A durable and long-lasting product is a promising starting point for circular activities. Yet organisational challenges remain.

In this episode, Caroline Stern gives insights into Hilti Group’s challenges when measuring and improving its circularity. It starts with logistics, spans over accounting, and includes selecting the right input data for ERP systems designed for a linear world.

This episode is the 12th in the series PaaS Decoded, 16 conversations about the fine details of product-as-a-service.

Video Impression

People

Caroline Stern, Head of Sustainability for South Asia Pacific, Hilti Group

Patrick Hypscher, Co-Founder of Green PO, Expert in Sustainable Business Models

Chapters

00:00 Intro
02:09 Changing the direction of an organisation
04:09 A strong circular foundation
05:58 Access to products as door opener for reuse
08:31 Reuse as better than new
09:34 How Reuse changes internal logistics
13:24 Facing linear depreciation of circular assets
16:06 Defining the production location of a reused product
16:50 Reused product as (no) waste
17:29 The organisation of reuse as the real complexity
18:38 The role of data on resource consumption and CO2
22:23 All products will become more sustainable
27:58 Long last products as basis for PaaS
29:11 Keep the offering in the center
31:42 Open Door Climate and Southeast Asia

About Hilti

Hilti develops, manufactures, and markets products for the construction, building maintenance, energy and manufacturing industries, mainly to the professional end-user. About 32,000 employees work for Hilti.

Further Links

Hilti’s Fleet Management Service: https://www.hilti.com/content/hilti/W1/US/en/business/business/equipment/fleet.html

Hilti’s Reuse activities https://reports.hilti.group/2022/our-stories/circularity-second-life-of-tools

Hilti’s Circularity Measurement https://www.hilti.group/content/hilti/CP/XX/en/company/media-relations/media-releases/bcg_sap_circularity_standards_circelligence.html

Transcript

[00:00:00] Intro

So all of these things that we take for granted, whether it’s accounting, IT, finance, there are all the standard ways in which we run business and more or less consciously, they’ve all been built under the idea of a linear economy.

And as we start to have more and more examples of products actually running through as a circular economy, we will have to review a lot of the assumptions that have so far been gospel in how most companies run their business

My name is Patrick Hypscher and this is Circularity FM, the podcast about understanding, building and managing circular business models.

Welcome to the 12th episode of PaaS Decoded, 16 conversations about the fine details of product as a service. In the last episode, Marianne Kuhlmann gave the first insights into an upcoming framework for assessing the impact of circular business models. In today’s episode, we look at organizational implications of handling reused items, a necessity that usually follows from running a product as a service business.

She is a passionate sustainability expert with over 15 years of experience leading teams and driving change in the circular economy . For the last four years she has been at Hilti Group, first founding and leading the global circular economy program and now pivoting to a new role as head of sustainability for the Asia Pacific region.

Before that she worked in journalism, management consulting, and operational efficiency in manufacturing. A global citizen raised in Brazil and educated in the U. S., she lived and worked in 19 countries on four continents and is just about to relocate to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, for her new role after a six month sabbatical.

Welcome Caroline.

Hi, thanks for having me.

[00:02:09] Changing the direction of an organisation

Caroline, sabbaticals are also times to reflect on what you have done before and what you will do next. What are some of the things that surprised you over the last four years or that were different than what you expected?

In all my previous roles, I think I was always somehow an outside player. First as a journalist writing about a certain industry and then consulting, advising within an industry. But my time at Hilti was really my first experience driving change from inside a corporate environment. I, I have a much better understanding now of the size and complexity of, of some of these large global companies and what it really takes to make change.

Getting people on board can, can be a long process. There’s usually a lot of different stakeholders, there’s complexity of the organization itself. But then, on the other hand, as soon as you identify and get the right people on board, then things can actually move pretty quickly. So it’s almost like a double understanding of time.

