Celebrating our collective impact
Kia ora tātou!
Ko Benji tōku ingoa.
E noho ana ki Te Whanganui-a-tara.
Kei Circularity ahau e mahi ana.
The focus of my work at Circularity is to help our partners, stakeholders, clients, and communities measure and reduce the impact they have on the environment. Many business decisions are based on economic impact but here at Circularity, we like to activate circular economy principles to improve environmental, social, and economic outcomes.
Our impact is your impact -
Circularity and Partners Collective Impact 2020-June 2023
I want to share with you some of the work we have done with our clients and partners over the last year as we look to improve our collective impact, by working together.
We measure our impact across all aspects of our work, brought together by our Theory of Change. A Theory of Change is a specific and measurable description of social or environmental change that forms the basis for planning, ongoing decision-making, and evaluation for an organisation.
Our theory of change is guided by our overall mission to help businesses unlock solutions that are better for people and the planet. We do that by helping them shape bold visions, build capability, design solutions, and share impact. The outcome of this work together is an increase in the circularity of resources, designing out waste and emissions, and regenerating living systems.
Circularity’s Theory of Change formed the basis of our BCorp certification process in 2022. BCorp is one of the gold standards for businesses looking to measure and validate their entire social and environmental impact. To certify businesses must complete an assessment which has questions relating to 5 categories; Governance, Community, Workers, Environment and Customers. Businesses can get points by either providing evidence of positive impact within their operations or through what is called an IBM (Impact Business Model). To qualify for an IBM your impact needs to be generated from a revenue earning service or product.
Two IBM’s that Circularity achieved through certification was Environmental Education and Impact Improvement. Environmental Education was achieved through our award winning circular economy program XLabs that has been running for 3 years. Impact Improvement was validated through our work with the Circular Transition Indicator (CTI). CTI is a globally recognised tool developed by WBCSD and 30 of its members to measure and monitor a company's circular performance. It provides a simple and sector-agnostic way for companies to understand their baseline circularity, design a range of potential solutions, develop a roadmap, and monitor performance over a range of horizons.
125+ Strategies for Change -
We started the year off with the Business for Good program which ran from February to April. The program was developed by BLab in partnership with New Zealand Trade and Enterprise and connects BCorp consultants with companies looking to start their BCorp journey and get certified. Circularity consulted to Ōku, Miraka, Dancing Sands, and The Collective providing them with recommendations on how to improve their score and reach certification status (80 points or over). These recommendations were included in our strategies for change metric which meant we enabled 39 strategies for change since January 2023. Massive shout out to Ōku who are now a certified BCorp and had their story featured on Seven Sharp! We are also working with The Collective who are doing the mahi to certify in the not-too-distant future.
Throughout 2023, Circularity has been working with Silver Fern Farms to bring their circular strategy to life and support the work they are doing to redefine what it means to be the world's most successful and sustainable grass-fed red meat company. By applying circular economy principles to PPE, Water and Packaging - Silver Fern Farms have a significant opportunity to achieve their waste-to-landfill reductions and water circularity goals by 2026.
In the same period, we have been working alongside a leading plastic container manufacturer in New Zealand to create a reusable strategy and service that would allow them to improve the circularity of their packaging materials by 80.63%.
Building capability -
One way we measure our means to build capability is to aggregate the number of people who have engaged with our services across platforms like webinars and panel events, programs such as XLabs LEARN and LIVE, and our own podcast, The Redesign of Everything. One of our favorite programs we like to deliver in partnership with Plastics NZ is the Re: Plastics training program, designed to build capability and advance a circular economy for plastics in New Zealand. Over the period, of 2020 to June 2023 we estimated we had engaged 23,583 individuals with the potential to influence 44k employees decision-making across all aspects of the business.
XLabs acts as an important catalyst to increase our collective impact and accelerate change by creating the space for more collaborative collisions, more imaginative innovation, and more tangible progress. In June 2023 we hosted a 1-day XLabs taster event at Papamoa Surf Club, with a range of businesses joining from around the Bay of Plenty region. At XLabs, we like to take teams through an activity called ‘map the system’ which requires businesses to map all the activities across their value chain and identify the most significant impacts within this system. For many, this activity brings about a new systems perspective and leads to ‘aha moments’ about the opportunities to redesign impact ‘hotspots’ for positive impact.
To date, we have had 302 businesses actively participate in XLabs and collectively design 36 circular solutions pitched to stakeholders for implementation. These solutions have the potential to keep 730,648 tonnes of materials in flow for everything from packaging, timber, crop waste, children's shoes, MDF, textiles and power poles, increasing average circularity by 28.5%.
We can’t wait to update these figures with our XLabs Future of Food results with 23 food leaders across Aoteaora.
Lighting the path forward -
Celebrating impact would not be possible without the incredible opportunities given to us by organisations across Aotearoa who have an appetite for change and want to solve complex problems. If you are reading this, you know who you are.
At Circularity, we are always looking to learn from others and we know the power of creating a shared understanding of the challenges we face. Our whakatauki gifted to us sums this up quite nicely:
Mā mua ka kite a muri, mā muri ka ora a mua
Those who lead give sight to those who follow, those we follow give life to those who lead.
We invite you to consider, how might the circular economy enable you to increase your positive impact?
As always, if you wish to discuss the subject of impact please don't hesitate to get in touch with myself or CEO and Founder of Circularity Louise Nash.
Together, we are co-creating the future to be circular.
Ngā mihi nui,
Benji