That strategy seems to have paid off: revenue has grown 45% since 2019, according to Mads Twomey-Madsen, Pandora’s senior vice president of communications and sustainability. In that same period, he says, Pandora has cut emissions by 17% across the board.

“We can grow and become more sustainable at the same time,” he says. Adopting sustainable practices was a natural next step in Pandora becoming “future-proof,” he adds. “It’s not something that we did as a marketing play. We’re quite aware that many consumers are very interested in sustainable options . . . but it’s more something that we did to stand strong as a brand overall.”

Whatever the reason, the moves make Pandora stand out. And they have helped earn it the number two spot in the Corporate Knights Global 100 ranking, all the way up from 48 in 2025.

The fashion industry contributes up to 8% of global emissions, but a minority of brands are committed to incorporating circular processes. According to the 2022 S&P Global Corporate Sustainability Assessment, which surveyed 70 brands in the textile, apparel and luxury goods industry, 44% of brands had at least one circular fashion program in place.

Pandora isn’t alone in its sustainability ethos. Some of the biggest brands in fashion have launched recycling initiatives in recent years. The German athletic apparel giant Puma, for instance, now uses polyester textile waste saved from factory off-cuts, faulty goods and used clothes to make new garments under the brand’s Re:Fibre program. On average, about 25% of Puma’s products contain recycled materials.

The 2026 Global 100 list puts speed in the spotlight

Inditex Corp., the parent company of Zara, aims to use only textiles that have a low environmental impact by 2030. The brand claims to have used 39% recycled fibres in 2024. It is also working to scale up purchases of recycled materials – such as fibre made from cotton-rich textile waste and polyester made from textile waste – through offtake commitments. The brand also has several eco-certifications, including the Recycled Claim Standard.

Kering S.A., the holding company that owns some of the largest luxury brands, including Gucci, also carries a Recycled Claim Standard certification. The company works with Econyl, a brand-name nylon made from waste products, and partners with start-ups such as Worn Again, which has developed the technology to create fabric from non-reusable textiles.

A steep hill to climb

Despite these types of initiatives – several of which are still in their infancy – the overwhelming majority of textile waste ends up in landfills. According to Boston Consulting Group, only 12% of global textile waste is reused, with less than 1% recycled into new fibres. When it comes to jewellery, recycled gold makes up a larger percentage of the overall supply than recycled silver but these metals are still being mined extensively.

Pandora mostly deals with silver, which makes up about 67% of the brand’s product volume. “The world is not very good at recycling silver,” Twomey-Madsen says, adding that the metal often ends up in the landfill through electronic waste.

Pandora’s big bet on sustainability pays off

It took four years for the brand to completely transition into recycled metals. The process required Pandora to convince its suppliers – 40 total – to source recycled metal certified by the Responsible Jewellery Council Chain of Custody standard. The transition will add an additional US$10 million to annual operating costs, which includes investing in new equipment for suppliers to establish a separate recycled-metal process from their non-recycled metals.

That’s a cost of doing sustainable business that Pandora is willing to pay, Twomey-Madsen says. The added benefit, he says, is that Pandora’s suppliers can now offer recycled metals to other brands, too. “It’s available now for other companies that want to do the same. And I think that’s something that you encounter in these circularity changes,” he says. “These value streams aren’t really established yet. So when you go first, you need to invest in making that happen.”

Ayesha Habib is a Vancouver-based journalist who has written for The Globe and Mail, Maisonneuve and Chatelaine.

The post These big retail brands are rallying around circular fashion appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The idea occurred to Nick Paget, co-founder and chief innovation officer at Meadow, a packaging technology company headquartered in Stockholm. While he couldn’t quite imagine a consumer going for that kind of a shampoo container, he was on to something. The result is the Kapsul technology – a new but familiar user experience that turns the ubiquitous aluminum can into a vessel for household products, such as shampoo or cleaning sprays, that is used along with a dispenser. “It’s still can enough where people put it in the recycling, but it’s not can enough where people think it’s a beverage,” Paget says. 

The aluminum beverage can is one of the most recyclable packaging options available. It requires 95% less energy to produce recycled compared to new aluminum, according to European Aluminium, an industry association representing the entire aluminum value chain in Europe. Aluminum cans that are repeatedly recycled don’t suffer the same quality loss as other materials, such as plastic. On top of that, aluminum  cans take only about 60 days to recycle for reuse. 

“They’re really scalable. They’re available everywhere. People know how to recycle them. You don’t need to change human behaviour, which is always the hardest thing,” Paget says. “And the best thing is we don’t need to invent it.” 

Meadow’s timing could be exactly right. As regulations in many countries tighten and companies bear more responsibility for the waste they create, Meadow’s solution is one that’s available, scalable, familiar and could help ease the transition to more recyclable materials while cutting costs. That is, if the systems and collective will are in place. 

To reimagine the aluminum can for household products, Meadow removed the beverage can’s pull tab, and with it extra material needed for can production. The top of the can was redesigned so that the product inside wouldn’t be accidentally mistaken for a canned beverage and consumed. However, the overall can-ness still remains, Paget says, as beverage cans require such extreme precision so they don’t leak or explode, which is why aluminum manufacturing companies sometimes serve both packaging and aerospace markets. 

The can then fits into a dispenser so that someone with the grip strength of an average 80-year-old woman could use it with ease, Paget says. The top of the dispenser changes depending on the product, such as a pump or a spray nozzle, and could be designed and branded. Once the product runs out, the idea is that the can is recycled and replaced by another aluminum can. “If you could turn off the tap,” he says, “why deal with the waste?” For Paget, it’s more efficient and exciting to deal with upstream innovation and prevent more waste from entering the system. 

