Sustainability is a business imperative, says Atalay Atasu, the Bianca and James Pitt Chair in Environmental Sustainability. It is an unavoidable disruption that businesses have to face due to pressures from customers, regulations and investors, not to mention the very fact that we live on a planet with finite resources.

To be more sustainable, we need to embrace a circular economy, says Atasu in the inaugural episode of the new INSEAD Explains Sustainability, a video series featuring INSEAD professors' insights on diverse topics on sustainable development.

To businesses, circularity is about maximising resource efficiency and reducing pollution. While circularity is often good for the environment, it is also essential to business continuity, Atasu argues. At the rate we are going, critical resources will eventually become depleted. It will become necessary to reuse these resources to maintain business continuity. This idea of maintaining business continuity by enabling access to critical resources in the long run necessitates circular thinking.

In this video, Atasu, the academic director of the INSEAD Sustainable Business Initiative, and co-director of the INSEAD Business Sustainability Programme, explains the challenges of circularity, particularly in influencing consumer behaviour and rethinking business processes. He also outlines the need to capture and create value. Watch the video for his insights on moving from a linear to a circular economy.