Many consumer product labels in Australia claim environmental benefits and/or pro-social outcomes (i.e. fair trade labels, energy rating program). Our aim with this study was to understand whether such labelling schemes are effective in changing behaviour and the extent to which they can be used to promote and increase producer and consumer adoption of circular economy products and services.
To capture different perspectives on the problem, this project involved:
In this video, the research stream leader, Dr Celine Klemm, gives a short summary of the research and provides answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about the trials.
In conducting this research, we followed The BehaviourWorks Method to gather evidence on the behaviour change approaches most likely to work.
(See a brief visual summary of the BehaviourWorks Method or a more extensive explanation.)
In response to jurisdictions across Australia, and globally, exploring Circular Economy (CE) policies, the BWA Waste and Circular Economy Collaboration conducted a rapid evidence review on the potential role of eco-labels in supporting the future implementation of policies that support a transition to CE. Our research aims to inform policy dialogue and identify relevant behavioural public policy experiments.
In conducting our rapid evidence review, we asked ourselves:
"What is the effectiveness of product labelling schemes targeting Circular Economy outcomes on behaviour and practice?"
Our studies mainly focussed on consumer purchases, where we noticed a number of consistent themes, including:
For readers wanting a quick overview of the evidence review (5 minute read)
For readers writing a brief, a policy submission or wanting a summary of practical insights.
For readers needing all the technical detail, including the full methodology.
Firstly, we found an evidence-informed approach for fostering business innovation from the Netherlands. Called 'Circular Strategies' (created by a team of researchers from Delft University of Technology) it addresses several of the 'soft' cultural barriers explained above.
To understand how we can help businesses in Australia adopt CE practices, we adapted and tested this approach with groups of stakeholders from one industry in Australia to allow us to investigate if fostering collaboration between stakeholders can promote CE adoption in Australia.
To better understand Circular Strategies and the research conducted by Delft University of Technology, click HERE.
Our initial workshops conducted with the textile, clothing and footwear ecosystem provided positive outcomes in the uptake of business circularity by encouraging collaboration. These included:
Nonetheless, we found that an attempt for scale-up and dissemination of the full facilitated workshops series may not be effective for every organisation. Thus, we suggest future research for business innovation consider train-the-trainer and knowledge translation activities as more viable for large-scale dissemination.
As part of our workshop process, attendees used an adapted version of the Circularity Deck, developed by Circular Strategies.
The Circularity Deck is a deck of cards that introduce principles of the circular economy and help people within an organisation, or potential collaborators from across an industry / sector ecosystem, to learn about the circular economy, identify shared circular challenges, and explore future innovations on which they could collaborate.
Each card includes
The Circularity Deck is based on published research (Konietzko et al., 2020), and recently, the Circular Strategies team has released a freely-available online version of the Deck for anyone to use.
Access the deck and watch a detailed tutorial at circularitydeck.com
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