Ellen MacArthur Foundation Partnership

In May 2019 we became one of a small number of strategic partners of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. As we lead the packaging industry towards a more circular economy we wanted to invite the leading thinkers on this topic into our business to challenge us and to help drive this agenda further, for ourselves and for our customers.

Our work with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation focuses on three-core workstreams.

Innovation

We are working with The Foundation to turbocharge our circular economy design and innovation agenda. The Foundation adds huge value to a range of projects, bringing their own knowledge and insight, a strong network and the ability to amplify our stories through their global reach.

For example, ClimaCell and HexcelWrap were featured in the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s ‘Upstream Innovation Handbook’ and our Circular Design Principles were also developed in collaboration with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation too.

Customer

Working with The Foundation enables us to further support our customers with their circular economy challenges. We know that our customers face significant challenges adapting to circular economy thinking, from plastics replacements to recyclability.

For example, EMF Provided unique insight at a range of high-profile customer-facing events as well as our virtual workshops . These collaborative sessions were designed to tackle the impact of Covid-19 and offer a more sustainable approach to its unrivalled customer experience.

People

In order to accelerate the transition to the circular economy it is vital that people are aware of what this means and the role that they can play. We are educating our people on the circular economy by giving them tailored access to The Foundation’s wealth of learning and development tools.

EMF provided training material for a range of key audiences, including our development programmes (Global Leadership Programme, Aspire and the Graduate Programme). We also collaborated on training 700 of our designers on Circular Design Principles, as well as on training our entire sales and marketing community on the Circular Economy and how we can help our customers.

EMF have also had key input in developing our Now and Next Sustainability Strategy, positioning us as leaders on the circular economy.

In the spirit of our partnership we also share our expertise and resources, working closely with other members of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation network to support a number of their priority initiatives.

For example, we’ve played a key role in developing a tool called Circultyics – a tool that enables companies to measure how “circular” they are and helps drive the transition to a circular economy by making it real and actionable, currently aligning with EMF on key policy goals to help drive the move to a circular economy.