WEDNESDAY 02 JULY 2025
Welcome to the latest edition of our Springwise Trends series. This month, we are diving into the circular economy. Read on to discover how innovators are seeking to tackle the world’s burgeoning material footprint while disrupting our current linear approach to economic development.
This deep dive is designed to provide you with insight into the trends we are seeing in our innovation database. Within our Circular Economy impact area, we include solutions in biomanufacturing, carbon removal, circular materials and processes, next-generation recycling, scalable reuse, and waste reduction. The report is written with a mixed audience in mind. If you are not an expert, then we’ve worked to cut through industry jargon and explain key concepts. If you are, then we hope you will find the innovations interesting food for thought.
If you have any feedback on this edition or any suggestions for features you would like to see going forwards, please email matthew@springwise.com.
KEY INNOVATION TRENDS
1 | Agricultural and forest waste feedstocks are being turned into plastic alternatives
2 | Food-preserving solutions are helping to extend shelf life and reduce waste
3 | AI is accelerating the design of novel materials and optimising biomanufacturing
4 | Smart systems are using AI to optimise recycling and circular supply chains
5 | Biology-inspired innovations are reducing waste and boosting circularity
In May, Circle Economy and Deloitte published their Circularity Gap Report 2025. This study found that the vast majority of materials entering the economy continue to be virgin, with the proportion of secondary (or circular) materials actually falling from 7.2 per cent to 6.9 per cent year-on-year. Without systematic change, the report forecasts that, between 2020 and 2060, material extraction will rise by 60 per cent.
In March, The United Nations Environment Programme announced that a new round of negotiations toward a global plastics treaty will take place from the 5th to the 14th August. In 2022, the UN Environment Assembly adopted a resolution to develop an international legally binding ‘instrument’ addressing the full life cycle of plastic, including its production, design, and disposal. The latest session comes after an ambition to complete the negotiations by the end of 2024 was missed.
In May, US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright announced the termination of 24 projects funded by the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations. Among the largest of these cancelled grants was a $375 million award for a major chemical recycling project run by Eastman Chemical in Texas.
Elsewhere, an analysis produced by Bain & Company found that chemically recycled plastics won’t reach price parity with virgin plastics in Europe for at least 20 years. The report further found that reaching price parity with smaller virgin plastic producers would require cumulative capex of $400 billion.
In January, the European Union Commission published new rules for packaging and packaging waste that will apply from 12 August 2026. The new regulation, which replaces an earlier Directive, introduces new measures covering the entire packaging lifecycle, including targets for waste reduction and provisions to reduce excessive packaging, improve recyclability, and promote reuse. It will further require the phase-out of harmful and hazardous chemicals such as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known colloquially as ‘forever chemicals’.
In the private sector, Chanel announced the formation of Nevold, an independent entity dedicated to finding new solutions for recycling and commercialising high-quality materials that incorporate recycled fibres.
At Springwise, we often feel like a broken record when reiterating a sobering fact: in the first two decades of this century, the global material footprint – the quantity of raw materials we extract to meet our final consumption demands – grew faster than both GDP and population growth. In short, we are consuming more and more resources to support our consumption habits. Far from this trend reversing, this year’s Circularity Gap Report from Circle Economy and Deloitte shows that the upward trajectory in extraction is set to continue. Until we start making deep and systematic changes to how the global economy operates, we shouldn’t expect otherwise.
Matt Hempstead Commissioning Editor Springwise
At Springwise, we often feel like a broken record when reiterating a sobering fact: in the first two decades of this century, the global material footprint – the quantity of raw materials we extract to meet our final consumption demands – grew faster than both GDP and population growth. In short, we are consuming more and more resources to support our consumption habits. Far from this trend reversing, this year’s Circularity Gap Report from Circle Economy and Deloitte shows that the upward trajectory in extraction is set to continue. Until we start making deep and systematic changes to how the global economy operates, we shouldn’t expect otherwise.
Matt Hempstead Commissioning Editor Springwise
The EU’s new rules on packaging and packaging waste embed several meaningful goals."
Unlike clean energy, where we can point to promising figures on solar power capacity and falling renewable energy costs, it’s much harder to build the ‘good news story’ when it comes to the circular economy. First, we are at an earlier stage in the diplomatic cycle. While the Paris Agreement has been in place for nearly ten years now, we are still waiting to find out if the much-vaunted Plastics Treaty will materialise when negotiations resume in August. In the realm of innovation, meanwhile, Bain & Company’s report on chemical recycling shows that we have a significant way to go to reduce the green premium associated with a much discussed (albeit somewhat controversial) technology.
So far so miserable. But as Sarah Poulter of the Circular Economy Institute points out in her Q&A, there are also reasons to be cheerful. Initiatives like Chanel’s formation of Nevold suggest that the private sector is taking circularity challenges seriously. Whether this work delivers meaningful change remains to be seen, but there are also signs of policy ambition – in some regions at least. The EU’s new rules on packaging and packaging waste embed several meaningful goals, including a requirement for all packaging on the EU market to be recyclable in an economically viable way by 2030. There is also more to come from the EU, with the Circular Economy Act (CEA) expected to be published before the end of 2025. The UK government, too, has promised to release a new Circular Economy Strategy this autumn.
All these developments set the backdrop for an innovation space that is increasingly diverse. While we’ve already touched on the cost challenges of one specific solution, chemical recycling, those in the know have long understood that we need a portfolio of different technologies to build the circular economy. Fortunately, we are indeed seeing multiple threads of circular innovation emerge. Biology, for example, has an important role to play, and here we are seeing signs of traction, such as Solena’s recent $6.7 million seed funding round. AI too could be transformative, whether through material discovery or the ability of computer vision systems to sort and separate at scale.
Of our seven impact areas, circular economy is perhaps the one where we need the biggest structural shifts in the way our economy works. It’s therefore little wonder that we have some way to go. But in this report, we hope to highlight that there are solutions awaiting the right policy and economic environment to spring into the mainstream.