Circularity in motion

Europe is doubling down on its circular-economy leadership. The EU’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, which entered into force in February 2025, regulates what packaging is allowed in EU markets as well as waste-management and -prevention measures; for example, design requirements that reduce the amount of excess packaging, minimum amounts of recycled content for various types of plastic packaging and recycling targets for different materials.   

Having a circular system assumes that waste will re-enter the system. But when it comes to relying on waste, “you need to have sufficient quality in a sufficient amount,” says Stig Irving Olsen, associate professor in the Department of Environmental and Resource Engineering at the Technical University of Denmark, whose research focuses on environmental assessments of products and systems. Turning aluminum beverage cans back into cans, instead of using mixed aluminum scrap, reduces impacts on the climate, according to a study co-authored by Olsen. 

While there are general complexities when it comes to recycling aluminum cans, such as impurities from the decorative cover, there is no technical reason why companies using Meadow’s technology couldn’t be integrated into existing recycling systems, Paget says.  

Simplifying the infrastructure

“What’s often missed is that you need an entire collection infrastructure,” says Clarissa Morawski, CEO of Reloop, an international non-profit working on waste reduction and promoting a circular economy. Recycling infrastructure needs more than just somewhere to collect packaging. It usually requires cooperation between many different players: companies, producers of packing materials, regulatory bodies, industry associations, retailers, collection services or sites and, of course, consumers who are willing to recycle. 

“If you’re in the business of refill, and you’re putting a fleet of bottles, nice refillable containers, they are an asset,” Morawski says. “You’ve invested in them. Your business plan is based on getting it back, washing it, refilling it, getting it back out to the customer, and then scaling it up.” 

Beyond Meadow, there are many examples of refillables being tested. In the United Kingdom, supermarket chains Aldi and Ocado completed a pilot project offering basic products in refillable containers, such as pasta, rice or washing liquids, that could be returned in-store or to a driver if groceries were delivered. Some beauty brands have in-store stations where customers can refill containers after the product is finished, often offered at a discounted price. Having incentives, such as discounts, can play an important role in the overall success of return rates. 

Deposit return systems are one of the most effective ways to ensure that packaging is recycled. For example, in Sweden, consumers pay a deposit on plastic and aluminum beverage containers at checkout. When finished, shoppers can return the packaging to more than 3,100 grocery stores nationwide or at designated drop-off points for money or vouchers at the grocery store, or choose to donate the returns to charity. In 2024, Sweden had an 87.6% recycling rate for plastic and aluminum bottles, one of the highest return rates in the world. When recycling is easy for consumers, similar deposit-return systems have yielded similar results, so long as the deposit is worthwhile. In Canada, return rates jump from a median of 68% when the deposit is less than 10 cents to 92% when the deposit is 20 cents or more. 

A shift in responsibility 

Even if consumers are willing to participate, buy-in is needed from every recycling player at every step. For instance, Aldi deemed the refillables pilot an in-store success and had high return rates even without a deposit system. However, the company decided not to scale the solution, citing the inability to test it in multiple retailers. In Ontario, the Beer Store closures have meant the loss of many bottle collection sites and concerns about the future of the entire bottle deposit-return program. “All the intentions may be right, but if you don’t have the right collection system in place, you’re out of luck. You’re out of business,” Morawski says. 

Even if a good collection system exists in one place, recycling regulations vary between jurisdictions. If a bottle of beer is sold in Oregon, the bottle must be returned in state. The same applies to Canadian provinces, countries in Europe and most other places you might travel with your otherwise recyclable waste. In Europe, the new EU packaging regulation outlines that its countries should do more to make deposit systems speak to each other but stops short of specifics, Morawski says. In places where there is a lot of cross-border travel, this could help improve recycling rates and prevent unnecessary waste. 

All the intentions may be right, but if you don’t have the right collection system in place, you’re out of luck. You’re out of business.

– Clarissa Morawski, CEO, Reloop

While there are several examples of success and good intentions, new regulations could hasten the establishment of more effective systems. The EU packaging waste regulation outlines several stricter regulations, including that all member states establish deposit-return systems on plastic and metal beverage cans by 2029. The U.K. government’s extended producer responsibility for packaging will place the responsibility of paying for the collection, sorting and treatment of waste entirely on the producers. The Government of Canada has also issued a strategy on zero plastic waste. In other words, companies will soon have no choice but to deal with their waste.  

Forward thinking about waste was also something Paget noticed and helped Meadow conceptualize as it was being founded back in 2020. It wasn’t just start-ups or tier-one companies; companies of all sizes are looking for these solutions, Paget says. To ensure that its technology is readily available to companies, Meadow established partnerships along its value chain, such as with Ball Corporation, which holds more than 30% of the aluminum can market in North America, Europe and South America; Novelis, the world leader in aluminum rolling and recycling; and Fillsy, a manufacturing factory in Poland.  

When it comes to getting customers to adopt a refillable model, Paget points out that packaging fails when it tries to become the product. For example, compare the experience of using a travel coffee mug with using a paper one. “Does anyone really love the experience of drinking through a plastic lid with a tiny hole in it and your coffee tastes like paper?” Paget says. Consumers have already shown that they are willing to pay for a better design and product experience, if the recent massive annual sales of some refillable drinkware companies are any indication. 

