The Circular Economy, Climate Action, and Urban Sustainability with Helen Santiago-Fink

Welcome to the 2026 Trend Talk podcast, a multipart miniseries from the American Planning Association in partnership with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. This series focuses on new and emerging trends and the potential impacts on our communities and the practice of planning. My name is Joe DeAngelis, research manager at the American Planning Association, and your host. Today, I'm joined by climate urbanist and researcher Helen Santiago-Fink for a discussion on the circular economy and the potential implications of this emerging economic model for cities and for communities. Helen works at the intersection of the social, natural, and physical sciences. Her 25-plus years of professional experience bring multidisciplinary expertise in sustainable development; climate change mitigation, adaptation, and resilience; urban systems planning; energy-efficient buildings; and community and economic development. Helen has worked at the global, national, and local scales as technical advisor and program manager for organizations including the United States Agency for International Development, United Nations Environment Program, the World Bank, European Commission, FEMA, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. Helen's publications highlight how nature-based solutions can accelerate urban sustainability and climate resilience. She holds a BA in economics, MA in urban and regional planning, and undertook doctoral work in climate change at the Boku Natural Resources and Life Sciences University in Vienna, Austria. 

Helen, how are you doing today?

Great. Thank you for the opportunity.

We're looking forward to chatting with you today about what is, I think an interesting topic. Yeah, we're excited for this.

Well, I believe it's actually a very important topic, and I'm glad to see that the American Planning Association is very much promoting the path towards basically, circular economy, circularity, in support of broader sustainability objectives.

For sure. For a topic like this, as we dive into this, it's probably best if we start with the basics. We've written about this topic in the past in previous Trend Reports that we've put out. There's maybe a general awareness among planners of the concept as maybe something related broadly to sustainability in some way. Can you give us a bit of an overview of the concept of a circular economy, what it is, and maybe how it's evolved a bit and changed over time?

Sure. Happy to do so. I think of the circular economy basically as resource optimization. In that, brings the whole issue of circularity, in which instead of a linear process in terms of basically using raw materials, natural resources to create, say, a desk. The desk in and of itself then becomes an input for whatever that desk, say it's made out of lumber and different other products, can be used, can be reused, can be repaired. That desk in itself has a life longer than in and of itself of its pieces and components. It may be a desk for a long time, particularly if you employ some of the circularity principles that involve repair, redecour, remanufacturing. But that also then takes us in terms of using those components of those desks when it's no longer a desk into something else. That something else can be then the input for either another product at the end of the day. Ultimately, at the end of the day, when we get down to recycling, which is at the bottom in a sense of the circularity path or at the end, the end of life of that desk, then becomes an input for something else. It could be, say, wood chips, if you break it down to wood chips that then ultimately can be used to create another product.

It's basically the reuse and the repurposing. There's basically 10 Rs now. We've really evolved from the reduce, reuse, recycle to, as I mentioned before, to the repair, to the remanufacture. Then we start at a very early perspective in terms of even refusing or rethinking or redesign. So much of the circular economy is dependent on the design of the product from onset to ensure that there is a resource optimization or there is the best use of those resources, in a sense, in a minimalist perspective, to be able to then allow for that product to be as functional as necessary.

You asked me about what was the genesis of circular economy? It actually does have a long path to date. The concept in and of itself evolved in the 1940s with the concept of industrial symbiosis, industrial ecology, terminology that you see both in the literature as well as in some of the old practices. But it's basically the intersection of nature, natural resources, economy, looking at economic models, and societal applications. In all cases, using technology, whatever the technology was of the day, as a tool to be able to allow that to happen. Back when the automobile was being constructed, or when the different forms of power were being used, it had a great impact in terms of the natural resources that were being used. It had an impact in terms of what were those economic models, what were those production facilities, what did they look like, and then how did society use those new products.

Unfortunately, that idea of greater efficiency for products was utilized, was a concept in the '40s. Then in the '70s, the term circularity was then really put on paper, largely came out of academia, and you find it in the literature, the concept of looking at a closed-loop system for production, for sustainable production and consumption, as is the SDGs [UN Sustainable Development Goals]. Ultimately, then we saw the Chinese actually looked at circular economy. Interestingly, they included it as a pillar to their sustainable development model at the time. This was in the 2000s when issues of climate change were becoming much more visible, much more understood.

I see the circular economy and climate change and climate action as mutually reinforcing strategies. If we focus on resource optimization, we very much can look at addressing the environmental costs and degradations that's taking place that ultimately exacerbate, whether it's natural resources, degradation, whether it's increased particulate matter and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and then ultimately the impact of those in terms of typhoons and hurricanes and extreme heat and all the climactic challenges that we are bracing with in current day.

