CCB Magazine

How circular is the cultural and creative industries? The congress "Zirkulär in die Zukunft", organized by the Federal Competence Center for Cultural and Creative Industries, was held on 7 November at the Amplifier Berlin to answer this key question - we were there as a media partner and look back: What role do the cultural and creative industries play?
 

TEXT Jens Thomas    

Ohm, Coulomb, Hertz, Ampere - the names of the rooms are still reminiscent of the old AEG factory, which was once one of Berlin's industrial gems and closed its doors in the mid-1980s. Back then, electrical engineering was manufactured here on a grand scale, but today a congress on the topic of the circular economy is being held here - "Zirkulär in die Zukunft" is the title. The congress is organized by the Federal Competence Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries. The venue: the Amplifier Berlin. Around 200 guests have come, some equipped with knowledge, others with question marks over their heads - the audience includes cultural professionals, academics and representatives from politics and business. There is no shortage of personnel. 

The event kicks off at noon with a promising panel: "How can sustainable innovations from the cultural and creative industries be scaled?" is the key question. Michael Kellner, Parliamentary State Secretary at the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy and spokesperson for the cultural and creative industries at the Federal Government, Nora Sophie Griefhahn from the Cradle to Cradle Association, Michelle Reed from the sustainable packaging service sendmepack and Dr. Bettina Hoffmann, Parliamentary State Secretary at the Federal Ministry for the Environment, will be on the panel. The problems quickly become clear: the economy is still too linear. According to the Circular Gap Report 2020, only 8.6% of the world's economy is currently "circular" - which means that too few products are still kept in cycles so that they can either be biologically recycled or technically dismantled so that they can be reused. "We must finally start keeping all products in cycles," demands Griefhahn from the C2C association, as if shot from a gun. Together with her association, she is trying to promote recyclability processes in all areas. And not without reason: the recycling rate in Germany is now quite high, even reaching 90 percent for packaging. For plastic packaging, on the other hand, it is only eleven percent. In addition, raw material consumption worldwide rose from 27 billion tons to 91 billion between 1970 and 2017 - more than tripling - and only 12 percent of raw materials come from recycling. In addition, consumption is expected to continue to rise worldwide to 167 billion tons by 2060.

We need to start keeping all products in cycles - Nora Sophie Griefhahn from the Cradle to Cradle NGO

Nora Sophie Griefhahn from the Cradle to Cradle Association in conversation with Michael Kellner, Parliamentary State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of Economics and Spokesperson for the Cultural and Creative Industries at the Federal Government. Photo © William Veder

What can the cultural and creative industries do to improve the situation? Michael Kellner sees procurement as a first step in the right direction. "We need to pay more attention to ecological and social issues in public procurement law," he demands. Cultural institutions are still focusing on the most economically profitable dimension, i.e. the cheapest offer - and not on the most ecological one. In Germany alone, 500 billion euros are spent annually on the procurement of public goods and services - in the EU as a whole, 60 percent of tenders are awarded on the basis of the lowest price. In addition, there is often a lack of knowledge about what could be an ecological or recyclable alternative - and a lack of time to look into it.

Michelle Reed is the best-practice example on the podium that day. With her company sendmepack, she develops shipping boxes from existing materials that take up little space - she calls this method precycling. Parcel, express and courier shipments have reached a new high in Germany. In 2021, 4.51 billion shipments were sent - an increase of around 83 percent compared to 2011. Sendmepack therefore specifically buys up cardboard boxes to avoid waste and resell them afterwards. "At the beginning, people were running us ragged," says the founder. The company already supplies around 400 online stores. Only the big ones are not yet included, but they are needed because 80 percent of the shipping volume in Germany in the e-commerce sector is generated by the top 10, i.e. the online stores with the highest turnover. But it is difficult for start-ups to keep up with the big players in the short or long term. At the moment, the company is dependent on venture capitalists. In the long term, however, that would not be a goal.