What Meadow hopes to do is to bring that same consumer behaviour to household products while reducing waste. Use aluminum for the refillable portions so it can be repeatedly recycled. Use plastic or other strong materials for the dispenser, which should last for a long time and not break when you drop it in your shower. Paget now knows that aluminum has place in the shower — and it takes Meadow’s innovation to crack open the can. 

Ashley Perl is a Canadian freelance journalist based in Stockholm. 

The post The aluminum can books a starring role in the circular economy appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The founders of Red Leaf Pulp say they’ve figured out how to make high-quality pulp from agricultural by-products rather than wood from trees, and they’re ready to start producing at scale. The company’s first-of-a-kind pulp mill, slated to begin construction in Regina, Saskatchewan, in the first quarter of 2026, will manufacture what it calls “climate-positive, non-wood pulp” using a process that consumes 95% less water and 70% less energy than traditional mills – all while running on electricity generated by burning biomass from its own waste stream.

“We think there’s nothing in Canada that’s as sustainable as this project, in terms of what we bring in upstream and downstream benefits,” says William Walls, vice president of strategy and development, in a phone interview. He claims that the carbon footprint of Red Leaf’s wheat straw pulp is a third that of regular wood pulp.

Red Leaf has earned the confidence of investors, raising $42 million in five years, most of it from the container company Dart, as well as about $8 million in government funding and a $1-million angel investment. Walls calls it “probably one of the best-funded cleantechs in Canada.” The company used the funding to build a demonstration plant in Alberta, where it has been testing its process and selling its products for different applications. Once operational in 2028, the facility is expected to convert 400,000 tonnes of straw into 200,000 tonnes of market pulp annually.

There’s a lot for investors to like. For example, Red Leaf doesn’t need to develop any equipment to run its patented process for “making the straw act like a wood chip,” Walls says. They use conventional equipment for wood pulp mills made by Valmet, one of the biggest pulp and paper equipment manufacturers on the planet.

Red Leaf sources directly from farmers and accepts all varieties of leftover wheat straw, as well as oats, barley and flax, much of which would often otherwise be burned or left to lie on the field. This creates a new revenue stream for farmers and positions them in a circular economy, while ensuring a reliable supply of pulp for Red Leaf’s new mill.

An opening in the pulp market

The introduction of wheat straw pulp comes amid an ongoing decline in the supply of “economically viable timber,” which has been devastating for Canada’s forestry industry and prompted one B.C. lumber mill to close in November. The main culprits are wildfires, which consumed 17 million hectares in 2022, and invasive insect infestations, which killed 13 million hectares worth of trees the same year. Those disruptions, plus a reduction in the allowable cuts, caused the whole forestry sector to contract by 22% in 2023 and have shrunk the available wood fibre for products like pulp and pellets by more than 40% in British Columbia since 2018. To make matters worse, the United States raised its duties on softwood lumber to 20.6% last July.

The constrained fibre supply in Canada’s forestry sector creates an opening for Red Leaf, but the company sees its role as complementary rather than competitive, spokesperson Elle Kreitz says in an email: “Red Leaf introduces new, non-wood fibre into an already integrated system, helping to relieve supply demand pressures without competing for forest resources.”

The company believes its wheat pulp should telegraph its authentic sustainability, so they’re not going to dye it bright white, which has long been an industry norm. Red Leaf advertises its pulp as possessing a “natural golden tone” – one that doesn’t require a harmful bleaching process to achieve.

A starring role for lignin

Red Leaf also plans to sell the lignin – a component of plant cell walls that gives them their structure – separately as a stand-alone product. Straw has less lignin, so it’s easier to separate out, Walls says. Lignin comes out of the pulp process as a sludgy brown by-product that’s already a popular binder in animal feed and is considered eco-friendly because it diverts waste that would otherwise contaminate waterways.

But Walls sees much more potential for the sticky residue. Non-toxic but also not directly digestible, there is evidence that lignin has some health benefits as a food additive, and it can also be used in other industries as a natural bonding agent for materials manufacturing and pharmaceuticals. There are also emerging applications in batteries and bioplastics.

“It’s like a unicorn. We’re selling it for more than twice as much money as the pulp,” Walls says. “But someday down the road it may be that this thing is called Red Leaf Lignin and the pulp is the by-product.”

Mark Mann is the managing editor of Corporate Knights.

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But instead of using energy to cool their servers, some companies are trying to recover heat and put it to use. “What we try to do,” says Sacha van Geffen, a lead engineer at Leafcloud, “is actually see if we can place some of those compute resources that generate a lot of heat really close to a place where heat is needed.”

Leafcloud is an Amsterdam-based cloud services company that turns waste heat into warm showers through a distributed network of servers, or “leaf sites.” To do this, Leafcloud uses off-the-shelf components to build heat-waste-recovery systems inside the technical rooms of facilities like large apartment complexes, swimming pools or retirement homes, van Geffen says. The heat captured from the servers is used to produce hot water for the building.

Leafcloud isn’t the only company putting heat waste to work. U.K. company Heata offers a similar service to individual homeowners. The 2025 Paris Olympics pool was partially heated from data-centre servers run by the company Equinix. In Brooklyn, Bathhouse uses waste heat from Bitcoin mining rigs to warm its spa pools. Nexalus in Ireland harnesses heat waste to improve efficiency and lower data-centre energy consumption.