And I think of it as, as being a little bit like a little tugboat attached to a very large tanker and the tanker tends to take its time and go in a direction with a lot of power and with a lot of force but it’s often a, a tugboat, you know, a small group of people who are responsible for, for, for changing the, the direction of that tugboat, and at first, that’s really hard, and you’re really struggling against the weight of that.

But once those shifts start to, to happen and that it starts to turn on its own axis, then the size and the complexity of the organization actually becomes an enabler to further change, to sort of run on its own rather than, than a barrier. And, and I think that’s what a lot of companies sometimes experience, that there’s, there’s often a bit of a tipping point.

When it goes from from pushing to actually going with the flow of the organization.

Yeah, I can relate to that. So, let’s talk about the direction of circularity. Where did you start with circularity at Hilti and where are you now?

[00:04:09] A strong circular foundation

So Hilti had a really historically strong base for circularity that we were able to, to build on. So for one, the, the products have always been extremely high quality and very long lasting, which is a great start.

There was already an existing infrastructure around tool repair. So with many tool service centers all over the world.

And there was this existing idea since 20 years of fleet management, the idea that the tools are not owned by the customer, but they’re owned by Hilti, managed by Hilti, which also enables us to be responsible for the collection and end of life of the tools when they come to the end of the contract. So, for a lot of reasons that were about customer experience and other business reasons, we had a great starting point in terms of all of the elements, all of the building blocks of what we now call circularity.

Where we are now is that we were able to build on that base and really centralize it around an idea of what is circularity. So first of all, what is a customer offering that really focuses on, in the case of fleet, reduce, reuse, and recycle those tools with value propositions along all of those areas.

We have a very strong program on how to reuse and requalify all of those products that we get back from flea to increasingly in increasing volumes. And we have a big topic of data and transparency where because we own those tools, because we own that flow, we were able to take a much closer look, get a lot of detailed data on what happens to those tools in their life cycle and at the end of life. And then crucially reflect that back to the customer in the form of transparency.

And all of that we were able to, to build on this existing strong base of things that we did for many other good reasons that we didn’t necessarily call circularity from the beginning.

[00:05:58] Access to products as door opener for reuse

You mentioned the reuse and reuse is normally considered as one of the more prioritized circular strategies because it keeps the product, the components in a good condition and in high value. Can you talk a bit more about the reuse of products at Hilti.

So I often say that we sometimes start with the opposite problem that many companies have. So many companies, when they first go on their journey of circularity or reuse, they first have to ask or answer the question of how do we get our products back, right? Most companies don’t have the control of those products. They don’t actually know what happens to those products.

We really had the opposite problem that for already for a long time we were responsible for, for collecting those products. We always made sure that they were responsibly recycled with external third party recyclers. But now we were able to ask the question of what else can we do with those products beyond just ensuring that they are properly recycled.

And there we started taking it in a few different directions. We started really based on our repair network. We have a repair network all over, all over the world and rather than buying and shipping new components to repair the other tools that we’re repaired, we were able to extract components that still met our quality requirements from expiring tools and use them in the repair of new products.

We then moved into, to batteries and there, what was really interesting is that we were able to work with algorithms to define whether a battery can or cannot be reused. With a mechanical component, you can set all sorts of thresholds. And of course we’re able to define very clear quality requirements. Some of those are optical, some of those are mechanical, some of them are functional. But with batteries and, and electronics in general, you can really go into the direction of building software to define on the series of a number of criteria, whether it meets your threshold or not. And so then you can really go in the direction of you know, the software gives me a green light. It has met the criteria for reuse or the software does not give me a green light. Therefore, it does not meet the criteria for reuse. So it becomes a much clearer decision for the technicians. And the next frontier is, of course, taking those individual components, so the same ones that we use, that we reuse and repair, it’s things like electronics, motors, and rotors, and not only using them in the repair of existing tools, but also eventually, you know, in the using them for the production of, of new tools, but that’s the next frontier and something that we’re not at yet.

