does the work itself need to change?
Links:
SystemIQ at 10 - https://www.systemiq.earth/systemiq-at-10/
Blue Whale Enquiry - https://www.systemiq.earth/reports/bluewhale/
The work ahead - https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/the-work-ahead
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