Heat waste from computing workloads is considered low-grade heat, meaning anything less than 100°C. “With low temperature grades,” says Amin Mohammadi, a PhD candidate at Simon Fraser University’s Laboratory for Alternative Energy Conversion, “converting that energy to thermal energy or cooling energy would be the best option that you have.” In other words, it’s too gentle to be converted to electricity such as with steam from a boiler, but with the help of heat pumps, it’s perfect for making a hot shower or keeping interiors toasty on a cold day. 

There are data centres and centralized district heating systems working together, too, such as Stockholm Exergi or Denmark’s Fjernvarme Fyn. This application could play an important role in heat-waste recovery from the growing demand for computing capacity. A recent Leafcloud white paper outlined that different thermal outputs could be optimized for different applications: high-performance computing for higher heat-waste temperatures, such as 60°C to 80°C, could be sent to district heating, whereas standard servers that produce temperatures in the 40°C to 60°C range could be used for building heat. 

The pieces are already in place to start making a difference. Leafcloud and other companies can capture heat waste now and without complex infrastructure that would otherwise take years to build out, such as constructing a data centre or retrofitting pipe systems for larger-scale municipal heating. By placing the heat source close to where it will be used, overall efficiency is improved, because it avoids the energy loss that occurs when heat has to move through a large system, Mohammadi says. 

In addition to heat-waste recovery, van Geffen says that Leafcloud’s distributed server system has other benefits. Using residual heat onsite not only reduces the reliance on other energy sources needed to heat water, such as natural gas; it also reduces costs. In a world where our data is so often controlled by secretive corporations, installing local servers in basements in Europe offers security and control, van Geffen says: “What we are offering is sovereign data storage, where the heat is also put to a good use.”

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The bill is the first such law to directly sanction fast-fashion companies for the consequences of their business models, which produce a non-stop conveyor belt of ephemeral clothing items destined for landfills. Globally, about 92 million tons of textile waste are produced each year. The fashion industry is the second-largest water consumer after agriculture and is responsible for about 10% of global emissions.  

France’s bill is a definitive sign of tides shifting, at least on the legislative stage. Agnès Pannier-Runacher, the country’s minister for ecological transition, described the bill to journalists as “a strong signal sent to businesses and to consumers.” 

The law creates a better environment for alternatives to fast fashion, but halting the flow of cheap clothing into landfills still necessitates a mindset shift on the part of consumers, says Alyssa Gauk, a communications lead with the activist movement Fashion Revolution. “Competing with fast fashion will require us to reshape our relationship with clothing and consumption altogether,” she says in an email. That means buying far less than we do now, making what we do own last, and supporting local makers, she says.  

For big clothing brands, there is a business case for producing more sustainably. A 2024 study from Simon-Kucher, a global business consulting firm, found that about 85% of buyers care about sustainability when making purchases, with 54% of those willing to pay more for a sustainable product.  

But even if many people want to buy sustainably made clothing, most of what’s available is too expensive for average consumers. Until that gap closes, fast fashion can be too tempting to give up. 

The meaning of sustainability in fashion can be hard to pin down, too. Gauk says that we should be suspicious of brands that use terms like “eco-friendly” without being transparent about what they mean. Even using recycled materials isn’t always a better choice for the environment. “A brand may use organic cotton or recycled textiles, but if the production process runs on fossil fuels or energy-intensive methods, the overall impact remains unsustainable,” Gauk says. “And when an industry as massive as fashion relies on these energy-intensive systems, the environmental impact is amplified on a global scale.” 

While there are eco-certifications to look for that can provide some ease of mind when shopping, such as Oeko-Tex, GOTS (Global Organic Textile Standard) or Fair Trade, experts suggest that if we stopped producing new clothes today, we’d have enough product to last decades. 

So what can we do with the clothes that exist now? France’s new bill is a legislative attempt to spur the necessary mindset shift among consumers while fostering a more competitive atmosphere to give smaller local clothing brands a leg up. The revenue from the added tax on ultra-fast fashion brands will go toward funding sustainable French brands. A blanket ban on ultra-fast fashion advertising includes promotions from influencers, who could face fines. Brands will be required to provide environmental data, such as carbon emissions and recyclability of products, to receive an eco-score. Those with poorer eco-scores will be taxed higher. 

Whether the bill will make a significant impact is yet to be determined, but its passing could make room for new ways to approach how we buy clothes. 

Ayesha Habib is a Vancouver-based journalist who has written for The Globe and Mail, Maisonneuve and Chatelaine. 

The post Here is how France is trying to fix fast fashion appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The company’s board replaced the CEO and CFO in a decision announced May 1, when Li-Cycle publicized that it was looking for buyers. A potential deal with mining giant and lead creditor Glencore evidently had not come to fruition: Two weeks later, a Canadian bankruptcy court appointed Alvarez & Marsal Canada Securities to oversee a sale of Li-Cycle’s assets. A Li-Cycle spokesperson referred Canary Media to the company’s public bankruptcy announcements.

Prospective buyers for the partially completed recycling empire can state their intent by early June. In the meantime, Glencore has loaned $10.5 million to keep things going during the proceedings. Glencore also entered a ​“stalking horse” offer of $40 million for most of Li-Cycle’s holdings, setting a floor for bidding (if any other investors want a piece of the action). Glencore could emerge with a real deal on its hands, but it won’t be recouping the $275 million it previously invested in Li-Cycle.

“The Company represents a compelling investment opportunity, uniquely positioned to benefit from rapid growth in the battery materials and [lithium-ion battery] recycling market, amid increasing global focus on sustainability and critical raw material supply chain resilience,” Alvarez & Marsal pitch in a flyer for the sale.

