Achieving Circular Success With Corporate Collaboration Not Competition

Dr. Phil Brown spent four years at TU Delft researching how companies collaborate to go circular, then joined a company built on the premise that mostly they don't. In this conversation with Garr Punnett and Sabira Lakhani, he traces the line from a master's project recovering plastics out of waste electronics to running sustainable innovation at Circularise and argues that the data layer everyone is now racing to build is step one, not the destination. The conversation covers who actually owns product data, why proof-of-concept paralysis is the real bottleneck, what has to be true for capital markets to fund recovery infrastructure, and which people you need in the room for a circular pilot to survive. It is a candid look at the unsexy plumbing of the circular economy from someone who has studied it academically and had to sell it commercially.