So you gathered already quite some experience with reuse. Is there something that surprised you and others might be interested to learn about reuse?

[00:08:31] Reuse as better than new

 So there is often the perception that reuse is less good, right? Or saying, oh, you know, how will people perceive reuse? Is it something that is of a lesser, lesser quality? And actually in many cases we found it to be exactly the opposite. And the best example of that is electronics. So electronics have a really binary criteria. They tend to either work or not work.

And the vast majority of electronics that fail tend to be early failures. So there’s a certain number, a certain small number of, of electronics and therefore also batteries and chargers that fail shortly after coming out of a factory. But if they survive that early failure, then they last for 20, 20 plus years at very high levels of performance.

So in reuse, you’ve actually filtered out those early failures that you would actually have from, from the factory. So you’re able to have even higher levels of quality from reused electronics than you are from brand new electronics. So that’s not always the case. But it’s this really good example of how some of our prejudice against reuse are actually exactly the opposite direction.

[00:09:34] How Reuse changes internal logistics

I can imagine making that work in reality comes with some operational challenges. How reliable is the return flow of these tools?

So it, it becomes a question of supply and demand, right? The supply of expired tools on one side and the demand that you have of all of the different reuse examples, whether that’s reuse and repair or anything that, that might come in the, in the future. And we do have a pretty good outlook on which tools , will be coming in. Of course it does fluctuate over time. And we have a fairly good historical data on how many repairs that you have.

But it really becomes a classical logistical problem of making sure that your buffers are big enough and that your min maxes are set correctly to make sure that the volatile supply and the volatile demand match and you’re not running out of products.

The other element is really a decentralization of the network. So in the past, if you were a tool service center and you wanted to buy a new part you would speak to the warehouse. But if now you are your own supplier, one is that you need to make sure that that supply is there, right? You become responsible for your own supply.

And the opposite, the, the central warehouses, who are responsible for the planning, they will eventually not work with one external supplier, but maybe they’ll be taking in reused parts from multiple different tool service centers. So you have an increased network complexity in the sense of where things are coming from.

There’s also this topic of making sure that the items have the right identity. So one of the big topics that we looked at was how do you properly label what is a reused item versus what is a new item. And from the perspective of logistics, very often you want to know those things together, right? So in order to make buying decisions, I want to know how many I’ve used of new items, but also reused. So I want those items to be associated. But for other things like transport, for example, or transparency in the system quality tracking, I want those items to be separate. So there’s a whole world of how you actually name the items in a way that for certain use cases, they can be counted together and for other use cases, they can be counted apart.

it’s ultimately because of, solving a logistical problem, but the problem is solved really in IT and product naming.

Can you , elaborate a bit further on these complexities. I can imagine there is some more

Yes, absolutely. I think a lot of people, when they think about the idea of starting reuse and remanufacturing, of course they start with the technical side, right? Can we guarantee to our customers the same quality that they are used to and, and that they should expect. But most companies have the ability to make those calls internally, right? You have engineers, you can increasingly use algorithms, you have historical data. Most companies are very well acquainted with their products and what are the points at which those products no longer meet the quality requirements that they need. That is, is important work and it’s detailed work, but it’s straightforward. We can identify what are the thresholds, what matters, right? Is that, is that mechanics? Is it optics? Is it the number of charging cycles? Is it a certain thickness of material? Is it rust? You know, what are, what are the thresholds that really matter to the quality of that particular product? And then you define thresholds, usually in a very conservative way, usually even above the threshold that you would require of new products, and you measure individual criteria against those thresholds.

And of course, you can integrate that into the systems into the IT systems and the process systems that are used by the people actually making those decisions, often the technicians or in the factory. So it’s it’s important work, it’s, it’s detailed work, but it is work that most customers, most companies feel comfortable with.

[00:13:24] Facing linear depreciation of circular assets

What most companies are not used to, because it really is a new frontier as we go further into circularity, are all of the things that come around reuse and all of the ways in which we run our business on a day to day way that we might not even realize tend to enable a linear rather than a circular economy.