That ​“compelling” opportunity amounts to five battery shredding plants, a massive unfinished recycling centre in western New York, and a business predicated on the growth of a nascent North American EV supply chain that currently faces far-reaching disruption from the Trump administration. A buyer would not be able to fully recycle any batteries without spending a few hundred million dollars more, and even then, it’s not clear they would make any money doing so.

The start-up’s collapse underscores the struggles of the fledgling battery-recycling industry in general. A few years ago, the sector was flush with venture capital and charting out rapid timelines for commercializing breakthrough technologies that would enable the transition to EVs while minimizing mining. The sector was also seen as a way to achieve the bipartisan goal of reducing dependence on China, which dominates the global battery supply chain.

Li-Cycle was founded in Canada in 2016 and went public in 2021 through a special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC (generally a red flag for early-stage cleantech companies). Its engineers developed a technique for shredding whole lithium-ion battery packs while they’re submerged in liquid; this prevented fires and saved considerable effort compared with painstakingly discharging and dismantling the packs for processing.

Li-Cycle successfully built five ​“spoke” facilities to collect and shred whole EV battery packs, turning them into the powdery mixture known as black mass. The spoke operations have paused in Arizona, Alabama, New York and Ontario, while a German outpost continues to function during bankruptcy proceedings. Collectively, these facilities can break down up to 40 kilotons of batteries a year.

The spokes were supposed to feed their black mass to Li-Cycle’s hub in Rochester, New York, which would refine it and isolate useful battery materials to reintroduce into the supply chain. This never came to pass because Li-Cycle halted construction in fall 2023, citing runaway costs. It became clear that Li-Cycle needed to find a lot more cash to complete the nearly two-million-square-foot site.

Prospective buyers for the partially completed recycling empire can state their intent by early June.

The company hoped for a lifeline from the Biden-era Department of Energy: in November, its Loan Programs Office finalized a $475-million loan for Li-Cycle to complete the recycling hub. But Li-Cycle never drew on that federal money because it couldn’t secure additional private funding to hold in reserve, as stipulated in the loan terms.

Li-Cycle is not the only battery recycling firm in a tough spot. Since last year, a number of challenges have beset the industry.

The adjacent U.S. EV sector has seen slower growth than expected, which has in turn reduced the urgency of building out a North American battery supply chain. Core battery materials like lithium, nickel and cobalt have plummeted in price, lessening the value of whatever recyclers might glean. And battery makers have increasingly turned to lithium iron phosphate, a cheaper alternative to nickel- and cobalt-based chemistries, further reducing the value of recycling these batteries.

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In the past year, a fire destroyed the largest battery-shredding plant in the United States, Interco’s Critical Mineral Recovery site in Missouri. Reno, Nevada–based Aqua Metals ran low on funds and laid off staff while it searched for financing to build a commercial-scale recycling line. Ascend Elements delayed construction of its flagship recycling plant in Kentucky, citing a customer’s decision to postpone buying the recycled materials. In March, Ascend cancelled plans to make cathode active materials in Kentucky to focus on precursor materials and lithium carbonate.

Redwood Materials is the rare bright spot. The venture by former Tesla CTO JB Straubel raised a couple billion dollars and has been building out a major compound in the desert outside Reno, not far from Tesla’s factory there. In 2024, Redwood Materials broke down 20 gigawatt-hours of batteries and earned $200 million in revenue from recycled materials.

The industry’s challenges come as the Trump administration says it aims to expand U.S. mineral supplies. Paradoxically, the administration has taken steps to undermine the fledgling U.S. EV and battery industries, which are the big drivers of demand growth for rare earth metals. The budget bill passed by the House last week would strip tax incentives for EV purchases and battery installations, weakening demand for the domestic supply chain that recyclers like Li-Cycle hoped to serve – and making the tough road for recycling firms even tougher.

This article was first published by Canary Media. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Read the original article here.

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One of these start-ups is Quebec e-waste recycler enim. It recently announced a partnership with the Royal Canadian Mint to explore how minerals it retrieves from obsolete electronic devices – specifically, printed circuit boards – can be incorporated into the mint’s products. “Instead of digging into the ground, we’re using primary waste as our primary source material,” says Simon Racicot-Daignault, enim’s president and CEO. And it appears, for the foreseeable future at least, to be truly inexhaustible.

According to a UN report, the world generated 62 billion kilograms of electronic waste in 2022, up a whopping 82% from 2010. But only 22% of that was recycled. That’s a massive amount of untapped potential that is guiding companies like enim forward.  

Enim, Racicot-Daignault points out, is the word “mine” spelled backwards. It’s a nod to the circularity the Montreal-based company is trying to embody. Founded in 2022 by engineering firms Seneca experts-conseils and Dundee Sustainable Technologies, enim has developed a hydrometallurgical technology that eschews harmful substances such as cyanide and mercury as it extracts the valuable materials – metals, ceramic, fibreglass, minerals – in a circuit board.  

Smelting is the go-to method for most e-waste recyclers, but that process salvages just 20% of the materials, Racicot-Daignault says. “The rest goes out in fumes or in solid waste” – as gas emissions or toxic ash. Enim, by contrast, targets each resource it extracts, converting them to liquid and then returning them to a solid metallic state, reducing metal losses and the risk of toxic emissions. “It makes us really the most eco-friendly option out there,” he says. “The ceramic can be reused in construction material, and gypsum can go into drywall. So, we think we have a really unique and distinctive product versus what is being produced out of smelters.” 

