When Zoe Daly was given the gift of a woollen blanket for her first baby, she loved it so much she wanted to buy more.
“As a mother, you worry about your baby’s temperature, about allergies and breathability. I loved the qualities of the wool. I just became obsessed with it,” she explains.
She set out to buy more. But while finding woollen blankets made in Ireland wasn’t a problem, finding ones made from Irish wool proved impossible. It perplexed her. “How can a country with millions of sheep not produce wool?” she asked.
The former documentary film producer put her research skills to work. She discovered it cost farmers more to shear sheep than they got back for the wool, making Irish wool pretty much worthless.
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So, she decided to knit up a solution herself. Working with farmers to identify the best sheep for wool, she committed to buying it from those who produced it, and at a premium price. Today she has that wool milled and spun into 100 per cent Irish yarn, before weaving it into beautiful blankets, clothing and accessories.
Under the brand name Ériu, Daly sells her luxury 100 per cent Irish woollen garments around the world online, and also supplies other designers, all from what was previously considered a worthless byproduct, and even worse, waste.
“It was that narrative of ‘Irish wool is worthless – we have to import all our wool,’ that just made no sense to me,” she says.
Today Ériu is a good example of the circular economy, capitalising on the fact that one person’s waste is indeed another’s treasure.
A range of new businesses are treading a similar path, including Bean Around, a Dublin business, that collects coffee grounds from cafes and turns them into soap bars. MyGug allows small food businesses, schools and other organisations to turn their own waste food into safe, free renewable energy. Cirtex turns used mattresses into components for everything from furniture to insulation.
It isn’t just start-ups either. Finline Furniture first opened its doors in the 1970s. For the past 10 years it has run an initiative that gives customers the option to bring back their old Finline furniture and having it reupholstered and recovered, rather than buying new pieces. More recently it has gone further, launching Revive, a range of sofas it pays to take back, restore and sell on. The stripping-back work for Revive is undertaken by a social enterprise for people recovering from addiction issues, bringing even greater value to the entire cycle.
But while such initiatives are laudable, circularity itself, in terms of entire manufacturing systems, is only at a fledgling stage, despite the fact that much more of it is required if Ireland is to hit its environmental targets.
Last year the Government commissioned a circularity gap report to establish a baseline measurement of the Republic’s circularity – that is, its ability to repurpose one thing into another, rather than use virgin materials. It found the State’s residents consume 22 tonnes of raw materials per person annually. That’s more than the EU average – 17 tonnes – and way more than the estimated sustainable level of consumption of eight tonnes.
It found that the biggest contributor to the State’s material consumption is the built environment, reflecting the housing and infrastructure needs of a rapidly growing population. The services sector, “led by booming tech and finance industries”, follows closely as the second-largest consumer.
In all, more than 97 per cent of materials in Ireland’s economy come from virgin materials, which shows the scale of the challenge ahead. Just 2.7 per cent come from secondary sources, compared with a global average of 7.2 per cent last year, according to Circle Economy, the organisation that produced the report.
Our consumption-based carbon footprint, at 12 tonnes per capita, is more than double the global average.
The report identifies several routes to improvement, including the building of a circular built environment, shaping a circular food system and advancing circular manufacturing.
The organisation at the heart of finding ways to get all this done is CirculEire, a public-private partnership created by Enterprise Ireland-backed research centre Irish Manufacturing Research (IMR). It is the first cross-sectoral industry-led innovation network dedicated to closing the circular innovation gap and accelerating the net-zero carbon circular economy in Ireland, and currently has more than 50 members committed to making this happen.
To do so will require a transformational shift, which in turn requires increasing Government support.
“The real opportunity for a circular economy is about redesigning how businesses make money by virtue of how they design their products, how those products are used and, ultimately, that they go back into systems that enable their further second, third, fourth and fifth life. It’s a transformative agenda,” explains Geraldine Brennan, IMR’s head of circular economy.
There is now a pressing need for a holistic, concerted effort to build markets for circular products and services at Government level. That’s because there remains a lack of critical mass in the form of demand from consumers, or even from business-to-business customers, to ensure this vital transformation takes place, she cautions.
This is not because there isn’t economic potential but because the transformed future is up against the status quo, which always has the upper hand. In this case, the status quo has been built up over centuries, right back to the industrial revolution, Brennan points out.
“And now we have an alternate way of doing something that requires, perhaps, R&D and investment,” she says. “It requires more labour. It requires different materials that cost more. So, there are all these costs that, over time, if you take a longer-term perspective when you are procuring something, you’re looking at the total cost of ownership, including maintenance, works out as more value for money. But if you’re only looking at point-of-sale, it’s more expensive. That remains one of the biggest barriers to its adoption.”
The risk is that inertia stifles the agenda.
“The biggest challenge to developing a circular economy in Ireland is that it still often remains easier or more commercially advantageous for businesses to adopt a linear model over a circular option, either due to economics, lack of knowledge or poor availability of recycled material,” explains Russell Smyth, head of KPMG’s sustainable futures team.
“As such, policy design needs to create the commercial incentive and rationale – be it the introduction of regulations requiring minimum levels of recycled content, investment in infrastructure to reduce circular costs, or consumer education to create real market demand for products with circular credentials.”
While he too believes that Government intervention is required and that the Government is best placed to influence the policy environment, long-term subsidies such as those provided to the renewables sector are unlikely to materialise in relation to the circular economy, given that the Government is moving “away from outright subsidies and instead seeking to put in place commercial mechanisms instead,” he says.
He points to the development of the biomethane sector, itself designed to promote the circular economy by using animal waste to create energy and digestate to displace fertiliser, as a case in point. There, the Government rejected a subsidy in favour of the Renewable Heat Obligation (RHO). Under the RHO mechanism the Government mandates a minimum level of biomethane to be included in the natural gas supply in Ireland. It’s a mechanism “that doesn’t set a price or provide a subsidy, but instead sets the policy environment and volume targets, leaving the corporates to decide how to fund any incremental cost,” says Smyth.
The fact that circularity is not a technology but a cross-sectoral activity, complicates matters, but one fact is clear: one way or another, Government support is required to get circularity done, to borrow a phrase. And that should come as no surprise.
“New emerging technologies have always been supported to be financially and commercially viable. They haven’t just navigated their way through without public and private investment and leadership to support it,” says Brennan.
“It’s about building markets for these products, and those markets need support. Wind energy wasn’t viable. Solar PV wasn’t viable. It took years and years with lots of incentives and fiscal instruments to make it so.”
