‘We Go Beyond’: Celebrating B Corp Month
We believe the future of business will work in tune with nature, not against it.
As a design and innovation partner, Circularity helps the changemakers, businesses, cities, and communities design a better way forward. Through the work we do together, we became a Certified B Corporation and Louise Nash, our Founder and CEO, undertook the training to become a B Lab Australia and New Zealand Consultant.
B Corp certification is an internationally recognised, third-party verified trust mark for businesses. At the core of the Certified B Corporation movement is the belief that by harnessing the power of business we can create a positive impact for employees, communities, customers, and the environment.
“Certified B Corporations are businesses that meet the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose” — B Corp
So this month, we’re celebrating B Corp Month — a time for us to explore and encourage the theme of ‘We Go Beyond.’ As we reflect on this theme, we invite you to think about what drives your business. For our team, we strive to go beyond sustainability and explore, innovate, and drive change towards the circular economy.
To reduce the linear extraction of resources from the planet -some 100 billions tonnes of virgin materials gets extracted every year and less that 8% of it ever gets cycled back through the economy in fact it mostly gets retuned as environmental pollution in our land, our oceans and our communities. The result? Climate change, biodiversity loss, inequity and resource depletion.
At Circularity, #wegobeyond by increasing the circularity of resources, designing out waste and emissions and regenerate living systems all by activating human potential and agency. This is what drives us to be a B Corp and delivers our impact —
By building the capability of nearly 20,000 people, Circularity has delivered 86 transformation strategies across packaging, building, transport, food, timber, and water, with the potential to recirculate 45.5 thousand tonnes of resources and unlock a $4.5 trillion global circular economy opportunity for businesses.
We’re thrilled to be one of 100 certified B Corps in Aotearoa. We hope that the awareness around and work of fellow B Corps paves the way for an abundant, regenerative, and circular future for Aotearoa New Zealand.
Why does Circularity want to be certified?
Circularity was founded by Louise Nash as part of a Master of Technological Futures in 2018. Her research focused on understanding the environmental impact caused by the take, make, use, and dispose cycle of the linear economy. She explored how businesses can unlock new ways of working that reduce their impact by regenerating, restoring, and recirculating resources to lighten their impact on the natural world. By working directly with businesses to understand and validate the best ‘tools’ to unlock mindset shifts, build capability, and unearth solutions, we have been able to rapidly accelerate our impact and reach. During the early years, for each project we refined our approach, selecting what works best for each business, to increase our impact and adapt to the challenges we need to solve. This early and rapid prototyping of our process has enabled us to directly address the barriers that has prevented business from making the shift required - knowledge, decision making and storytelling.
The Circularity Circular by Design methods alongside our design-led process has become an award winning and proven approach to unlocking the circular economy opportunities for businesses, no matter the size of industry.
This work we do alongside our clients and partners has enabled us to become B Corp certified - alongside other businesses that meet the high standards of transparency, social and environmental performance, and accountability.
Joining the community that B Corp has created enables us to represent a better economic system where businesses can benefit people, communities, and the planet — being a force for good to businesses that are wanting to also become certified.
Through becoming B Lab Consultants last year, we’ve also collaborated with a wider network of businesses within Aotearoa to generate a positive impact for their employees, communities, customers, and our economy in partnership with New Zealand Trade and Enterprise, first supporting the tech sector and now Food and Beverage. By helping these businesses with their B Corp certification we grow our communities and enable further transformation of business as usual across industries.
The steps we’re currently taking:
To achieve B Corp certification as a company, we evaluate and develop our processes within five categories, including:
Governance — We’re evaluated on our overall mission, engagement around our ethics, social and environmental impact, and transparency. This is also evaluated based on our ability to protect our mission and consider our stakeholders in decision making. This mission, we’re proud to say, is locked in our B Corp profile, as we have intentionally designed our structure to create positive outcomes for our workers, community, clients, and environment.
Workers — We must evaluate our efforts to create security for our team, in regard to finance, health and wellbeing, and career development. Unlocking human potential is what drives us as a business. We’re a tight knit team with a focus on sharing and growing our individual skills across all aspects of Circularity.
Community — This evaluates a company’s engagement with and impact on the communities in which it operates, hires from, and sources from. This section also acknowledges our business model — specifically focusing on local circular economic development and projects that address community-oriented problems, fair trade sourcing and distribution, and micro-enterprises. We are also proud of the community we’ve created, including clients and XLabs programme alumni, encouraging continual development and collaboration to further push for a regenerative, circular future here in Aotearoa.
Environment — We assess our company’s overall environmental practices as well as our impact on air, climate, water, land, and biodiversity. It recognises our work as an innovation partner and our service to design circular business models for other businesses. This has allowed us to have another locked mission on our B Corp profile in Environmental Education and Information — recognising our business model which positively impacts our community, clients, environment, and workers.
Customers — In this section, we’re evaluated on our stewardship of clients through services, data privacy, and feedback channels. It focuses heavily on our services as a design and innovation partner, addressing climate change and improving environmental wellbeing. Our Impact Improvement score is a mission locked on our profile acknowledging such work.
What else we do:
At Circularity, it’s important to us to take our work a step further, committing wholeheartedly to the how and why of our cause.
Alongside our work with businesses and the XLabs circular economy programme, we share insights, innovations and conversations on the Redesign of Everything. These are intentionally designed and developed to create understanding in spaces that sometimes go unnoticed or unacknowledged. Explore all our latest articles, podcast episodes, and other resources on issues of sustainability, business, the environment, and more on The Redesign of Everything page.