So one example there is accounting. In accounting, it is a very common idea that we depreciate a product over time. And if you think about it, that’s a fundamentally linear concept, an idea that a product through the virtue of time alone loses value up until the point that it reaches zero. We don’t depreciate a bar of gold, right?

We don’t depreciate certain financial assets. But, we have no problem saying that a tool, right, also contains gold, depreciates over time. So, that is written into absolutely every way , of doing business, and it’s something that we normalize. But what does it mean for reuse? It means that you say, okay, I had a tool. And that tool was sold for a certain value in the market, call it a thousand Swiss francs. And in my books, that’s then depreciated over time to a much, a much lower, even zero value based on how long the customer used this in. I then take back that tool at the end of the life and I extract an individual component.

And that component has never existed out in the world, right? The last time it was a component was back in production. So it has no value and it has no identity. In the real physical world it’s exactly identical to a product that’s maybe worth 200 Swiss francs and that’s where my savings come from because I don’t have to buy that new product. I can reuse that existing one. So that’s another value.

But is that the correct value, right? To say that it is exactly the same as a product that came out brand new. Or you could say maybe it’s the, the cost of labor of how much time that it took me to extract that part and requalify that part.

Maybe that’s the right value. So you get into this fundamental question of what is the right price for a reused item and you could say, well, it is the depreciated value of the tool, but actually it’s a component. You could say it’s the entirety of the value of its equivalent new part, but that intuitively doesn’t make sense either. You could say it’s the value of labor you produced. You could even say it’s zero because on your books it has never existed and it’s been amortized to zero.

And the reality is that all of our accounting standards don’t give us direction on how to do that. So, companies that are, that are going through this process are having to make decisions and at the moment there is no right unified answer of really what is the value of a reused product.

Accounting is, is one world.

[00:16:06] Defining the production location of a reused product

A second topic is, is customs and documentation. A lot of a lot of products require certain documents that are based on where those products are made. If you then make a product in one location, use it over many years, and then reuse it somewhere else, where is that new product made, right?

Is it still the original product that came from the original factory? It’s just changed locations? Or is it actually a brand new product and the idea of having removed it from, you know, removed a component from its original location, requalified it and put it somewhere else, that actually means that that’s been a new production process, and therefore that documentation needs to refer to that production location.

Again, no clear answer.

[00:16:50] Reused product as (no) waste

Another topic that comes up a lot is the idea of What is waste, right? There are, for very good reasons, especially in the European Union, a lot of limitations on shipping material across border. Because, for very good reason, we don’t want this idea of waste dumping.

But is a reused product waste? Because that is, again, a very linear assumption that everything that has been used already is waste, whereas actually what we’re saying is, No, this product still has value. It has value to me, which is why I’m bothering to go through the process of relocating it. But if then the government comes and says, well, actually that is waste that actually goes like totally against the idea of the circular economy, right?

[00:17:29] The organisation of reuse as the real complexity

So you have the IT topic that I mentioned before, right? Most companies are run by their central ERP systems that, that, that can be SAP, Oracle, but they, they tend to be very, very large central systems that run absolutely every aspect of how a company works. And this topic that I mentioned earlier of how do you name a reused product so that in some cases it’s the same and in some cases it’s separate, that is actually a huge and complex topic. So all of these things that we take for granted, whether it’s accounting, IT, finance, customs There are all the standard ways in which we run business and more or less consciously, they’ve all been built under the idea of a linear economy.

And as we start to have more and more examples of products actually running through as a circular economy, we will have to review a lot of the assumptions that have so far been been gospel in how most companies run their business. So the technical parts, you know, don’t, certainly don’t be afraid of starting the technical part.

In many ways, that’s the easy one, right? The complexity comes in the behind the scenes.

