Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning.
It’s a tough time to be in the business of environmental sustainability. Earlier this month, seven of the world’s 10 largest countries missed a United Nations deadline for submitting updated emissions-cutting plans, according to Bloomberg. Starting late last year, financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and others left the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, a coalition of companies committed to reducing their carbon footprints. These moves and many others come as President Donald Trump and his appointees seek to eliminate federal government programs that tackle global warming.
Even so, Jonquil Hackenberg, CEO of leading circular economy charity Ellen MacArthur Foundation, is navigating this new world with a mix of optimism and pragmatism. The circular economy is a system where materials are recycled, refurbished, reused, or composted and where farming is designed to increase biodiversity. In an exclusive interview with Modern CEO, Hackenberg underscored the foundation’s commitment to addressing global challenges such as climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss.
The circular route to waste reduction
A recent example of the foundation’s work is the Big Food Redesign Challenge, an 18-month project aimed at helping the food sector design environmentally friendly products. Earlier this month, the foundation showcased 141 products by 57 organizations, including Nestlé and grocery chain Waitrose & Partners, which use circular economy and regenerative agriculture principles.
In addition to such programs, Hackenberg also talked about the role circularity plays in non-environmental issues like supply-chain resiliency. “We are looking at critical raw materials through the lens of material security, which plays very well into the new administration and beyond,” she says.
A sustainable supply-chain solution
Studies suggest that recycling or reuse of materials can help offset disruptions in supply chains due to shortages or geopolitical factors. The European Union’s Joint Research Center, for example, recently issued a report examining how boosting circularity, along with other approaches, could help reduce Europe’s dependency on China, Japan, Russia, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, and Ukraine for materials used to make titanium metal products. Companies in the EU use titanium primarily in planes but also in cars, robots, and 3D printing.
Hackenberg’s background makes her well-equipped to make the practical case for the foundation’s mission. She previously served as CEO of Eunomia Research and Consulting, a social-environmental consultancy, and before that was global head of sustainability and climate response at PA Consulting. “My experience is really in large-scale transformation,” she says. The move to a circular economy “is the largest-scale transformation we’re going to face.”
Indeed, despite early gains—75 countries have circular economy roadmaps and 55% of businesses, including IKEA and Dell, have made commitments to circularity—the movement appears to be stalled. The most recent Circularity Gap Report found that just 7.2% of materials that entered the economy in 2023 were “secondary,” or non-virgin, down from 9.1% of materials in 2018.
Circularity logic
Driving further transformation may require highlighting the way circularity can support local economies, for example. “If you are looking at governments that are perhaps more protectionist, who are asking, ‘How do I help and protect our own economy?’ It’s a ripe playing field for a circular economy to create new value opportunities and new jobs without global inputs,” Hackenberg says.
Hackenberg’s broad framing of the benefits of circularity mirrors the way other nonprofits and many businesses are trying to reposition themselves in the Trump era. Fast Company recently reported on how cleantech startups have started emphasizing their role in national security.
But the Ellen MacArthur Foundation isn’t walking back its commitment to climate and biodiversity issues. “We need courage and leadership to stay the course,” she says. “Politics will come and go, but facts back up that we are scraping at the barrels of planetary boundaries. Eliminating waste on our streets and in our oceans is a nonpartisan issue.”
How is your company handling topics under fire?
Is your company reframing the way you talk about environmental sustainability, inclusion, or other topics that are under fire? Send your comments to me at
stephaniemehta@mansueto.com. I’d like to share some of your insights in an upcoming newsletter.
Read more: virtuous circles
- Fast Company’s best circular design of last year
- How HP is using a supply “reset” to advance the circular economy
- Meet Chairish, an 11-year-old, used-furniture marketplace and an Inc. Best in Business honoree
