We Can Achieve the Circular Economy Despite All the Challenges

Chris Hines MBE, co-founder of Surfers Against Sewage, former sustainability director at the Eden Project and an increasingly popular figure on the conference and speaker circuit, is nowadays the owner of environmental consultancy A Grain of Sand. He believes we need to face up to the fact that we are dealing with a crisis – despite our best efforts so far. We caught up with him, appropriately enough, in the offices of a London construction firm.

Chris Hines knows the construction industry well, having delivered the keynote address at the NBS Construction Leaders’ Summit in 2024 and having hosted the Recofloor Awards in 2025. He is therefore well aware of the efforts that the construction and flooring industries are making to raise their game on sustainability and applauds these, saying we need more of them. However his key message is that, however good our efforts so far, there is more to do – and it needs doing urgently. In fact a better understanding of the big picture and an increased sense of urgency are the key requirements for scaling sustainability to the level it needs to be.

‘We need to make big changes,’ he says. ‘Unfortunately for all the good work that we are doing, the climate crisis is accelerating at a speed that is overtaking us. We’ve really got our work cut out. We can’t just come at this at normal pace. We need to be addressing this as if it was a crisis, which it is – an escalating crisis.

‘The construction industry, and the flooring sector in particular, are on quite a steep improvement curve. But it’s nothing to match what’s actually coming our way, and what’s already hitting us. We need a shift of culture.’

Chris Hines is however encouraged by some examples of good practice.

‘Laing O’Rourke made an announcement that they were switching to low-carbon concrete for all of their projects globally. And it wasn’t that they were going to do it in a year’s time. It was an immediate commitment, as of the day they made the announcement. They also had more than 65 sustainability leads within the organisation, whose mission it was to spread the word via the project managers, designers and construction leads. So that’s a cultural shift, and one that needs to come.

‘Looking at what is going on in businesses like this and the technical solutions that are possible, I am optimistic that there will be an awakening, that we will see some really strong leaders pushing into that space. With young blood coming through, I think we can hope to meet the challenge of driving the scaling of sustainability that is required.’

The construction industry recognises the need for retrofit, and this is the default activity in London, and it has a 60% carbon saving compared to new build.

‘That’s great and we do need to see those kind of big shifts, from new build to retrofit. But if you look at places like the centre of Birmingham or Manchester, there’s a lot of concrete being poured, and there’s potentially a lot of waste in that. That’s not to say that every new infrastructure project is bad. While I really don’t think we need another runway at Heathrow, we can build better in such a way that these types of major construction projects don’t necessarily conflict with sustainability goals. We can build amazing things really well.

‘If Laing O’Rourke are saying they can produce low energy concrete, then you can see that we can also get low energy, low carbon steel. We can be far more efficient in the way that we do these things. It’s just a question of whether we are reacting quickly enough. I don’t believe it’s the technology that’s holding us back. If I look at the computing power of the phone I have in my pocket and compare it with the technology of the early ’90s, you can see the pace of change and what is possible.

‘These are the kind of examples that we need to bring into the systems that we use in the built environment and in flooring. There are plenty of examples of good work being done, as I have seen for example when I did an awards event last year for Recofloor.

‘What’s more, I also think that the public are just wanting us to get on with it. They want things to be done. What makes me say that is for example the 89% project, in which they surveyed 130,000 people from over 100 countries worldwide. 89% of those people thought that the climate crisis was the number one priority for world governments, and that they should do everything they could to address it. But interestingly all of those people also thought that they were in the minority.’

Controversially perhaps, Chris Hines believes that if ever there was a long-term driver of delivering Net Zero, war in the Middle East may be one of those things, because it will force us to consider energy security more seriously than ever before, leading to increased focus on renewables.

‘The carbon footprint of one of those oil depots going off is just shocking and deeply negative. But maybe it can make us realise we can do this in another way, where we don’t need to have these fights over energy. I would recommend a book by Mike Berners-Lee, The Carbon Footprint of Everything. It covers everything from the carbon footprint of an email to a war.’

Chris Hines believes there are still too many examples of missed opportunities, and he cites the example of Rolls-Royce as a classic example of where we fail. The UK is the second windiest nation in the whole of Europe. We’re also the home of one of the best turbine manufacturers in the world – Rolls-Royce. But the turbines they make are put in warplanes for BAE Systems.

‘With our excellent wind resource, our superb turbine manufacturer and our port infrastructure, we should have developed a homegrown wind turbine industry, which could have supplied the world. But we didn’t do that. Fortunately it is not too late. We’re going to need wind turbines for generations to come, and we should be manufacturing our own.

‘We need large scale turbines and micro-renewables. In some European countries they have micro-solar. It’s like a roll-out mat that they literally hang out of the window, and it drives your kettle and your fridge. So you don’t just need to have massive complex things. If every house has its own micro-wind turbine and solar panels on the roof, it would make an enormous difference. We can build pretty much Net Zero houses already.

‘There is a surfing project in Bristol called The Wave. They achieved a 12% reduction in their carbon footprint by changing the structure of the retaining walls. By backfilling with soil, it meant that the retaining wall could be a lot thinner, and they also used recycled plastic in the concrete as well. That’s a project pushing against the norm. If everybody moves into that kind of approach, we then start to see real steep scalability of solutions coming through.

‘We should always build that way. And if developers say: “That’s our profit margin gone”, well really we can’t dilly-dally around some of that anymore. We need to drop some positive action.

‘And it’s the same with flooring. You know, we need to incentivise the circular economy, and we need people to take the lead. Business tends to outpace government. That’s because companies have to invest for the longterm, not just a four or five year electoral cycle. If a company’s making an investment in, for instance, EV production, to meet published government targets, it will only start to pay back after a number of years. So you can’t suddenly cancel it because of changing views on Net Zero. The same principle applies to products and materials for flooring.’

With regard to positive action required by the Government at this time, Chris Hines believes the most helpful action would be to cut the subsidies that currently exist in the fossil fuel sector. This would produce a level playing field for renewables, creating a massive change.

‘We need a long-term vision here. We need to shake up the system and stop rewarding the companies that pollute our planet for profit. We all subsidise that, because our government chooses the economic instruments which work in that way. The system should be geared to incentivise the circular economy instead.

‘It’s about reorganising things – and you don’t always need a stick. Sometimes it’s just obvious there’s a better way of doing things. For example I know of a small data centre in South Devon, which they built next to a community swimming pool. So the water from the swimming pool is used to cool the data centre, and the community swimming pool gets warm water. That is not rocket science. It’s one of the most obvious things that you could do. So, when we look around, that’s what we need to do. If someone wants to build a data centre, we need to tell them it needs to be next to a hospital or a community centre, so that the heat can be used.

‘In Vancouver, they extract heat from the sewers and, through heat exchangers, they use that to heat the district. We just need to be more innovative. We need to get our heads around the concept of Spaceship Earth and how 8.2 billion people place quite a lot of a drain on the finite resources that we have.

‘It’s about being cleverer – and I am optimistic we can do that, because we have demonstrated in so many ways how innovative we can be, starting with the design of products and the materials used to make them. With incentives, with encouragement from government, we can get there – we can achieve the circular economy.’

All information verified at the time of first publication in the CFA Guide to Sustainability 2026–2027 in August 2026. Read this industry-leading resource for more of the latest sustainability insights.