[00:18:38] The role of data on resource consumption and CO2

It’s nearly like a philosophical journey addressing the underlying assumptions of, our economy. So I’d love to go there, but let’s not do it because I want to come back to one aspect you mentioned at the beginning, and this was about data and transparency and measurement. How does that play into the journey?

So unlike CO2 with circularity, there isn’t yet a standard way of measuring circularity. What does it mean to be a circular business? What does it mean to be a circular product? We have hundreds, if not thousands of different associations, consulting firms, business groups trying to answer that question. And at the moment, everyone is coming up with a slightly different answer.

Personally, I think we’ll still see a lot more diversion in that and a lot more examples of different ways to measure circularity before we hopefully eventually agree on something that is a more consolidated unified system, but that will probably take a while.

Because of that Hilti did a partnership with BCG to co develop the creation of, of a score that helped measure circularity. That’s all been published in our sustainability reports for the last few years.

But actually I think some of the biggest value of that is not only the external signifier, but it’s what it allows you to give in terms of transparency internally.

Most companies can tell you very easily how much money they’ve spent on a particular product, say steel, but they could not tell you very easily how many tons of steel that they purchased and even less so how much of that was recycled content.

And the database that we pulled together to ultimately create the circularity score is exactly about that. It’s a, it’s a very, very detailed breakdown of all of the products that we buy, whether it’s a full component or individual materials broken down as, as much as possible into What level of recycled content does each thing have? So now we are able to say with some degree of certainty, not only this is how much money we spend on steel, but also this is how many tons of steel we purchased. How does that fluctuate over time? And what percentage of that is recycled content? And that opens up a lot of opportunities for them to use that data and say, what are the initiatives that therefore make the most sense?

Electronics came out very, very quickly and electronics and particularly batteries very high on that list. They’re, they’re incredibly valuable products and they’re also incredibly high CO2 products if you look at it on a per weight basis. So anything that you do in terms of batteries and electronics has a really outsourced impact on not only your circularity, but eventually also your, your CO2.

And later on when we signed the Science Based Targets initiative and we’re now very committed to the CO2 reduction that database that we produced for circularity really enabled us to make decisions and to have an understanding on what would move the needle. It allowed us to much more quickly calculate our scope three emissions than if we’d had to do that exercise from scratch because we were already at the point where we could say, okay, I know how much recycled steel I have. Now, it’s about saying what is the correct CO2 conversion rate. And then we were able to arrive much more quickly at the, the scope three numbers for the science based target.

So the I think the importance of data is always this dual function. There is a external signifier, which in, in the time of transition and in the time of a lot of change on these topics is very important to show that you’re taking the topic seriously.

But then it’s also the vast internal knowledge that you gain and the decisions that you’re able to make on that, that are really based on the relative importance of the different products and of the different materials you have.

[00:22:23] All products will become more sustainable

And let’s take that further based on these insights. Where do you see product sustainability going for companies?

So I think in the last, maybe 10, 15 years, we’ve had a bit of a trend of having green lines, right? And lots of companies have come up with a sustainability line. But that sort of begs the question as to saying, okay, well, if you have a sustainability line, then everything else, which is usually the majority, is a non sustainability line.

And I think both, both customers, but also companies are starting to realize that’s not really the direction that we want to go, right? We don’t really want to, to open that, that that discussion. And I think increasingly what we will see is how do you integrate sustainability into your, into your processes, into your product design in a more fundamental way so that you’re no longer saying, this is my sustainable product, and these are my non sustainable products, but these are the efforts that I’ve made across my portfolio to reduce my CO2 or improve my sustainability.

And there again, the importance of data, of making those decisions in a smart way, because it’s usually a handful of materials that you’re using very intensely across a product range, so a change in that material can impact a huge number of products.

In the best of cases, right, automotive is a fantastic example, you already have certain components that are used across multiple products. So if you’re then able to make a change on one component and that affects multiple product lines, you’re also able to enact that change more quickly.

