This past week, Plant Chicago welcomed sixteen local small businesses to their first Circular Economy (CE) Leaders Network meeting. First of its kind, the program assists entrepreneurs in Chicago’s South Side who seek to implement sustainable practices into their existing business model. Businesses start off by receiving The Circular Economy Toolkit for Small Business and setting a primary goal that they would like to achieve by the end of this year. The toolkit defines Circu

Post by John Mulrow, PhD Candidate in Civil Engineering at University of Illinois Chicago INTRODUCTION In the last Human v Machine blog we determined that humans stand little chance of matching the performance of heavy machinery the likes of an industrial compost screener. But how about for lower power tasks you might find machines doing at home? Student participants of the Women in Engineering Summer Program (WIESP) helped me investigate this question during a workshop on en

Post by John Mulrow, PhD Candidate at University of Illinois Chicago INTRODUCTION Composting is a simple and traditional circular economy practice. It returns nutrients to the soil, creates economic opportunity, and can happen at a local scale. Modern industrial composting is highly dependent on heavy equipment; loaders, grinders, screeners and dump trucks are all high-powered machines, typically fueled by petroleum products. In the circular economy of the future, renewable s

Article by Eva Chancé, French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) (This research was led by Eva in partnership with Plant Chicago and Research Steering Committee members from Illinois Institute of Technology and University of Illinois Chicago) In this paper entitled “The Plant – an experiment in urban food sustainability” and published recently in the journal Environmental Progress & Sustainable Energy, we present the concept of urban food production and oppor