Circular Innovation Council is reinforcing the circular economy as a foundational strategy, far beyond recycling and waste management, to empower leaders to make coordinated progress. Learn more in this interview with Jo-Anne St. Godard, Executive Director, as featured in Circular Economy Magazine.
Imagine a Canada that is resilient, prosperous, and low-carbon, where circularity shapes how our communities are built and governed.
Turning this vision into reality requires dismantling misconceptions about the circular economy, which remain a key barrier to progress.
To better understand this transformation, we spoke with Jo-Anne St. Godard, Executive Director of the Circular Innovation Council, about how the organization is advancing national understanding of the circular economy and enabling leaders to translate principles into practice.
Circular Innovation Council (CIC) began in 1978 as the Recycling Council of Ontario, originally focusing on recycling glass, cans, and newspapers in response to linear take-make-waste systems. While early efforts centred on recycling policy and resource recovery, the core mission was always to use materials more intelligently and reduce waste at its source. As understanding of the circular economy evolved, so did CIC’s approach.
In 2020, we rebranded to reflect a national scope and a broader view of circularity, emphasizing reducing material demand, eliminating waste, and maximizing product value through reuse, repair, and redesign.
The circular economy is not simply about managing waste more efficiently. It is about preventing waste altogether while unlocking economic value, strengthening supply chain resilience, retaining embodied carbon, and improving competitiveness.
Today, CIC works across Canada and globally to advance circular production, procurement, infrastructure, and policy. Our focus is on delivering environmental benefits such as reduced emissions and resource use, alongside economic gains including cost savings, innovation, and job creation. This evolution reflects our core belief that the circular economy is foundational to a low-carbon, resilient, and prosperous Canada.
Frameworks, such as the Circular Economy Action Plan, play an important role in aligning purpose and enabling coordinated progress. By identifying core enablers such as information, collaboration, policy, innovation, and investment, they create a shared foundation for scaling circular solutions across sectors and jurisdictions.
Circular Innovation Council reinforces that the circular economy extends far beyond recycling or waste management. While recycling has a role, our focus is on reducing material demand, prioritizing reuse, and keeping products and materials in use for as long as possible to maximize value. This approach directly supports both climate action and economic strategy.
Municipalities are central to this transition. They influence infrastructure, manage materials, shape land use, and procure at scale. Through circular procurement, reuse systems, and applied pilots, we support municipalities in embedding circular principles into decision-making. Procurement in particular is a powerful lever, creating demand for durability, repairability, reuse, and low-carbon materials, which accelerates market transformation.
Across all of this work, we emphasize a clear message: the circular economy is an economic strategy that integrates climate action with productivity, affordability, and long-term value creation.
One of our greatest successes has been shifting national understanding of the circular economy. Through sustained education, awareness, and convening, circularity is increasingly recognized as an economic, environmental, and social strategy that goes beyond recycling.
Circular Economy Month, which evolved from Waste Reduction Week, is a key example. It now engages municipalities, businesses, educators, and community organizations across Canada each October to learn, share, and act. Participation continues to grow, reflecting a stronger appetite for practical solutions and a deeper understanding of value retention rather than waste diversion alone.
The Canadian Circular Economy Summit series has also become a national platform for advancing policy, partnerships, and implementation. Since the inaugural Summit in 2023, followed by a second in 2025, when Circular Economy Magazine launched with our collaboration, and a third planned for 2027, the series has helped catalyze collaboration, inform policy discussions, and accelerate adoption across sectors.
What is particularly encouraging is the broader shift in perspective. Businesses increasingly recognize circularity as a driver of cost savings, innovation, and supply chain resilience. Municipalities are using it to address material management, emissions, and budget pressures. At the same time, awareness of social benefits such as job creation, skills development, and stronger local economies continues to grow.
A persistent challenge is the limited recognition that the circular economy is climate action. Circular strategies, particularly reducing material demand and prioritizing reuse, deliver some of the fastest and most cost-effective emissions reductions by retaining embodied carbon in products, buildings, and infrastructure. Yet climate discussions often focus narrowly on energy systems and clean technology, overlooking emissions embedded in materials and consumption.
Another common misconception is that the circular economy depends on a single breakthrough technology. In reality, it is process-driven. It requires new principles, practices, and policies to be tested together in real-world settings. This work is inherently place-based, involving municipalities, businesses, and regional supply chains. Solutions must be demonstrated locally, proven in practice, and then scaled.
Additional barriers include entrenched linear infrastructure, legacy policy frameworks, fragmented regulation, inconsistent data and metrics, and financing models that favour capital-intensive projects over systems innovation. Addressing these challenges requires coordinated strategy, place-based experimentation, and a redefinition of how value is measured and created.
Our focus remains on turning circular ideas into practical, scalable action.
Circular procurement is a priority. Initiatives such as Procure4Circular are leveraging purchasing power to create demand for reuse, durability, repairability, and low-carbon materials. Aligning buyers and suppliers around shared criteria has the potential to reshape markets and accelerate adoption.
We are also expanding reuse systems through community-based pilots and virtual tools such as the Share Reuse Repair Hub, making circular solutions more accessible to communities.
A major forthcoming initiative is the CRD Circular Innovation Centre, which is designed to demonstrate how construction, renovation, and demolition (CRD) materials can be retained, reused, and circulated locally, preserving embodied carbon while reducing costs and waste.
In parallel, new efforts focused on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) will support the adoption of circular practices that improve efficiency, resilience, and competitiveness.
Food waste reduction remains another key priority, with a focus on prevention and value recovery. Across all programs, place-based pilots continue to play a critical role in proving what works and enabling national scale.
Over the next decade, the goal is for the circular economy to become embedded in how Canada plans, builds, and governs its communities, with municipalities playing a central role.
Cities and regions concentrate material flows, infrastructure, procurement power, businesses, and people, making them ideal environments for place-based circular economy implementation. These settings allow solutions to be tested, refined, and scaled.
The circular economy must be understood as a whole-of-community approach, not one confined to waste or recycling departments. It should be integrated into procurement, economic development, infrastructure planning, housing, climate strategies, and community services.
When municipalities embed circular criteria into purchasing and investment decisions, they unlock climate benefits through reduced emissions and retained embodied carbon while strengthening local economies and creating jobs. They also play a key role in enabling share, reuse, and repair systems that make circular practices visible and accessible.
Circular Innovation Council will continue supporting this transition through place-based demonstration projects, capacity building, and the replication of successful models across Canada. Businesses, governments, institutions, and communities all have a role to play in delivering the full economic, environmental, and social value of a circular economy.
Please contact us via the Circular Innovation Council website for more information.
This story was featured in Circular Economy Magazine:
The implementation of circular economy solutions at scale requires standardized rules for infrastructure and product design. In this special conversation featured in Circular Economy Magazine, Danielle Holly, Executive Lead, North America of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, shares exclusive insights garnered from the Foundation’s extensive work as a convenor and trusted voice in the circular economy space.
Read More View blog postBefore we can scale circular solutions, we need a common foundation for circular economy terms, measurement, and practices. In this Circular Economy Magazine editorial, Michael Leering, Director, Environment & Business Excellence, Standards, at CSA Group, offers insights into the role of standards in advancing the circular economy.
Read More View blog postThe Ten Lives festival movement is inviting everyone to get their hands dirty and help regenerate the earth, setting a new standard for how events can drive collective impact. Discover the details in this exclusive interview with Louis De Jaeger, Networking and Regeneration, as featured in Circular Economy Magazine.
Read More View blog post