So I think we’re now at a tipping point where you increasingly see companies going away from this idea of one lighthouse product or one lighthouse line, which are, are of course important learnings that we’ve made in the past to say, How do I integrate that into my processes and how do I do it as a more fundamental way of product design?

And that’s of course a much longer journey, right? You don’t you don’t shift your portfolio every couple of years. So the time it will take for that to really come to market will be slower. But then again, thinking about the tanker at the beginning, when those shifts start to move, they’re then much more holistic and much more lasting and a much more integral part of the, of the business.

I think that’s absolutely the right direction to go in, away from, you know, individual examples and more into processes and systems that encourage sustainability to be the default in your product production.

Let’s stick with journeys. You mentioned at the beginning that you’ve been traveling South America for the past months. Is there anything, any practice you encountered that inspired you or reminded you of things we are now doing under the label of circular economy?

Yeah, so I, I think labeling is a really important part of it, right? We now in the sustainability world, we like calling things, you know, circularity, sustainability, we have lots of jargon, lots of names. Increasingly, people are talking about the same thing, they just might use other words.

And sometimes that’s just a way of describing things, right, of, of saying, okay, if you ask someone. You know, why, why is it hot today? They will tell you, oh, because maybe, maybe they use the word climate change, but they’re probably just as likely to say, okay, because the rains are late or because we cut down the forest over there.

But there often is a really intuitive understanding sometimes even lacking in politicians. Of, of why these things are, are happening, right? And I think the same is true in, in everyday, day life.

One thing when I moved from, from Brazil to Europe that really struck me is how few repair shops you see or can see. What we might sometimes call junk shops, and that was something that traveling in Central America I saw really a lot. You see these, these often very small stores really overloaded with all sorts of odds and ends, right? They have a, a television and a bunch of cords and effectively what from a European perspective is a bunch of broken stuff, but it’s not broken stuff.

It’s stuff that is being repaired, right? You can repair a football. You can you can rewire your your phone. There’s a lot there that you might say, okay, well, in Europe, I’m used to throwing that away, that actually there’s still value to be seen and, and can be repaired. And it really comes down to the, the, the relative difference of labor price versus material price.

And in Europe, the relative price of materials of buying something new is generally much cheaper than the labor to repair that. Whereas in in places that have labor costs, that calculation looks very different, right? The price of import, of buying something that is often imported, often has taxes, is disproportionately more expensive than the cost of of repairing it locally.

So you have, really intuitively this idea of reduce because products are expensive and material goods are expensive and then reuse and repair for as long as long as possible. You don’t need to teach that, right? That’s something that’s really intuitive. So if anything, I think it’s something that countries that are maybe not as economically advanced have a lot to teach the developed world of actually reminding us that those practices are there for a reason, because it understands intuitively what we sometimes conveniently forget, which is that resources are not endless. Resources are finite and therefore valuable, and we should treat them that way rather than being disposable.

Yeah. Wow. That already brings me to the, the final three questions. The first one is a bit coming back to fleet and product as a service. , what do you think is the main thing a brand or manufacturer should make sure before starting such an offering?

[00:27:58] Long last products as basis for PaaS

I think it really needs to start on the basis of a, of a high quality, long lasting product. Any of the circularity levers that you talk about, whether that’s repair, reuse, remanufacturing multiple ownership, all of those assume that the product lasts. So you really need to make sure that the, the product is is, is robust, it’s repairable, it’s long lasting.

And some of that is what we now call design for circularity, but some of it is also just inherent to the type of product. So it’s not a coincidence that remanufacturing at large scale really started with big industrial players. So you have the example of Rolls Royce and, and the turbine, right? Obviously very, very expensive piece of material, John Deere, Caterpillar these big long lasting complex machines where that inherent value is much higher. It’s not that circularity is not possible for smaller or relatively cheaper items. But those, those things that already have that, that high quality, that durability and that complexity built into it really lend themselves more to circularity from the very beginning.