We need to give greater consideration to ecological and social issues in public procurement law - Michael Kellner, Parliamentary State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of Economics and Spokesperson for the Cultural and Creative Industries at the Federal Government

Above: Michael Kellner, spokesperson for the cultural and creative industries at the federal government. Below: The congress participants. Photo © William Veder

This is also where the problems that arise for creative professionals and in the field of the circular economy become clear - and which are only addressed to a limited extent at the congress. After all, many people have good ideas, but how to make a living from them is another question. For example, a funding pot is presented here and there at the congress, such as the Zero Fund, through which the German Federal Cultural Foundation is providing eight million euros until 2027, after which the field thins out. What's more, the circular economy is reaching its limits anyway. For it to work, the entire economy, including the value chains from the design, production and consumption phases through to closing the loop, would have to be converted - which is currently difficult to imagine. The so-called CMU rate, the proportion of recycled materials in the raw materials used, could also be increased from the current 12 percent to a maximum of 22 percent, as materials such as coal, natural gas and biomass are not recyclable and residual materials are left behind during recycling that have to be disposed of - but which can then often only be used in lower-quality products (downcycling). In any case, many of the recycling processes are energy-intensive, and the fields in which creative professionals can assert themselves are limited. For years, the circular economy has been dominated by technology, collection, transportation and street cleaning, waste treatment and recycling as well as the wholesale of used materials - it is hardly surprising that the cultural and creative industries have hardly played a role in the national circular economy strategy that the German government has been working on for some time. This is because it is primarily the areas of product and fashion design, as well as architecture and the event industry, through which viable concepts are being developed in the cultural and creative industries. It is an open secret that many design labels that produce recyclable products can barely make a living from a pair of sustainable underpants or a compostable collection. And now there is also the construction crisis - all architectural commissions are being canceled.

But it's also clear at the congress that there is no shortage of great visions. Nora Sophie Griefhahn from the C2C Association, for example, launched the Tempelhof Laboratory project in collaboration with the Ärzte and Toten Hosen bands - three concerts were organized with the aim of returning as many materials as possible to biological and technical cycles. The result was that 100 percent recyclability cannot be guaranteed, as some cycles cannot be completely closed at the end of the use phase. Nevertheless, the project enabled 80 percent of the nutrients from the toilets to be returned to cycles and 50 percent of the water consumption to be saved. Second example: Natascha von Hirschhausen. The Berlin fashion designer has developed a waste-free cutting technique and only uses fair trade and organic fabrics for her collections. This is because the fashion industry is still responsible for up to ten percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Less than one percent of textiles worldwide are recycled - and 80 percent are incinerated or sent to landfill. This is precisely why we need knowledge transfer and mediators like Griefhahn and von Hirschhausen - or people like Laura Scherer, who will also be there on the day. Scherer will be interviewing players in the circular economy via her podcast Circu: Culture and discussing specialist topics in depth. Elsewhere, there are research institutes such as Prognos, which produce studies for the creative industries. And the workshops, of which there are three on this day, are also about in-depth exploration: in the first, "Pitch Your Green Idea", the topic of sustainability is introduced to the participants via a board game, in the second, "Sufficiency Strategy", they practise doing without - and in the third, "Co-creating the circular transition", everything revolves around the question of what the cultural and creative industries can contribute to the circular economy of tomorrow. This is precisely where the limits are reached, as there is still no figure on how high the share of creative professionals in the circular economy is or can be in the future, nor are the limits of what the creative industries are capable of at all being discussed.

Photo © William Veder

Breaking down boundaries, rethinking everything - and staying in cycles, that's what the congress on circularity in the creative sectors was all about. All in all, the congress was the beginning of a debate, not the end. In a circular economy that already employs around 310,000 people in Germany and has grown by around 18 percent in the last decade, new fields of activity will certainly emerge in the future from which creative professionals can also benefit. But the question of whether creative professionals have a lobby to assert themselves against all the competition that is currently setting out with recyclable products remains just as open as the question of whether the circular economy should be limited to purely ecological cycles - in which case everything will continue to go round in circles when it comes to ecological issues. But whether you can make a sufficient living from it is another matter - which in turn is presumably compostable and at least does no harm to the environment. 

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