The Circular Economy Task Force is a business group convened by Green Alliance. It is a forum for policy, innovation and business thinking on resource use in the UK and is currently chaired by Colin Church, chief executive of IOM3.
Recent work by the task force includes our report
Targeting success: why the UK needs a new vision for resource use, in which we call for a more ambitious and systemic approach to resource use. Even though higher product standards and recycling measures are necessary for a circular economy, without clear targets to reduce resource use itself, the UK cannot tackle its waste problem.
In November 2020, we released our report
Design for a circular economy: reducing the impacts of the products we use, in which we argue that even though ecodesign standards and energy labelling have been a success story, the UK government has an opportunity to further reduce the environmental impact of everyday products post-Brexit by tackling resource efficiency.
Fixing the solution: why a circular economy for all materials is the only way to solve the plastic problem was published in March 2020. The report was launched at an expert panel event that explored how the UK can ditch the throwaway society. More information about the event can be found
here.
This followed on from our January 2020 report
Plastic promises. Through that, we investigated what is happening in the grocery sector and showed how, under pressure from the public to act on plastic and in the absence of direction from government, businesses are switching to other single use materials, sometimes without evaluating the consequences or in the knowledge that changes could increase other environmental impacts.
The current members of the task force are Schneider Electric, Corplex, Boots, Kingfisher, PwC, SUEZ and Viridor.
For more information about the achievements of the task force,
see here.
