A Workshop Series around the Circular Economy (Edinburgh)
- Date: 23 May 2011
- Location/venue: The Melting Pot, Edinburgh, EH2 2PR
A free workshop series for UK academic lecturers:
STEM :: Design :: Business :: Economics
What role can your discipline play in the future of educating for a circular economy?
This workshop was for you to:
- learn about the circular economy (CE) – a comprehensive approach to sustainability – and associated tools, such as biomimicry, cradle to cradle thinking, positive development, green chemistry, Blue Economy and natural capitalism
- dialogue in disciplinary and interdisciplinary groups to discuss engagement with the circular economy and the curriculum, as well as ideas for CE projects. These sessions will be facilitated by appropriate academics/specialists in the field and will include a creative task to focus the discussions.
- feed back to the Foundation and the HEA on their roles and possible support mechanisms necessary to develop curriculum in HEIs around the CE
This event was free of charge. Please see link below for programme and other resources.
Highly volatile energy prices and increasing tightness in the supply of raw materials point to the end game for an economy built on cheap energy and vast materials throughput. Add in the challenges in financial markets around credit and in creating sufficient jobs to satisfy the aspirations of broad swathes of society and the transition required is profound.New business opportunities and educational and training innovation is beginning to emerge around a model which is variously described as a ‘circular economy’ or a ‘cradle to cradle’ approach. Businesses already working within a circular economy frame include Procter & Gamble, Phillips, Desso, Aveda, Steelcase, and InterfaceFLOR.
These workshops provided an opportunity for small group dialogue around systems thinking and product, service and system design. Discussion focused on the framework and the thinking skills that will be at the core of a transition to a circular economy.
More information on the Ellen MacArthur Foundation:
The Foundation’s goal is an education which sees the challenges of a resource-constrained world as an opportunity to innovate and accomplish remarkable things in the redesign of our industrial systems. It is about a changed education perspective first and foremost -moving from an emphasis on ameliorating the effects of the ‘take-make- dispose (linear) economy’ to the search for virtuous cycles of economic development (the ‘circular economy’). The Foundation’s education programme is not about the environment, saving the planet, a culture of less and less, about guilt management or about being green. Rather, it is about a design philosophy, about how we produce and consume and how we enable the transition to a prosperous, beneficial and restorative economy and the skills, innovations, technologies and systemic changes which will be needed.
In communicating the ‘circular economy’ argument in our education work we recognise that it is only one perspective of many, one aspect of the complex global set of issues surrounding transition. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation wishes to position this circular economy framework as a way of enriching the debate and encouraging the discussion around the task of creating the conditions for a new industrial revolution. The Foundation, working with its business and education partners, wishes to be identified as an organisation helping to make sense of the question ‘which way forward?’ It intends to focus on the big picture, on systems and citizenship and the role of leadership in the achievement of ‘a new industrial revolution, by design’.