Enim’s innovation caught the attention of Canada’s national mint, which has a business that goes well beyond loonies and toonies. For more than 100 years, the coin-minting authority has operated a gold and silver refinery. Among its products are precious metal bars, grain and bullion investment products. As a member of the London Bullion Market Association, it adheres to strict quality and responsible-sourcing standards. In 2023, the mint refined 6.6 million ounces of gold alone.  

“The amount of material we’re going to get from enim is a tiny fraction,” says Michelle Richardson, chief impact officer for the Royal Canadian Mint. But it’s no less meaningful and represents a chance to partner with a Canadian company that is innovating in a space that aligns with the mint’s priorities. “For us, enim is one more tool in that arsenal that might let us be a more responsible and sustainable organization,” Richardson says.  

Enim sees opportunity not just in Canadian coins for everyday use, but in the collector line the Royal Canadian Mint produces. “They have access to that market of investors that are looking for truly distinctive and traceable low-impact products” who are willing to pay more for products that have a lower carbon footprint, Racicot-Daignault says.  

The company is currently in the middle of a financing round, with hopes to start operating commercially in 2027. In 2024, it opened a 10,000-square-foot demonstration plant in Thetford Mines thanks in part to a $3-million cash infusion from the Canadian government. At full capacity, it will be able to process 10,000 tonnes of printed circuit boards a year, Racicot-Daignault says. 

“There is clearly an evolution in society, but it’s not super fast,” he says. “It’s not that in two years from now everybody will be willing to pay more. But we clearly see customers that are willing. So the trend is underway.”  

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According to those who study consumer habits, millennials and Gen Zs are looking for two things when they go shopping: sustainability and individuality. One jewellery company is capturing hearts and wallets by offering both.

Pandora, launched as a family-run jewellery shop in Copenhagen in 1982, has grown to become the world’s largest jewellery maker, by pieces sold. And unlike much of its industry in recent years, Pandora’s star is rising. As competitors like Tiffany and Signet see diminishing returns, Pandora ended 2024 with 31.7 billion krone (US$4.5 billion) in annual revenue, representing 13% organic growth.

These figures reflect a major turnaround. In 2019, following several years of declining sales, Pandora embarked on a new strategy: to expand its product line beyond the luxury charm bracelets for which it had become famous and go all in on sustainability. It established three new priorities: to decarbonize, push circularity and promote a more diverse corporate culture.

Six years later, Pandora’s charms, which can be engraved and assembled to create personalized pieces, are just one element in its full palette of fine jewellery. And the company is aspiring to the highest sustainability standards in its field. Since 2021, it has used only lab-grown diamonds – to avoid concerns about blood diamonds and inhumane labour practices – and since 2024, exclusively gold and silver in recycled form. 

According to Mads Twomey-Madsen, Pandora’s senior vice president of sustainability, the transition to recycled metals took four years to complete and required 100 additional staff: a relatively small investment for a company with some 37,000 employees worldwide.

More than 40 of Pandora’s suppliers – both smelters and producers of clasps and chains – had to change their processes to meet its new standards (which are issued by the Responsible Jewellery Council), but they were persuaded to do so by the volumes in question.

Pandora claims that its annual purchase of roughly 340 tons of recycled silver, sourced from electronics, silverware, manufacturing waste and old jewellery, accounts for some 6% of the total global market. 

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The shift away from newly mined metals will reduce greenhouse gas emissions across its supply chain by 58,000 metric tons annually by the company’s estimates: roughly the equivalent of taking 6,000 gas-powered cars off the road. It’s also costing Pandora some US$10 million annually, largely in premiums paid to suppliers to help them adjust. It’s “a cost we are willing to absorb” Pandora CEO Alexander Lacik told The New York Times last year.

While sustainability may be front of mind for younger buyers, Lacik admits that the average jewellery shopper is looking primarily at design and price. But even if customers weren’t clamouring for it, Pandora’s sustainability push has proven a sound business decision; according to its 2024 annual report, the company has grown by 45% since 2019. No doubt, others in the industry are watching with interest. 

Naomi Buck is a Toronto-based writer.

The post Pandora’s big bet on sustainability pays off appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Under a new blue-box program developed in partnership with a provincially established non-profit called Circular Materials, residents of London, Ontario, can drop their used pods, which are made with an aluminum mesh and frame, in a special bag that comes in the Nespresso package. Then they put the sack in the blue bin on recycling days. The spent pods are collected and sent to one of three recycling facilities, where the coffee and the casing are separated. The aluminum is compacted and shredded, and then sent to a smelter to be reprocessed.

According to the company, the program has been rolled out in hundreds of communities across Canada. “Nespresso Canada currently pays the entire costs of the capsule recycling program,” a spokesperson says. “This approach does not generate any costs for residents or municipalities.”

This venture, so far, is a small but revealing example of an important shift taking place when it comes to waste diversion. For decades, most Canadian and U.S. municipalities have operated blue-box programs, charging residents and some businesses for the service through taxes or fees. But diversion rates remain stubbornly low, and a lot of contaminated material that gets tossed in blue bins finds its way to landfills.

All of the same accelerants we saw in the climate change debate, we’re seeing take hold now with plastic pollution.

– Rick Smith, executive director, Canadian Climate Institute

The “extended producer responsibility” (EPR) model, popular in much of Europe, places the financial burden squarely in the laps of producers. The thinking is that the industries affected will be motivated to find or develop new end markets or reduce packaging to avoid landfill fees. 

