Back To Basics

Today’s topic is the EU Taxonomy!

As you already know, transition to the circular economy is crucial to achieve Paris Agreement goals and mitigate the effects of climate change.

We already introduced you to some examples of successful circular businesses. However, we need our whole economy to adopt the circular approach to their businesses. You may wonder how?

Here is one of the answers. The EU just introduced the EU Taxonomy which helps to navigate the transition to a low-carbon, resilient and resource-efficient economy. It established performance thresholds for economic activities which: - make a substantive contribution to one of six environmental objectives, - do no significant harm to the other five, - meet minimum safeguards.

The performance thresholds will assist businesses, project developers, and issuers in gaining access to green funding in order to increase their environmental performance, as well as in identifying which practices are already environmentally friendly. As a result, it would continue to expand low-carbon sectors while decarbonizing high-carbon ones. The EU Taxonomy is one of the most significant breakthroughs in sustainable finance, with far-reaching consequences for investors and issuers in the EU and elsewhere.

The next circular business model we want to share with you is the business case of Emma Safety Footwear.

Emma is one of the customers of Cirmar, our project client. The company is located in Kerkade, the Netherlands, about 45 km from Maastricht. Emma offers circular safety footwear.  As part of a pilot project, they tested a "shoes as a service" model in collaboration with one of their customers. The goals are better fit for workers, better maintenance and cleaning, and a higher return rate of used shoes for recycling. The fashion industry, including footwear, is one of the most polluting industries in the world (Allwood et al., 2006). By exploring how shoes can be offered as a service, EMMA is pioneering the testing of the circular economy in this industry - working towards longer product life and higher recycling rates. The key idea is to extend the useful life of a shoe by providing workers with a maintenance kit, and to close the loop by designing the shoes so that they can be easily disassembled, and the parts recovered for recycling. FBBasic and Cirmar are supporting Emma in this process to replace input materials for easy recyclability and improve product design for easy disassembly.

Each circular shoe has its own material passport (c_passport), the materials used have a particularly long service life and all raw materials are recycled after use. For proper recycling, it is of particular importance to already find a future use case that closes the cycle of material consumption. All shoes are individually labelled so that they can be tracked through the chain.

#BackToBasics and Back to our project!

During the midterm presentation we talked about the preliminary phases of our process and we outlined the following steps that are required to ultimate the project! Let's now dive deeper into that by dividing our next steps into three main sections:

1)  Target customers

- What is the typical customer that our cliemt is aiming to reach?

- What are the characteristics of these potential customers?

- How can these clients fit in the overall FBBbasic's business strategy?

2) Value identification

- What are the data commonalities that all circular businesses share?

- How can be found a common nomenclature for recycled materials?

3) Value communication

- How can our client communicate value to the target customers identified in section 1?

- How can the cliemr improve its platforms to have a greater reach?

Meet our client - FBBasic and Cirmar!

Founded by FBBasic, Cirmar provides concepts, products and IT-applications to support and grow a circular economy. With the goal to create a circular economy and contribute to the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, Cirmar’s tools help its customers to establish circular products, components and (secondary) raw materials. Moreover,Cirmar facilitates a circular design as well as product identification through a full supply cycle: production – use stage – end of use – dismantling – reverse logistics – reuse, repare, refurbishment, recycling – next use application

To achieve these goals, recuperated raw materials will have to be recognizable and available for the market through a uniform nomenclature. This requires product identification, tracking and an insight in the positive, circular impact. Cirmar enables this through three of its products C_passport, C_bank and C_dashboard.

C_passport supports product identification and tracking. It provides a detailed overview about many aspects of the product such as the product composition up to the raw materials, the defined use of the product, refurbishment and recycling options as well as next use applications. 

C_bank is a collection of C_passports through which customers can track, trace and harbor valuable products in a supply cycle. It provides insights from sourcing to distribution. Moreover, customers can follow reverse logistics, the disassembly and decomposition of their products in order to recycle them.

Today we are presenting a quick overview about Circular Economy: the main topic around which our #premium project is revolving! 

We all heard about the externalities stemming from the traditional “take-make-waste” economic model, as well as we know how dangerous they can be for our environment.

Changes are disruptive processes, especially if they imply the shift to a completely new and different economic model. For this reason, together with FBBasic and Cirmar, we believe that it would be crucial for everyone to focus on providing alternative sustainable solutions to the status-quo. 

We will give our contribute by developing the proper tools to overcome the barriers that are preventing companies to embrace #circular_economy. Supporting our clients' #mission, our team will extract valuable insights from their dataset enabling them to comunicate the incredible benefits of a shift toward a circular business model.

Karl  | 24 | Entrepreneurship and Business Development

Matteo | 22 | Strategic Corporate Finance

Daniel | 23 | Data Science for Decision Making

Joscha | 25 | Public Policy and Human Development

Weronika | 23 | Sustainability Science, Policy and Society