The Circular Balancing Act: Navigating People, Planet, And Profit
For the circular economy to be truly effective, the right balancing act of people, planet, and profit must be pulled out. Christine Yeager discusses how corporations can turn this into reality, giving more opportunities to lower-income communities and building a more sustainable world. She also presents some companies that excel in these areas and one particular organization that balances those three legs pretty well.
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The Circular Balancing Act: Navigating People, Planet, And Profit
Three Legs Of Circular Economy
This is the show exploring how we can optimize the shift to the circular economy by embracing change and the fact that change is cyclical. In this episode, we're unpacking a core tension at the heart of this transition, the balancing act between People, Planet, and Profit. Many people refer to it as a three-legged stool. Driving sustainable change is crucial, but making it work in the real world means navigating these trade-offs. Some of this can be inspiring, and other parts of it can be uncomfortable.
For all episodes, I like to have a vocabulary check or to remind people what some of the words are that we might cover in this show, because not everybody wakes up every day thinking about the circular economy. There are a couple of vocabulary words we'll talk about in this session. To set the stage, one is the circular economy. This is a system where materials are kept in use for as long as possible through reuse, repair, refurbishment, and most frequently thought of as recycling. This ultimately is about minimizing waste and regenerating natural systems with a heavy emphasis on the idea of economy. Think about the financial incentives tied to reuse, repair, refurbishment, and recycling.
Another vocabulary word we'll talk about is the concept of the triple bottom line or People, Planet, and Profit. This is a business framework that expands success metrics beyond profit to include social and environmental performance. This is something that B corps talk about a lot, or B corporations or Benefit corporations. Benefit Corporations is a concept. Instead of a C corp or a corporation, you would be a B Corp. You define your stakeholders broader than fiduciary responsibility to the stakeholders to drive profit, but in fact, a fiduciary responsibility that includes the triple bottom line.
There's also B corp certification, which may come with being a true legal definition of a B corp, but it can also come from meeting a lot of very rigorous metrics and showing improvement over time across aspects that are measured as defining People, Planet, and Profit improvements. That's a whole other aspect. You have externalities. These are the hidden costs or benefits of a business decision that aren't reflected in market prices, like carbon emissions or landfill waste. These are some of the vocabulary words that we might come across in this episode.
The Positive Impact Of Prioritizing People
I'm going to start with people, because a circular economy must work for everyone, not just those already equipped to engage. Also, companies often start with profit, which is the antithesis of what we're trying to talk about here. I'm going to end with profit here in this discussion. People come through in different ways, but often with this lens of equity, like equity and access, equity and the right to provide your input, and then social equity in the concept of not furthering the divide between the haves and the have-nots.
One aspect tied to the circular economy is equity and access to services like recycling or the right to repair something. In Colorado's packaging EPR plan, there's a requirement to serve communities regardless of income, language, or housing type, and to prefer service providers with strong labor protections. It's baked into the concept of the program plan and the actions that are going to be taken in the name of the circular economy in Colorado through the Extended Producer Responsibility or EPR legislation.
One of the reasons I want to talk about this is because it is true that, generally, lower-income communities are hit harder by sustainability challenges, environmental challenges, or access to recycling directly. Why is that? This can happen because there's a higher waste burden and disposal costs, potentially, in those communities, as well as smaller municipal budgets. There's limited access to curbside or convenient drop-off recycling, in general, in lower-income communities. This option forces residents to dispose of recyclable items as trash because they don't have access or an option.
This increases landfill use and then raises municipal solid waste disposal costs, which are often passed on to residents through utility bills or local taxes. Disproportionately, this affects those least able to pay. Smaller municipal budgets exist because local governments and lower-income areas collect less revenue from property taxes, sales taxes, or utility fees.
It's the nature of the fact that it's a lower-income community, which is are primary funding source. These are primary funding sources for public services like waste and recycling. With these constrained budgets, recycling is often deprioritized in favor of more immediate needs, like public safety, which is fair enough, roads, and education. These are all very important aspects. Recycling comes behind all of this.
Another reason lower-income communities can be hit harder by environmental challenges is the concept of environmental and health inequity. Communities without recycling access often live near landfills, incinerators, illegal dumping sites, and petroleum facilities. Therefore, they have a higher exposure to air and water pollution. These areas, often deemed environmental justice communities, bear the brunt of pollution-related health impacts such as asthma, cancer, and other chronic diseases. There's the term Cancer Alley in Louisiana.
