The Circular Industries Talks are organized every second Wednesday at the Circular Industries Hub. In this edition, Sicco Santema, Professor in Responsible Marketing and Consumer Behaviour at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at TU Delft, discusses the topic of connected circularity. Curious for more? Take a look at the recording at the bottom of this page.
“In the transaction based economy there will be no (true) circularity.”
My contribution is a bit philosophical. We live in a money driven business society, that ‘pushes’ goods and services from raw materials to end users to disposal (in terms of any of the ‘RE’s’). A company consists of silo’s, a supply chain consists of many companies. Transaction cost economics (as an example) maximises sales and minimizes purchasing (= profit maximization). Evenly important is that transactions shift the ownership (and thus responsibility) of good and services to customers. The connection form the end to the beginning is thus lost. This means that ‘flipping the supply chain’ needs again a series of transactions, even further disconnecting the original supplier from his contribution to the end product or service. Our business system is now so much based and oriented on money as the key dominating factor, that I am happy that the EU CSRD legislation is coming in place, allowing us to redefine others values of doing business in a network and thus value circularity. It also allows us to think supply chain based with respect to circularity, a new frame on give and take, a new frame on reusing, remanufacturing materials that are not dug out of our one earth.
Curious about the whole story? Listen to Sicco in the Circular Industries talks.
The Circular Industries talks
The goal of the Circular Industries talks is to share knowledge across Leiden, Delft and Erasmus and to complement and deepen the knowledge already available within the Circular Industries Hub. The talks are organized on Wednesday morning from 10:00 to 11:00. The talks are online (Microsoft Teams).