 And the second question is more about trends. You mentioned already trends with product sustainability. Do you see any trends when it comes to circular renting for the next five years?

[00:29:11] Keep the offering in the center

I think with sustainability in general, it will be about not having sustainability isolated from the rest of the business. So same as we mentioned with product design, that same effect needs to happen in finance, in marketing in, in all of the, the aspects that were in logistics, right? All of the ways that we run our business, that it’s not a sustainability thing on the side and the regular businesses, the rest of it, it is sustainability integrated into all of those different ways of doing business. And that is of course high complexity.

On, on the services, whether that’s a circularity or you know, circular business model, renting, product as a service, whatever we might call it, I think the important thing is to really keep the, the offering in the center. There’s a good reason why a lot of what we now call circular business models didn’t start by calling themselves circular business models. They started because they were addressing a particular need and they were addressing a particular customer requirement, whether that was that the customer didn’t want to have the hassle of dealing with with things on a day to day basis. Or that the product was too expensive for them to have on their balance sheet, but there’s a lot of companies that started with what we now call circular business models for reasons that have nothing to do with sustainability and are much more about customer experience and good financial ideas.

And those I actually believe are the ones that will be the most long lasting, right? Coming up with something that is, that is sort of the, the main goal of it is to be a circular business model, then it’s very easy for that goal to come before the goal of filling a customer need, right? And at the end of the day, for us to be a scalable business, it needs to be something that is attractive.

So. I’m a strong believer that those two things can come very strongly together. There is a watch out that when you have an existing business model sometimes it’s hard to adjust. Whereas when you start from something from scratch, you can deal deal with those problems from the beginning. So there, there are pros and cons to, you know, you start with an existing model, but then maybe there’s resistance to change within an existing successful business model. On the other hand, you can start with something totally new that meets all of the requirements, but then you have all of the work to scale that and before it really has impact and change.

So. In the end, we need both, right? We need business models that came for other reasons to increasingly become sustainable and circular. And we need business models that are in our products or services that are now being created with circularity and sustainability at the center of it to also be viable business.

[00:31:42] Open Door Climate and Southeast Asia

Yeah, couldn’t agree more. So my last question, Caroline, is about people. So Circularity FM is about connecting people. Is there any topic you want to talk about with people, people who listen right now who should reach out to you?

Yeah, so I think the great thing about working in sustainability now is you have so many wonderful people with lots of, lots of backgrounds and, and really a lot of, a lot of passion and interest. So it’s always fantastic to, to exchange and, and see some of the, the things that other people go through.

I’ve recently signed up to the initiative of Open Door Climate which is hoping to have conversations with anyone who’s interested to, to pivot into sustainability at whatever stage in their career and exchange on some of the things that, that might be useful for them.

I’m a very big believer that now every job is a climate job or every job is a sustainability job. I don’t think you need to have sustainability in your job title to really enact change. Um, To the contrary, I also don’t think we need huge independent sustainability teams. We need sustainability integrated into every aspect of how we do business.

So if you’re interested in, in, you know, pivoting to sustainability or, or would like to access sustainability more, even if it’s not in your job title, very open to speak.

And on a personal level, we’ll be relocating to Kuala Lumpur very shortly. So anyone who’s currently active in sustainability and circularity and also regenerative agriculture in Malaysia and Southeast Asia, I would love to learn about all the wonderful work that’s going on already and very much excited to be part of a new community there.

Thanks a lot, Caroline. So many valuable insights. We could talk for two more hours, at least on my side, I’ve many more questions. I wish you a wonderful start and thanks again for sharing these insights with us.

Thank you very much. Thanks for having me and all the best.

This was another episode of PaaS Decoded. 16 conversations about the fine details of product as a service. If you liked it, share this episode with colleagues or on social media. If you missed a question or topic, please send me an email so I can improve the conversations for you. If you learned something from this episode, please provide a review via Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

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My name is Patrick Hypscher and this is Circularity FM, the podcast about understanding, building and managing circular business models.