Last week, the FSLCI organized its first ever industry-focussed workshop in Berlin, Germany. The workshop titled “Circular Economy, Resource Efficiency, Life Cycle Innovation: Same objectives, same impacts?” brought together representatives from various companies such as BASF, Henkel, Evonik, Steelcase and others. The principle objective of the workshop was to develop a better understanding of the circular economy concept, its meaning for a company and which opportunities and challenges derive from it.
The workshop, organized as a lunch-to-lunch meeting, and hosted by the Rainmaking Loft Berlin, started off on Tuesday with a highly insightful keynote by Martin Stuchtey, co-author of the famous Growth Within report and the recently launched follow-up publication called Achieving Growth Within. The keynote was followed by an interesting panel discussion between David Lazarevic (SYKE), Martin Stuchtey (SystemiQ), Peter Saling (BASF), Ralph Pfitzner (Siemans) and Zura Nukusheva-Béguin (UNEP).
Following the input from the keynote and the panel discussion, the interactive part of the workshop kicked off. Participants were split into three groups which worked in a rotating station system on six questions such as “Which challenges are companies facing who are trying to implement a circular economy approach?” or “Have Circular Economy, Resource Efficiency, Life Cycle Thinking the same objectives?” After a productive and intensive round of discussions, participants enjoyed the evening during networking drinks and continued the discussions over dinner.
On Wednesday morning the discussions from the previous day were summarized, before the keynote by Ralph Thurm provided a comprehensive insight into Reporting 3.0 – a platform he’s helped launch to open a new chapter on reporting to drive change. Following the panel discussion with interventions from Franz Speer (Henkel), Guido Sonnemann (University Bordeaux) and Ralph Thurm (Reporting 3.0), participants split again into three groups. While the discussions on the first day had focussed on the challenges, the second day focussed more on the opportunities of applying a circular economy approach. Questions such as “How do we stimulate the change towards a circular economy?” or “How do you measure progress in a circular economy?” were discussed. Afterwards, workshop participants reconvened over lunch to review the outcomes of the two days.
We are looking forward to sharing some really interesting insights with you, once our workshop documentation has been reviewed and approved by our workshop participants. We would also like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who participated in our workshop and or helped us make it happen! We really appreciate the positive feedback and look forward to more workshops to come!
Tags: circular economy fslci impression life cycle innovation resource-efficiency workshop
