Impact story

Adopting circular economy practices in Australian businesses

Our research on businesses' tendency to adopt circular economy (CE) practices found that “soft” cultural barriers, such as perceived demand, organisational inertia, and lack of collaborative capacity, were greater barriers for Australian businesses to adopt CE practices than "hard" barriers like regulation or technology. We also found that adopting many CE practices first requires a significant change in surrounding business models and ecosystems, so working to change behaviour of individual businesses alone was insufficient to achieve a successful transition to adopting CE practices.

MSDI’s existing collaboration in circular fashion and textiles provided a sandbox (experimental arena) to tackle the problem: How can we bring industry ecosystem members together to work on a shared pilot project for CE adoption?

We conducted an evidence-based workshop series (“Circular Strategies” or see extra resources) to support organisational behaviour change and collaboration in the Australian textile, clothing and footwear ecosystem.

Designers, manufacturers, retailers, policy actors, peak bodies, and recyclers attended a series of three workshop sessions to:

1. Learn about each others’ CE experience and identify a shared challenge
2. Explore potential product, business model and ecosystem innovations using the Circularity Deck
3. Map commitment and resources from members for sustained collaboration
4. Plan out the concrete actions needed to start a pilot innovation project

Outcomes of the workshop series

The successful working group created "Circular Stories", which describes how different garments and textiles can be designed, manufactured, sold, and managed at end-of-life in a circular system.

Why this outcome is important

This demonstrates to other relevant stakeholders that there is potential for embedding CE practices into their business processes. This is a significant step in the right direction to achieving an overall circular economy in Australia. Ultimately, this project has led to a practice change in external organisations to BehaviourWorks Australia (BWA) and may lead to policy development in the future.

"It’s possibly not the hugest impact nationally of all the list but it is a really tangible and interesting collaboration in a tricky sector.

I also like it because it’s something government couldn’t do on its own and industry likely wouldn’t do on its own, and traditional academic research would likely have not yielded this result either.

To me its an example of your specific value add. Plus, exciting!"