Circular Economy
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What Do Scotland’s Councils Buy for Reuse and Repair? We Read Every Public Tender Since 2023
In January 2026 the City of Edinburgh Council awarded £28.5m for furniture and white goods for its temporary accommodation and council tenancies, through Scotland Excel’s national furniture framework. The framework has a lot for reused furniture, but Edinburgh’s notice does not mention reuse, and both winners hold its lots for new furniture and kit-out. In…
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Can AI Do Recycling Market Research? I Re-Ran a Real Fishing-Net Study to Find Out
In an earlier post on what an AI-augmented consultant actually does, I wrote that on the Seychelles fishing-net work, “the European scan could have been days rather than weeks.” It was a guess. This post tests it on a real piece of recycling market research. The scan in question is the European study I did…
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Who Buys AI for Waste, Water and Environmental Work? An Analysis of 97 Public Tenders
We read every public AI notice in the UK and EU. 97 buy AI for waste, water or nature, and none is for reuse or repair.
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Why Europeans repair, and why their bills have little to do with it
Among 27,498 Europeans, difficulty paying bills made no detectable difference to repairing once like was compared with like. Environmental concern, education and country did.
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Scotland’s Circular Economy System Map
Governance and funding of Scotland’s circular economy: the public bodies, the money flows between them, the regulations taking effect to 2030 and the cost pressures on councils. Verified against primary sources.
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A Claude Code Skill That Builds, Researches and Stress Tests Business Models
I wrote two Claude Code skills that build, research and stress test business models, published them under an MIT licence, and pointed them at a project I ran myself. In 2021 I worked with the Government of Seychelles on ReNeT, a circular economy project for the industrial tuna fleet’s end-of-life fishing nets. The system design…
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Scotland’s household recycling has been stuck for a decade
The official numbers, council by council. Scotland’s household recycling rate peaked in 2017 and has drifted since, the legal 60 percent target for 2020 was missed by a wide margin, and a growing share of what looks like diversion from landfill is really incineration. This is that data, read by someone who has built these…
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Designing a Coastal City Waste System: Lessons from Project STOP, Indonesia
How to design a municipal waste system for a coastal city in a low-infrastructure context. Methodology and case study from three Indonesian cities, drawing on Project STOP.
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Scaling a Take-Back Programme Across European Markets: Lessons from Interface ReEntry
How to design and relaunch a corporate take-back programme across multiple European markets. Methodology and a comparative case from Interface ReEntry across the UK, Ireland, Spain and Benelux.
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Designing a Circular Economy from Scratch: A Field Methodology
How to design a circular economy intervention from scratch, with a methodology and a real case study from the Indian Ocean fishing-net industry.