This can also hit lower-income communities harder because they have fewer economic opportunities. Recycling programs can create local green jobs in collection, sorting, and processing, but with a lack of such infrastructure, it means that there are fewer employment opportunities in these communities. Investment and recycling infrastructure often bypasses rural or low-income urban areas because it's harder and more distributed. It's harder to provide that access through a hub and spoke approach business model because the spoke is too far. This perpetuates cycles of disinvestment and underdevelopment.
This can all be continued and perpetuated through systemic underrepresentation. These communities are less likely to be engaged in policymaking or consultation processes that shape recycling systems, like what's collected, how services are delivered, and things like that. As a result, recycling systems are often designed without their input, failing to meet their logistical, cultural, or language needs.
What does prioritizing people look like in practice? How can this be successful? What can it look like through a business? One company doing this well is Cotopaxi. They're a certified B corp. They embed equity in their supply chain. Their Del Dia product line is made from remnant fabrics, reducing waste while giving their factory workers creative control to design unique items. They've built a model that celebrates both sustainability and worker dignity.
Another leader that is always at the forefront is Patagonia, whose worn, wear, and repair initiatives preserve product value while supporting fair labor and worker rights across their global supply chain. Another one is called Interface, a flooring company. They've pioneered programs that clean up oceans while supporting coastal communities through programs like Net-Works, sourcing nylon from discarded fishing nets. Circular systems must avoid replicating structural inequities. It's not just about greening operations. It's about including and uplifting the people doing the work and those most impacted in order to successfully meet the People leg of the three-legged stool.
Lower-income communities are less likely to be engaged in policymaking or consultation that shapes recycling systems. As a result, these are designed without meeting their needs.
Building A More Sustainable Planet
Next is Planet. This is often the topic related to sustainability and the circular economy, but let's dig into this a little bit more. The circular economy aims to be regenerative, eliminating waste and decoupling growth from resource extraction. In theory, it's a net win, but in practice, not all of these solutions are created equal. You can even have a circular economy idea, but it is best in class if it regenerates. Meaning, you put back more than you take out as opposed to cycling through maybe once or twice.
A lot of times, there’s a lot of detriment in the circular economy. Paper, for example. Paper is a fiber. It has a certain length to it. Every time you recycle it, the length of that fiber gets shorter. At a certain point, the fiber is physically too short to recycle again. There's a bit of detriment that's happening to the structural integrity of the material throughout the process.
In an ideal world, you're regenerating more than you take. This can also be a huge challenge in the circular economy because perhaps there's a byproduct that happens in that process. There's this woman who eloquently talked about unzipping polymers and re-zipping them back together to create new polymers, and how that is a way to reuse this material that you've already pulled out of the earth and put it back into a new use indefinitely. That is an elegant way to describe chemical recycling. However, there are a lot of criticisms and challenges that come with chemical recycling because of the byproducts that might happen through the unzipping and re-zipping process. You have to consider these trade-offs.
The planet is often deprioritized over profits for reasons that may seem obvious, but let's spend a minute trying to break this down. I fundamentally do not believe that all businesses are trying to do an evil thing by deprioritizing the planet. They face some very real challenges and misalignment in making that choice. One is short-term financial pressures. This is very true for all publicly traded companies that are not B corps. They have a financial fiduciary responsibility to a shareholder to make the decision for the business that drives the highest profit. They can be put in jail if they are proven not to be making that choice.
That is a very real structural barrier to publicly traded companies having short-term financial success. They are under constant pressure to meet quarterly earnings expectations and sustainability initiatives, which often require upfront investment. Returns over a long period of time can seem like a financial risk in that short-term context.As I've said before, if it were easy, someone would've already done it.
There's another aspect that is blocking companies from choosing to prioritize planet over profit, which is misaligned incentives, bonus structures, key performance indicators, and performance reviews. They rarely include environmental metrics. When I was leaving the Coca-Cola company, they had put some environmental metrics into the metrics that determined the bonus of the senior leadership. That was a huge win. Not every company has made that change. If executives are rewarded solely for cost savings and sales growth, then those goals will always take precedence over sustainability, even when the company might be talking publicly about something else.
For complex supply chains, many companies don't fully control their supply chain. This creates barriers to transparency and accountability, especially in industries like fashion, electronics, or packaged goods. They may be 3 or 4 times down the supply chain, so they don't know what their supplier’s supplier’s supplier is doing.
When people’s livelihoods are on the line, it can be difficult to choose the planet over continuing to stay in business.
