New guide on ‘Questions to help you put circularity at the heart of your business strategy’ launched

IEMA's Circular Economy Network Steering Group has published a guide on questions to ask yourself to put circularity at the heart of your business strategy. IEMA's Policy and Engagement Lead on Circular Economy Adam Batchelor tells us more about this new guide.

IEMA’s guide ‘How to integrate circular strategies into your business model’ explained how the ‘six goals for decision-makers’ can help develop an overarching circular strategy, providing opportunities for organisation to do better, with less.

This new guide builds on that initial work by exploring how to integrate circular strategies into business models by asking questions to help you think differently. These questions are designed to help challenge the traditional business model and can help create more value for businesses and customers while ensuring that circular practice is beneficial in the long term for all involved, both upstream and downstream of the business’ core activities.

Questioning whether existing strategies undermine sustainability can reveal how unsustainable approaches also undermine value from a customer’s point of view, and what these costs could be to business. Furthermore, questioning existing strategies can help the transition to a circular solution, are less resource intensive, reduce emissions and pollution, and create more value for all stakeholders.

This guide follows the ‘six goals for decision-maker’ and offers questions and examples to help kick-start a redesign of your overall organisational strategy, or to design a strategy for a new business.

The guide covers the following sections:

• Section 1 introduces the importance of circular strategies for businesses and organisations.
• Section 2 considers how customer priorities might have changed.
• Section 3 explains how ‘sell more’ strategies can undermine sustainability and value for customers and businesses.
• Section 4 explains how circular strategies create more for customers.
• Section 5 explores how shifting from ownership to usership can meet customers’ needs while creating value.
• Section 6 puts the three core circular goals into practice with questions and examples to spark ideas to help develop circular strategies.
• Section 7 looks at how the shared value goal creates value for all stakeholders, with practical
• questions and examples.
• Section 8 considers some of the operational changes needed to support circular strategies.
• Section 9 looks at how the narrow and regenerate goals can boost efficiency and effectiveness.
• Sections 10 and 11 summarise the guide with key references.

IEMA member can download their copy here

Non-IEMA members can purchase the document here (under 'Sustainability in Practice Guides')