I'm glad that that's where you ended, right, with the topic, because I think that that does bring it to a very local scale that is maybe pertinent to planners and practitioners and people who live in cities and urban areas. Because a lot of what I've read about this topic has been in the context of the life cycle of products and manufacturing supply chains and things like that. Not relying on the extraction of new materials all the time for manufacturing, but maybe reusing the components of things that have already been produced and creating a whole new life cycle of new products that might be coming out of that.

At times, that can feel a little bit distant from the work of planning, planners, the urban context itself. Can you maybe speak a little bit more about the relationship between a circular economy, circularity, and cities themselves?

Sure. Let's bring it down a little bit now to, for example, in the U.S. The U.S., at a local level and at a state level, really started with looking at circularity or looking at basically recycling principles. This dates back to the '70s and the '80s, states like New York and California, looking at, for example, recycling of bottles and cans. Unfortunately, the first U.S. national recycling policy wasn't adopted until 2021. But that shows some progression in terms of having what's been done at the local level start percolating up into national policies.

That was gaining momentum now, and we're seeing it now in things like, for example, the right to repair laws that are happening at the city scale, and they are percolating up, once again, through the different governance structures. We see them also within private industry, where manufacturers are providing through these right-to-repair laws, producers and repair shops the opportunity to be able to repair and having the information to allow for the repair of products. We see that at the state level in terms of governance, mandates, New York, Minnesota, California, again. Cities are well-positioned.

Let me just show or indicate where a lot of that movement started from at the subnational level was really in Europe. Europe has been a global driver in terms of advancing circular economy policies and practices. Back in the '90s, some of the first policies were developed, even where the European Commission as a whole, but ultimately, their policies very much are just umbrella policies that then come down to the local level. It has very much a different, well, they operate with a governance structure different than we find here in the U.S. in some respects, in which those more macro policies then came down to the local level. Then the local level has the responsibility to develop either what we call local ordinances here or different incentives or facilitation infrastructure to be able to promote that circular economy practice.

For example, the city of Amsterdam, which I worked with when I was working for UNEP, and I was based in Paris, they were working with their chamber of commerce, and this was back in 2014, 2018, where they worked very closely, city working with industry, working to actually educate their citizenry in terms of what are the 10 Rs, which I alluded to earlier. This goes to, one is to redesign, one is to rethink in terms consumption practices. Then it goes on to repair, to remanufacture, to refurbish, to repurpose. Those 10 Rs now, you really only find or hear about in a European context. The three Rs are still very much the norm or the motto, even among the Japanese that have been also very forward-leaning in terms of looking at circularity.

But cities are very well placed. I'll pause there for a moment, and then I can get into some more detail. But any more suggestions on your end?

Yeah. I think that talking about this in the context of resource extraction, I think, is really interesting right now as it relates to products and to industries that are very much growing in scale right now. One of the trends that we've been tracking over the last few years has been related to the massive growth of certain high-tech industries. This new gold rush for sourcing and potentially securing materials that can be used for lots of different purposes, but for things like solar panels and wind turbines and smartphones and, increasingly, data centers to handle massive new computing needs and such. We recognize and understand that this is a highly extractive process with some major environmental costs, potentially. As we followed this trend over time, we don't really see any signs of that slowing down necessarily.

So, from your perspective, looking into the future potentially, is there any growing interest within the industry, or are there any established processes within the industry as well, or among governments for a less extractive, less carbon-intensive, potentially more circular model as it relates to these highly extractive industries?

You've addressed a very timely question right now. You're absolutely right. I mean, obviously, we live in a technologically based society and world, and that is only increasing with some of the technological improvements that we basically literally see every day.

An honest answer to your question is really, no, at the present time. Yet, let me say that governments in an industry have been struck with the current realities of changing geopolitical conditions, fluctuating market dynamics, coupled with societal consumption norms, and that the scarcity of essential resources, particularly critical minerals, which are necessary to power our technological world, is a dire priority to address. The immediate reaction by many governments, including our own, has been to return to the primary traditional practice of extraction, or basically mining. Mining for the sake of extraction to secure the necessary supply of resources for our ICT [information and communications technology] industry, our energy industry, our automobiles, medical, defense, among other sectors. The critical minerals, which there's a list from the U.S. government and Department of Energy, has 54 of those that are priorities, things like lithium and nickel and graphite and cobalt and manganese, and more common things like copper and lead, and then not even to speak about the rare earth elements that are even more challenging to basically extract, even identify. 