If you're a small business getting off the ground wanting to have that transparency and accountability through your supply chain, it can be a barrier to entry because you don't have enough buying power to push for that level of transparency, potentially. If you are a larger company, you might have a lot of structural legacy agreements, systems, and a lack of data and information for you to see and have the transparency yourself, let alone talk about it publicly.
These complex supply chains can potentially mask what is happening further upstream in the supply chain because there's no visibility into it. A company may not be able to influence, or it makes it tough. You have to upend, potentially, your profits to the detriment of growth, which means your business may not be in business anymore if you don't continue with the current cost of goods sold that you have. It becomes a trade-off between being in business and not. When people's livelihoods are on the line, it can make it very difficult to choose the planet over continuing to stay in business.
There's a lack of regulatory mandates. Without strong environmental regulations like extended producer responsibility or carbon pricing, there's little legal incentive to change. This is why so many in the sustainability community have leaned on pushing for regulatory changes over the years. It’s because it is a very effective way to rebalance the incentives for a business. In many regions, polluting or using virgin resources is still cheaper than circular or sustainable alternatives. That's where regulation can work to reset the market, as it does for many of these crops, like corn and soy, that receive subsidies to continue their business. That changes the starting line for the market.
What companies are prioritizing the planet well? Not to be all doom and gloom over here with all the roadblocks, because there are companies that are figuring it out. You might be surprised that I'm going to say Ikea. They take their commitment to becoming fully circular by 2030 very seriously. This includes refill options, modular design, large-scale investments, and responsible end markets.
They're also switching their materials out to get rid of formaldehyde and things like that. They're not just switching those materials, but they're rethinking the systems and how they operate to make a conscious choice to prioritize the planet as well as understand that that's something their consumers are looking for. There's also Allbirds who labels each product with its carbon footprint and uses regenerative materials like eucalyptus and sugarcane. Their transparency shows that not all sustainability claims are fluff. Some are measurable, trackable, and improving over time.
This is not an advertisement for Cotopaxi, but they get a second mention here. Their use of remnant materials diverts textile waste from landfills and eliminates the need for virgin inputs. They don't just talk about the planet, but they design around its limits. That's embedded in the core value proposition of the brand. Technologies like chemical recycling complicate things.
While they can produce post-consumer recycled materials, their energy use and emissions vary. The debate in policy circles is whether these qualify as responsible end markets or not. While textiles, chemical, and mechanical recycling show promise, hurdles like blended fabrics and contamination reduce their current impact.
Profit does not need to oppose sustainability, but we must ensure financial mechanisms actually drive systemic improvement, not just shifting the costs.
Planet-positive isn't just about new technology. It's also about ensuring every solution truly reduces harm and conserves resources. Achieving that requires a lot of balancing the trade-offs and thinking through the end-to-end. There will always be criticism of what you're doing because it's very hard to have a perfect circular economy with no detriment.
Creating Profit In A Circular Economy
At the end of the day, planet-positive isn't about new technology alone. It's about ensuring every solution truly reduces harm and conserves resources. Let's move on to the final P, which is Profit. In the circular economy, money still matters. It's got it in the title, economy. The beauty of the circular economy is thinking about how to rethink profit in the service of driving circularity, or rethinking incentives and shifting the incentives in general. Money does still matter. Extended Producer Responsibility is shifting the incentives and the cost of recycling from taxpayers to producers, encouraging better design and infrastructure investment.
I held Profitlast because companies often put it first. In the spirit of pushing for change, what if we thought about profit as a result of prioritizing people and the planet? The consumer data out there says that a lot of people prioritize people and the planet fundamentally. They sometimes see it as a status symbol for themselves, like, “I am choosing a brand that is doing good for the environment, so it makes me have a better status.” This is true in many generations, and is very true in younger generations.
As an anecdote of my experience in this realm, I had the privilege of participating in what they called the Junior Board for the Girl Scouts of Greater Atlanta. We weren't like the board of directors or whatever for the nonprofit, but we were an advisory board to help with some very specific areas that they wanted us to support.
Through this opportunity, I got the chance to volunteer in different ways. One of the ways I volunteered was participating in something they called Camp CEO. This is where Girl Scouts in the Greater Atlanta area earn the opportunity to go to this camp. It's a leadership development camp. They offer a weekend of mentorship and career exploration for high school girls and Girl Scouts.