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Early this year, Quebec producers and packagers formally assumed responsibility for waste gathered from municipal blue-box programs – the latest Canadian jurisdiction to shift its recycling services to EPR. 

Ontario is in the midst of its own EPR transition, setting up “producer responsibility organizations” to manage different portions of the blue-box waste streams. 

Sarah King, who heads Greenpeace Canada’s oceans and plastics campaign, points out that Recycle B.C., the oldest and most highly regarded EPR program in North America, has built an encouraging track record. Created in 2014 by the province’s Ministry of Environment, the not-for-profit reported that for 2023, 43% of plastics were sold to end markets, while the agency has established a partnership with GFL, the waste-management giant, to invest in new recycling infrastructure and technology. 

EPR, King says, “can have really positive impacts in terms of eliminating problematic materials and formats.” Yet, she offers up cautions: “Unfortunately, what we’ve seen is that it’s really focused on transferring collection and recycling [away from municipalities] as opposed to reducing overall waste generation. It’s not a replacement for eliminating or banning certain types of plastics or materials.”

The transformation of high-profile recycling programs coincides with a boom in research and development and business innovation when it comes to waste materials. Herewith, some notable case studies. 

1. Building in reverse through deconstruction

Construction and demolition waste remains a black box in the recycling world, as is true of much of the so-called IC&I (industrial, commercial and institutional) waste stream, of which only about 12% is diverted from landfill in Ontario, according to the Council of the Great Lakes Region. The United States, in turn, generates 600 million tonnes of construction and demolition debris annually, about a quarter of which goes to landfill. The rest, such as scrap metal, is diverted. 

Meredith Moore, an interior designer originally from New York, belongs to a growing movement within the contracting business. Her Toronto firm, Ouroboros, provides “deconstruction” services to renovators, essentially salvaging and reselling materials that normally end up in industrial waste bins: old studs, asphalt shingles, flooring and so on. The firm grew out of a home reno she and her partner completed during the pandemic and was inspired, in part, by the sight of so many overflowing bins in front of homes getting makeovers, she says. “I was just pretty much blown away by the amount of really wonderful materials that were being tossed out.” 

“Deconstruction is basically building a home in reverse,” Moore explains. “The last things that you’re putting in are going to be your baseboards, kitchen, appliances. All of that gets salvaged. Then we go on to the flooring, and that gets salvaged. Once we get to the drywall, that goes to recycling partners or gets disposed of. There are still not really any great options for fibreglass insulation for recycling right now. Then, once we get back to the stud walls, we basically work from the top down.” Ouroboros can achieve 90% diversion on most projects.

A growing number of municipal, state and provincial jurisdictions have established deconstruction rules, including places like Seattle, Washington, and San Antonio, Texas, where deconstruction is required or regulated. In Ontario, salvaged lumber – which is often much sturdier than what’s on offer at Home Depot – has to be regraded, per the provincial building code. Initially, that rule was a significant impediment to finding buyers, but Moore developed an approach that allows her to sell salvaged beams and studs to homebuilders. 

As for the business model, she says there’s still a cost premium for deconstruction services, even after factoring in revenues from resold materials. But Moore has figured out how to reduce that price differential by providing charitable-donation receipts for salvaged scrap that the homeowner can donate. Under those conditions, “we become, on par, less expensive than demolition.”

2. Stopping plastic pollution from synthetic fabrics

As of January 2025, France became the first country to mandate the installation of microfibre filters in washing machines – a move that will reduce the leaching of microplastics into the water system. 

European Union data shows that plastic microfibres in textiles are responsible for 15% to 31% of the 9.5 million tonnes of plastics that end up in the world’s oceans each year. In the United States, according to a 2019 literature review published in the Journal of Cleaner Production, textiles accounted for 6% of all municipal waste in 2014, of which only about 16% was recycled. (A few jurisdictions, like Markham, Ontario, offer or mandate textile recycling.)

A 2024 study by Ocean Diagnostics and the Rainforest Conservation Foundation found that annually about 1,920 tonnes of microfibres find their way into the environment from Canadian laundry activities, with almost 400 tonnes released into the air via dryers, with the balance in treated wastewater and biosolids used in farming and forestry. 

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Concerns about synthetic fabrics have escalated dramatically in recent years with the advent of fast fashion, as well as the growing popularity of blended materials that include both natural and synthetic fibres that enable clothing to be stretchier. A U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) study released last December estimated that 60% of textiles made today include plastics and cited Environmental Protection Agency studies showing a 50% increase in textile waste between 2000 and 2018.

Some brands – Canada’s Frank and Oak, Patagonia, and Finland’s Pure Waste – now promote either all-natural textiles or products made from post-consumer recycled fabrics. Lululemon last year introduced products made from “enzymatically recycled” polyester. End-of-life diversion, however, has had limited success because clothing and textiles are not allowed in most blue-box programs. Used synthetics that go to landfill or incinerators release greenhouse gases and leachates that shunt microplastics into lakes, rivers and oceans, soil, micro-organisms and, ultimately, human bodies. 

While some textile-recycling facilities now deploy hand-held devices that use infrared scanning to identify different types of fabrics, these technologies don’t solve the blended-fabric problem, and, as the GAO report goes on to note, advanced textile-recycling technology is still in its infancy. 