This is where we are now, but there is some ray of hope in terms of alternative strategies to be able to secure those critical minerals. One of those is through secondary sources and bringing in issues like circularity. For example, one of the projects that I'm currently working on is looking at the recycling of e-waste. E-waste, all our electronic and electrical components these days utilize these critical elements, which basically need to be mined or have traditionally been mined, and then go through a very energy-intensive process, smeltering and extracting them, to be able to create our semiconductors and our computers and our MRI equipment and the magnets that we need to power both solar energy or particularly wind energy. All that is necessary. But we're looking at secondary sources and employing circular economy principles, we can get to those critical minerals that are already in the form of e-waste. So e-waste recycling is economically viable. It's an accelerated strategy to be able to get to those critical minerals. And this is something that I am advocating currently in my professional capacity, both among private sector as well as governments at all scales. 

And so cities are very well placed to be able to help facilitate that e-waste recycling process. That in part is through policies like extended producer responsibility. These policies have been around for decades, but cities can work both with their state government to be able to pass those policies, and then cities at the more localized level can help facilitate the collection of e-waste, can develop partnerships with the private sector. Now we've seen that to some extent, also working with private-sector companies like, for example, ERI, which have partnerships with Best Buy and Staples to be able to facilitate the collection of e-waste by the general public. And so that is a tremendous opportunity.

You can also look at other sources for critical minerals from secondary sources, and that is looking at tremendous amount of industrial waste. So we don't have to mine again, we just look at the industrial waste that currently exists. We also look at wastewater treatment facilities where in the wastewater, there's a lot of heavy metals. And so it's looking at those secondary sources of which these are already residual products that can be put in that circular economy loop to be able to extract the resources that we need in a much more sustainable, accelerated, and in a sense, economically profitable manner.

This is maybe a bit of a follow-up to that because we've written in the past, last year, I believe we touched on it this year as well in our Trend Report on some future signals related to deglobalization. Nations taking some tentative steps away from interdependency and maybe instead looking inward for certain things. It's conflicted and contested, the degree to which this might actually be happening, but we've covered it as a longer-term signal. Even things like onshoring of manufacturing or reliance on domestic energy or whatever it might be.

Are we seeing this trend reflected at all within the concept of the circular economy as a tool for realizing some of that dependence on national resources? Are there any potential implications that you might see downstream of this at the local level?

The current America First policy very much looks at bringing FDI, or foreign direct investment, into the U.S., particularly very big now on critical minerals, and they're working with all kinds of countries that have capacities and companies for mining, like the Australians and others, to be able to develop, in this case, more mining for critical minerals. However, some of those companies have already embraced the idea of looking at secondary sources and have really embraced innovation and research and innovation in this space to be able to, in a sense, leapfrog what I'm calling going to the traditional mining and even leapfrogging going through this smeltering process, which, as I said before, is very dirty, very resource-intensive.

A lot of other countries, the Japanese are investing here in the U.S. The U.S. is not mandating circularity because we are behind the curve on that. But these companies, these investors in these countries, some of them have already embraced and inculcated it into their production processes. As I said, the Japanese have very much realized the potential of circularity in their production processes, and they are actually building a big facility here in the U.S. that will be announced in the very near future to do just that and to work with the U.S., and to bring those practices there.

I see the potential more coming in from not only bringing in the FDI in terms of the investment, but bringing in some of those practices that are more sustainable, and in some cases, more advanced than what we currently have in practice. We have largely relied on our overseas markets and overseas partners for some of that. But this may be the opportunity now for the U.S. to look at seeing not only where the economic opportunities are in terms of circularity, but looking at the potential to invest in more R&D.

 We've been actually very good in R&D, and there's some very interesting R&D that's come out of our national labs in terms of how to really bring in some very interesting cutting-edge technologies, such as what's coming out of Rice University in Texas in terms of flash-jewel technologies that are able to use electrochemistry to be able to actually get to that extractive to extract those critical minerals. We've seen that Penn State has got some very interesting technologies that have been funded by our National Science Foundation. A lot of potential here. What we are seeing is the need for those private-sector partnerships that have maybe done that elsewhere, bringing them to the U.S. and being able to create that learning practice, both for U.S. private sector, clearly bringing in our innovation through our big ICT companies and then bringing in, maybe we'll touch on this in a little bit, is the whole AI layer to even help accelerate that.

So lots of opportunity there to take circularity, to embed it, and to target it specifically in terms of, well, particularly in the tech sector and moving towards circularity, like in e-waste, as I mentioned before. But this can brought to bear in terms of broader, in terms of looking at, once again, strengthening that nexus between circular economy and climate action, and bringing and using innovation and technology, really to, in a sense, mainstream that practice.

You mentioned just there, climate action. You mentioned AI and artificial intelligence. These are very much future-focused-type sectors and areas, pressing in the present, but they're likely to be of major concern going into the future.

