Welcome to the Green Alliance podcast.

We are the charity and think tank dedicated to achieving ambitious leadership for the environment.

I'm Libby Peake, Senior Fellow and Head of Resource Policy here at Green Alliance.

And I'm sad to say that resource policy is one area where ambitious leadership has sadly been lacking over the many years I've been working on the topic. But all is not lost and there's hope in that the government should be publishing the first ever circular economy growth plan for England soon,

which has to be a positive move.

This episode is a bit different to what we usually do.

Instead of the next half hour involving me talking about the circular economy,

we wanted to let you hear it for yourselves, through the voices of the people actually making it

happen. You're going to hear from people working on the ground, repairing, refurbishing,

reusing, and renting, who don't just understand the circular economy in theory, but live it every day.

Their stories are a powerful reminder that the circular economy isn't some distant policy idea. It's already here. It's

already working. And perhaps most importantly, it's something people really care about and want

to see more of. Before we dive in, it's worth saying a bit about how we came to meet them, because these

conversations didn't come out of nowhere. The circular economy, one that moves away from the

take-make waste model that costs people in planet so dearly, is something that Green

Alliance has been working on for a long time.

We launched our Circular Economy Task Force back in 2012, and we have, in recent publications,

focused in both on the startups and the large companies who are already driving better

use of resources to the benefit of their bottom lines, as well as their customers, not to mention the

environment. Given this government's overarching interest in growth, we've also done some deep

dives into wider economic impacts, and this year worked with strategy and, part of the

PWC group on their analysis of the potential for GDP growth in the UK from a circular transition.

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