What would a fully circular rebrand look like?

Such an interesting question that came up with a colleague this week.

Under the “circular economy” definition (in my own oversimplified words), a business would recycle or recover everything it produces so that nothing is wasted.

For example: Upparel – a business I’ve mentioned here before – sells socks made from recycled materials, but it’s main business activity is accepting and recycling textiles from the public to create that recycled material (or distribute anything they can’t recycle to anywhere possible that isn’t landfill). They actually accept and recycle/divert much more than they require for their socks.

That’s how a product-based business does it, which might look different to how a service-based business would.

But a rebrand is a self-contained project, which is different again… so what might that look like?

Some initial thoughts we came up with:

• Rebrands produce new assets like signage and printed collateral, so working with suppliers who take away your old signage/collateral and dispose of/recycle it responsibly is one option
• Finding end-of-life options yourself for your collateral is another – there are waste collection companies who do the sorting and recycling for you, or you can see if there are options near you
• Migrate your website to renewable-energy-powered green hosting
• Create a low-impact version of your website
• Digitise documents like annual reports, company profiles, catalogues, and other “booklets” and host them on your shiny new green servers
• Switch to digital business cards
• Partner with fair-trade suppliers with buy-back or trade-in schemes for your uniforms and apparel
• For trade show or conference merchandise, opt for a lower quantity of locally made, high quality, practical products that you hand out to promising leads, as opposed to large quantities of cheap throw-away items you’d hand out to freeloaders hoarding free merch
• Use the most local supplier you can find to minimise transportation and postage
• Generally ensuring that every new item you create as part of your new brand, can either be returned, safely recycled, or reused at the end of it’s life (whether that’s your next brand refresh, or when it needs to be replaced due to wear and tear)

I think we’ve barely scratched the surface.

As more innovative options start to emerge, it’ll be possible to rebrand in increasingly sustainable ways. Whether it can ever be fully circular is something we’ll be watching very closely!

Wanna know something really cool? A lot of these options can actually boost business. Many of them save money; Some are really innovative, so they’re a point of difference; Or committing to a different practice simply creates a unique talking point that will gravitate the planet-conscious folks towards you. As we’ve said here before, Everything you do and don’t do becomes a part of your brand.

I hope you found this list interesting – it was fun to put together and I hope you check some of them out… you don’t need to be considering a rebrand to start making positive changes!