Dame Ellen MacArthur shares her vision of a circular economy for a better planet

World record-breaking sailor Dame Ellen MacArthur has spent a lot of time on the high seas. She reveals how these experiences sparked a revelation about how to manage finite resources on our planet. Hear why she’s optimistic about transitioning to a circular economy, a system where we dramatically reduce waste and pollution.

I will never ever forget
the feeling I felt as I saw the sea

and set foot on the boat
for the first time.

And to that four-year-old kid,

it was the greatest sense of freedom
that I could ever imagine.

I just felt, you know, from that age,

I would absolutely love one day,
somehow, to sail around the world.

[In February 2005,
Ellen set a new world record

for fastest solo
circumnavigation of the globe.]

When you set off on those journeys,

you know, you take with you
everything you need for your survival.

What you have is all you have.

You have to manage what you have

down to the last drop of diesel,
the last packet of food.

It's absolutely essential,
else you won't make it.

And I suddenly realized,
"But why is our world any different?"

You know, we have finite resources,

available to us once
in the history of humanity.

You know, metals, plastics, fertilizers.

We're digging all this stuff
out of the ground, and we're using it up.

How can that work in the long-term?

Surely there was a different way
we could use resources globally

that used them and not used them up.

That was the question I had in my head,

and it took me a long time
to get to a place

where I realized there is
a different way the economy can run,

there is a different way
we can use stuff, use materials.

And that would be the circular economy.

The way the economy functions
predominately today is very extractive.

It's linear.

We take something out of the ground,
we make something out of it,

and at the end of the life
of that product, we throw it away.

No matter how efficient you are

with the materials
you feed into that system,

even if you make that product

using a little bit less energy
and a little bit less material,

you're still going to run out in the end.

If you turn that on its head
and look at a circular model,

whereby when you design a product,

you take a material out of the ground,
or you take recycle material, ideally,

you feed that into the product,

but you design the products

so you can get the materials back out
by design, from the outset.

You design out waste and pollution.

Why would you ever create either
in a world with finite resources?

It's about the design brief.

Today, if you buy a washing machine,

you pay tax when you buy it,
you own all the materials within it,

and then when it breaks,
as they inevitably do,

you pay tax again, landfill tax.

Within a circular system,
all that changes.

You don't own your machine,
you pay per wash.

It would be looked after
by the manufacturer of the machine,

and they would make sure
that once it comes to the end of its life,

they take it in,
they know what sits within it,

and they can recover
the materials from it.

So you end up with a circular
system by design.

We've studied at great length
the numbers behind that,

you know, the economics,

and it's much cheaper.

It's US$ 0.12 versus US$ 0.27 per wash
to have that circular machine.

We would live within a system that works.

We would not be producing waste.

We would have a better service.

We would have better access to technology.

From all the studies we've done,

because those manufacturers
aren't buying all the materials,

selling them on,

we would get a better price,

because they would be guaranteed
their flow of materials

going back into the system.

I'm hugely optimistic

because when you look at the numbers,

when you look at
the economics behind this,

it makes sense to switch
to a circular economy.

There's more value in a circular economy
than in a linear economy.

There's absolutely a cost
in the transition for a big organization,

but maybe you need to ask yourself
another question:

what's the risk in linear?

Because to me, that's a no-brainer.

There's a big risk in linear.

It simply cannot be the future,
based on pure economics.

So, actually, where do you put your time?

Where do you put your effort?

Let's work out what circular
really looks like

and try and paint that circular tapestry
as best as we possibly can.