The Ellen MacArthur Foundation was launched in 2010 to accelerate the transition to a circular economy. Since their creation, they have emerged as a global thought leader, establishing the circular economy on the agenda of decision-makers across business, government, and academia.
Why we’re aligned with the Foundation:
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation is a widely-recognised and truly inspiring think tank. It has been instrumental in promoting the concept of the circular economy by consolidating approaches and creating a coherent framework, thereby giving the concept wide exposure and appeal.
BioPak is a vocal advocate of the circular economy. Our products are designed with circularity in mind: we use renewable materials to make products that can be turned into a new resource, compost, along with food scraps. The work of the Foundation is a great source of inspiration, best practices and tools, and we have been repetitively involved in their industry initiatives.
About the Foundation:
The Foundation’s vision is a new economic system that delivers better outcomes for people and the environment. Business models, products, and materials are designed to increase use and reuse, replicating the balance of the natural world, where nothing becomes waste and everything has value. A circular economy, increasingly built on renewable energy and materials, is distributed, diverse, and inclusive.
The current system is no longer working for businesses, people or the environment. We take resources from the ground to make products, which we use, and, when we no longer want them, throw them away. Take-make-waste. We call this a linear economy.
The linear economy has to change.
We must transform all the elements of the take-make-waste system: how we manage resources, how we make and use products, and what we do with the materials afterwards. Only then can we create a thriving economy that can benefit everyone within the limits of our planet. The circular economy is based on 3 main principles, which involve collecting and re-circulating biological and technical resources:
- Design out waste and pollution
- Keep products and materials in use
- Regenerate natural systems
Ellen Macarthur Foundation’s circular economy systems diagram.
Our impact:
In 2018, BioPak signed the New Plastics Economy Global Commitment, an initiative led by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation in collaboration with the UN Environment Programme. The program unites businesses, governments, and other organisations behind a common vision and targets to address plastic waste and pollution at its source. We are committed to phasing out all fossil-based plastics from our ranges, including product sleeves, by 2025 and have been reporting annually on our progress.
Our packaging concept and compost network Compost Connect have been showcased in a case study that shows how, by providing composting network, BioPak has created a circular system, ensuring that packaging and, importantly, the food it contains does end up being composted, thus contributing to the preservation of healthy soils.
In 2020, we were one of the first in our industry to complete the Circulitics Assessment. The assessment is designed to support a company’s transition towards the circular economy, regardless of industry, complexity, and size. Going beyond assessing products and material flows, this company-level measuring tool reveals the extent to which a company has achieved circularity across its entire operations.
In November 2020, the Foundation unveiled their Upstream Innovation Guide, a comprehensive toolkit to achieve a circular economy for plastic packaging. The guide is available electronically in five languages, along with an interactive, searchable database of all of the innovations profiled in the guide. BioPak’s circular approach to packaging is listed as their upstream innovation #138.