Looking ahead, 20 or so years into the future, the population of people within cities and urban areas, it's expected to continue to grow. Along with those two that you mentioned before, what do you maybe see as some of the most important trends or signals related to the evolution of this concept, of the circularity concept, the revolution of the circular economy, especially as it might relate to life in urban areas and the work of planning and planners?

Yes. I mean, there's so much. I want to... Let me mention at least another three in addition. I already elaborated on the e-waste. But one that I find in terms of circularity, and this is so fundamental to our lives, and it can be done everywhere, but it needs that impetus of what cities can do, particularly given that it's their responsibility through the municipal waste management, is bringing circularity to the food sector and addressing issues of e-waste and organic waste.

Organic waste is about 50 percent of municipal solid waste. Imagine if we were able to take out that 50 percent, we were able to put it through different processes such as basic composting, and be able to utilize that food waste or that organic waste, as is being done by a number of cities and communities, but really taking that to scale. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to see how many cities around the U.S., at least, have already incorporated composting as a service, is the way I see it. Composting as a service, and cities can help facilitate and incentivize that commitment. That is based upon one of the seminal books by Paul Hawkins, Drawdown. Addressing food waste or organic waste is the number three climate strategy to be able to bring down those methane, one of the longest GHG [greenhouse gas] gases. That would be huge if cities can do that. There's many ways to do it, and that's already being done.

Another one is bringing circularity into the built environment, and what cities also have a responsibility for in terms of permitting and providing guidance to the private sector and the development community. Green buildings or buildings as carbon sinks have tremendous opportunity using new materials, using new technologies, being able to... I have a project that I worked with the University of North Carolina, and we brought it to Vietnam in terms of looking at hemp and using hempcrete to be able to as a building block. So using and going back once again to the natural environment and learning and using natural materials to be able to really accelerate things like direct air capture in buildings, doing things like bringing in biophilia and biophilic principles and nature-based solutions to be able to incorporate green walls and green facades into the building environment. It's really interesting innovation looking at hydrogels for insulation, all kinds of new technologies really that very much reinforce the circularity and very much look at not only technology, but looking at the natural environment and the practice of biomimicry that I've been a big advocate for in terms of, and coupled with technology, really to be able to move towards that circularity and that optimization of resources.

And there's so much to be done there. I mean, the integration of circular economy to be able to advance societal norms is this tremendous opportunity, which I think cities are also very well placed to do. We need to learn from current-day practices, not only in terms of what you wrote about in the 2025 report. I know you looked at briefly the neuromorphic chip development that's been done by some of the labs and some of the companies. But taking that to the point in terms of learning, once again, from nature and then bringing in an AI component and learning from current-day online marketing practices, but to promote sustainability. 

Let me just say a word in terms of that integration between where I see circular economy, climate action, and technological progression and advancements like AI. AI, this incredible tool that really needs to be targeted. It needs to be used for targeted things and priority needs, not just for writing a sentence or an email. Because as you well know, and as you addressed in the last report, the resource footprint is tremendous. But if we were to triangulate circular economy with climate action, with AI, to be able to nudge and advance societal norms for sustainability, that would be tremendous.

I mean, this is currently what's being done right now with online marketing practices. Why not learn from, and what's already been done actually, in the Philippines and in China, through online payment and lifestyle platforms, to be able to nudge and incentivize environmental action and the use of products that actually have high recyclable or circular content? That's already being done, and it's planned. They extrapolated to actually reforestate areas of their communities, areas where there's climactic challenges, so putting in mangroves. They've been able to plant millions of trees depending on the public and encouraging and nudging the public to move towards sustainability behaviors in action.

So this is a tremendous opportunity. It's already being done by online marketing practices, but not for sustainability, particularly. So I think that would be a great way to... This is a great opportunity for cities, actually, to help incentivize at the very local scale, clearly working with partnerships across many disciplines.

I think it's always great when we're able to close on something that is very forward-thinking and thinking about what's possible in this area. I like this. I really do enjoy this focus, not purely on the rigid, the manufacturing potential around this, which is extremely important right now, and it's a massive component of it. But I really like this perspective of the city itself as a component within this circularity type model and thinking of the ways that the city plays a really important role in that.

So hopefully that's a good place for us to close today. I think that we can wrap it up. Thank you, Helen, for joining us for this really excellent conversation on a topic that I think, again, planners have heard of but don't really know that much about, I think, yet. And I think this is a really good both introduction and a deeper dive into potentially what is to come. So we really appreciate your time today.

Great. Thank you very much. A lot of exciting potential into the future if we just pursue it and strategically look at working with cities and the citizenry of the cities to be able to move forward in a much more sustainable world. Thank you.

Thank you, Helen. For more on this topic, a summary of this discussion and many other collected trends and signals, please check out APA's 2026 Trend Report, which is available at planning.org/foresight.