A US$1.28-million research study, commissioned by Goodwill and funded by Walmart’s philanthropic arm, seems to support that conclusion. Conducted at four regional textile hubs in the United States and Canada serving 28 Goodwill divisions, the two-year pilot concluded that 60% of the material studied – cottons, blends and polyster – could be reprocessed with existing recycling technologies.

While such findings are encouraging, regulations to mandate microfibre filters in washing machines will likely be more effective at reducing microplastic pollution well before clothing is thrown out. Just don’t dump your accumulated lint down the drain after collecting it. Better yet, experts say: dry your clothes on a line. 

3. Recovering EV battery materials through ‘direct recycling’

The surge in sales of electric vehicles in recent years foreshadows a similar surge in EV battery recycling as all those vehicles begin to reach the end of their lives. Battery metals and components like cathodes and anodes can then be reprocessed and cycled back into battery production. 

But the traditional means for salvaging these materials rely on high heat (smelting), chemicals or water, producing by-products that harm the environment, including greenhouse gases, acid leachate and an abundance of sodium sulfate, a cast-off compound that’s harmful in high concentrations. For every tonne of battery metals, conventional recycling produces 800 kilograms of this salt-like powder, which is difficult to dispose of and has few further commercial uses. Chinese battery recyclers sell it for use in detergent, while North American and European firms pay to dispose of it. “There’s not really an industry for this material,” says Beatrice Browning, a senior recycling analyst at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, a global EV supply chain consultancy. 

“In the competitive battery industry, the difference between sodium sulfate being a sellable product and a cost centre for disposal is one of the main reasons why battery producers in the U.S. and Europe can’t compete on cost with Chinese battery companies,” says Micha Ben-Naim, a scientist and investor with Boston-based Clean Energy Ventures. 

Browning points to the emergence of “direct recycling,” a simplified process for salvaging the various components of a spent battery without shredding the modules. “The direct recycling process’s easy scale-up is expected to generate higher revenue due to higher material recovery and few processing steps,” a team of researchers from India, Singapore and France concluded in a study released last year. 

Several start-ups are now working in this emerging market, Browning says: Kyburz, a Swiss EV company with a battery recycling division; Princeton NuEnergy, which has raised US$55 million and is now building a commercial-scale plant in South Carolina; and Ascend Elements, which has raised more than US$700 million in recent years and signed a 2023 deal to supply recycled battery materials to Honda. Clean Energy Ventures, meanwhile, recently led a US$8-million seed round, to be invested in Aepnus Technologies, a California firm commercializing a sodium sulfate recycling technology. 

Unlike conventional methods, direct recycling doesn’t produce the black mass that’s used to produce cathodes. That’s an advantage, because it eliminates the need to ship black mass to Asia for reprocessing, Browning notes. “The aim is to try and localize the whole supply chain.” 

4. Replacing plastics with new biodegradable materials

At some point this year, the UN member nations will resume a long-delayed negotiation over the implementation of a global treaty, adopted in 2022, to end plastics pollution. Even without the environmental hostility and climate denialism of the Trump administration, the goal remains elusive. 

For decades, plastic packaging has been the Achilles heel of the recycling industry. With a few exceptions (e.g., fleece made from recycled bottles), plastic is stubbornly resistant to circular applications for a range of familiar reasons: the proliferation of single-use plastics, inadequate sorting, mixed and contaminated feedstock, and simply the skyrocketing quantity of plastic packaging.

Veteran plastics researcher Rick Smith, executive director of the Canadian Climate Institute, says that new recycling technology won’t alter this narrative; rather, he predicts, the trajectory of plastics use will yield to rapidly emerging insights about the health impacts. Microplastics “are widely distributed throughout the natural environment, with evidence of harm at multiple levels of biological organization,” the authors of a wide-ranging literature review published last year in Science observed. “They are pervasive in food and drink and have been detected throughout the human body, with emerging evidence of negative effects.” 

Smith points out that the microplastics debate today is where the climate crisis discourse was a generation ago. “All of the same accelerants we saw in the climate change debate – the increasing awareness that climate change is not some sort of notional concern for our grandchildren, but a proximate threat to human security in the here and now – we’re seeing take hold now, just in the last year, with plastic pollution. For a plastics company, there’s no way you’re going to explain away the horrible, increasing scientific evidence that small plastic particles have penetrated every human body on Earth.”

Those revelations, he predicts, “will drive incredible new solutions in terms of non-toxic new materials and truly biodegradable plastic-type materials. That’s happening quickly, but we’re not there yet.”

John Lorinc is a journalist and author specializing in urban issues, business and culture.

The post Four ways that recycling is finally changing for the better appeared first on Corporate Knights.

What’s worse is that many of these medical plastics aren’t biodegradable. This means they can persist in landfills or oceans for centuries. Eventually they break down into micro- and nano-sized particles, which pose many risks to the environment and our health – including endocrine disruption and cell damage.

Incinerating plastic medical waste also releases harmful chemicals into the atmosphere. This contributes to poor air quality and potentially even global warming.

But there’s a growing push to find eco-friendly alternatives to traditional plastics. Bioplastics, such as polylactic acid (PLA), may be promising replacements to the plastics used in medical products. Bioplastics can be made from plants or algae. This means they can be broken down when the temperature, pH levels and moisture conditions are right, and they don’t create any toxic by-products over time.

Natural fibres, such as bamboo and hemp, are also being researched to replace synthetic materials, as they’re strong yet biodegradable. And unlike traditional plastics, many biodegradable alternatives are designed to break down without releasing harmful chemicals.

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