I was the least impressive person there. These girls were unreal. They were so impressive, inspirational, and all kinds of things. We did a vision board, and their vision boards gave me goosebumps. They were so inspirational, and largely because they'd already accomplished a lot. Many of them had already started nonprofits in service of the things that they wanted to see change in the world.
To an inexperienced eye, you might see that it looks like they had cliques, but we structured some of the activities so that they were forced to maybe work with somebody at a different table. They didn't skip a beat. It didn't matter to them at all. They were so supportive of each other, helping each other, and making space for the other person to talk, no matter how different they were. I left that opportunity full of hope for our future, because if these are the women that are going to lead us into the next however many years, we are in a good spot.
Beyond these incredible future leaders, what companies are considering profit in conjunction with people and planet? Companies like Unilever are making this work by investing in reuse and refill pilots. While the returns aren't always immediate, they're building long-term brand value and resilience. On the flip side, a small competitor of Unilever, Blueland cleaning products, is creating cleaning products that don't have waste. It's a B corp that reimagines household cleaning products to eliminate single-use plastic. Their business model centers on selling refillable bottles and dissolving cleaning tablets, reducing packaging waste and shipping emissions dramatically.
Despite being a relatively small company, Blueland has scaled quickly, winning investments from Shark Tank and securing shelf space in retailers like Target. Their cost-saving refill model builds brand loyalty and increases profit margins over time while driving a significant environmental impact. Blueland proves that circular design doesn't have to come at the expense of growth. Their refillable systems tap into consumer value and create a routine that the consumer continues to participate in. That also delivers recurring value and recurring revenue for the consumer and the planet.
Balancing Act: Low material value and unstructured markets lead to inefficiencies and sometimes questionable practices where entities get paid multiple times without driving real system change.
Profit is harder to reconcile in sectors like textiles, though. The economics of textile-to-textile recycling are tough. Blended fibers, contamination, and a lack of infrastructure all raise costs. Meanwhile, low material value and unstructured markets lead to inefficiencies and sometimes questionable practices where entities get paid multiple times without driving real system change.
Still, businesses like Cisco are showing that circularity can align with profit, especially when modular product design reduces waste and makes refurbishment and resale viable. Companies are creating ways to lengthen the time that you can use something by creating these modular solutions. If one piece of it breaks, you only have to replace the one piece, as opposed to sometimes iPhones. It's hard to replace the thing. You may have heard of legislation out there and this idea of the right to repair. Profit doesn't need to oppose sustainability, but we must ensure financial mechanisms actually drive systemic improvement, not just shifting the costs.
Finding The Right Balance
Finding the balance. I know this is a very EPR-heavy episode, and that is because it's relevant. It's growing a lot. There are a lot of deadlines associated with it that companies have to align with. I am going to bring in the Circular Action Alliance as an example. They are a nonprofit who are the selected producer responsibility organization implementing packaging EPR across several states.
Their plans provide commentary and action plans against Planet, People, and Profit. For Planet, they have eco-modulation incentives for using recycled content above and beyond the market, and then also for designing for reuse and investing in infrastructure that supports closed-loop or circular systems. For People, they talk about creating multilingual education campaigns, prioritizing strong labor practices, and also targeting access to traditionally underserved communities.
For Profit, they have a fair and equitable funding system in concept where producers pay for recycling based on their material impact with investment, targeting long-term supply chain resilience. There's this aspect of if you shift to recyclable materials, you're incentivized, and that will reduce your fees over time. You are incentivized to make these fundamental shifts in your business. It's not perfect, and implementation will reveal where adjustments are needed, but it's one of the most structured attempts to build a circular system that balances impact, equity, and business viability.
At the end of the day, the circular economy isn't just a buzzword, but it's a paradigm shift. Real systems change isn't smooth, clean, or easy. It's full of trade-offs. What matters is how we name, navigate, and learn from those trade-offs across People, Planet, and Profit. If we're serious about circularity, we can't treat these dimensions as separate silos. They're deeply interconnected. Achieving balance isn't about perfection. It's about direction, transparency, and willingness to evolve.
Why embrace thinking about it from the lens of People, Planet, and Profit? Fundamentally, I believe that's the future of business. In fact, I think the future is already here. You see it in the long-term success of businesses that do balance those three legs well and the growing success of companies like B corporations. We're in the middle of the growth curve of shifting to that thinking. By prioritizing all three Ps, you have a more resilient, stronger business that can stick around for the long haul and feel good about what you're doing. Not that it's just about the emotional aspect, but that's why I would embrace a change to prioritize the People, Planet, and Profit together. Thank you for your time.