Ireland Chose Its Exhibit Carefully
When a European Commissioner comes to town, host countries tend to reach for the big set-piece: a gigawatt of something, a ribbon, a rendering of a facility that will exist in 2031. On 3 September 2026, Ireland did the opposite. It took Jessika Roswall — European Commissioner for Environment, Water Resilience and a Competitive Circular Economy — to a Dublin company that collects used cardboard boxes, grades them, and sells them on to Irish SMEs.
That was the exhibit. Re-Box, accompanied by Minister of State for the Circular Economy Alan Dillon TD and the team from Irish Manufacturing Research, whose CIRCULÉIRE network counts the company as a member. And on the evidence of what the circular economy debate is actually stuck on right now, it was the smarter choice by some distance.
The reason is simple. Europe's circular economy conversation has spent a decade being quietly swallowed by recycling. Recycling is the easiest thing to measure, the easiest thing to set targets for, and the furthest down the waste hierarchy of all the interventions that matter. Re-Box does not recycle cardboard. It keeps a box as a box. Michael Doherty, the company's founder and managing director, described the model during the visit as keeping "a product as a product" and returning it to the market at a fraction of the cost of new packaging for Irish SMEs. That is reuse — the intervention everybody agrees ranks highest and almost nobody has figured out how to measure.
The Measurement Problem Ireland Is Trying to Solve
The most substantive thing the delegation heard at Re-Box had nothing to do with cardboard. IMR's Circularity Assessment and Metrics Technologist, Daniel Whelan, set out how the company's circularity assessment through CIRCULÉIRE turned data into decisions — including the switch from a diesel fleet to HVO fuel after vehicle operations were identified as the business's emissions hotspot. A reuse company, in other words, found out through measurement that its own footprint sat in the vans rather than the warehouse, and changed it.
More consequential still is the pilot project Re-Box is now supporting: a CIRCULÉIRE effort to develop a methodology for quantifying the emissions avoided through reuse. This is one of the genuine blind spots in corporate carbon accounting. Conventional greenhouse gas assessments capture what an organisation emits; they are poorly equipped to credit the emissions that never happened because a box was used four times instead of once. Until that can be counted in a way an auditor will accept, reuse businesses compete with one hand tied — invisible in the very reporting frameworks that are supposed to reward them.
Dr Geraldine Brennan, IMR's Director of Circular Economy Innovation, framed the day in exactly those terms. "Today's visit demonstrates how collaboration between policymakers, research organisations and industry can accelerate the transition to a competitive circular economy," she said. "Re-Box is an outstanding example of how innovation and circular business models can unlock value while reducing resource consumption and emissions."
What CIRCULÉIRE Has Quietly Built Since 2020
The network the Commissioner was shown is not a pilot. Since 2020, CIRCULÉIRE — designed and led by IMR, funded by the Department of Climate, Energy and the Environment — has engaged more than 90 member organisations spanning start-ups, SMEs and multinationals. It has supported 19 circular action plans, run innovation pilots involving 29 organisations, and seen member companies invest individual sums of between €25,000 and €500,000 in circular deployment projects of their own.
That last figure is the one worth dwelling on. Networks are easy to set up and hard to make consequential; the distinguishing mark of a working one is whether members put their own capital behind what they learn. Half-million-euro deployments by individual companies suggest something beyond workshop attendance. The measurable outcomes claimed across the network — reductions in virgin material consumption, greenhouse gas emissions and landfill waste — follow from those deployments rather than from the membership list.
The Keynote: "Circularity Is a Necessity"
The site visit formed part of a wider Irish agenda that also took Roswall to the Environment Ireland conference — sponsored by CIRCULÉIRE — and to Bull Island Nature Reserve on Dublin Bay. Over the course of the day she met Minister Darragh O'Brien and Ministers of State Alan Dillon, Niall Collins and Timmy Dooley.
Her opening keynote left little room for interpretation. "Circularity is a necessity. It's not just a nice to have," she told the conference, setting out a transition that depends on making change easier for businesses, creating real demand for secondary materials, improving affordability, and using regulation, public procurement and other incentives so circular solutions can compete and scale on commercial terms rather than moral ones.
The scale of the gap she is legislating into is stark. Speaking in Ireland, Roswall noted that only around 11% of products are currently refurbished or have components reused — and that the Commission's proposed Circular Economy Act aims to lift that to 30%. The Act is intended to be proposed during Ireland's Presidency of the Council of the European Union, which puts Dublin in the chair for one of the most significant pieces of resource legislation Europe has attempted.
How Is Ireland Actually Doing?
Martina Hennessey, Assistant Secretary for Circular Economy and Resource Efficiency at the Department of Climate, Energy and the Environment, used the same conference to describe how circular policy has shifted from an environmental file to an industrial and economic strategy. Ireland's Circular Economy Strategy 2026–2028 builds on the Deposit Return Scheme and targets annual growth in circularity, with construction and textiles as priority sectors and innovation funding, Extended Producer Responsibility and circular procurement as the levers.
Eleven days after the Commissioner's visit, that funding lever got noticeably heavier. On 14 September 2026, Minister Dillon launched the 2026 Circular Economy Innovation Grant Scheme with total funding rising from €650,000 to €1.5 million, individual grants expected to range from €50,000 to €150,000, and applications open until 12 October 2026. More than doubling a grant scheme inside a fortnight of hosting the Commissioner responsible for the file is, at minimum, a well-sequenced fortnight.
The conference was not uniformly congratulatory, and that is to its credit. The European Environmental Bureau, representing more than 190 organisations across 42 countries, welcomed the forthcoming Act while warning through its Head of Circular Economy, Eva Maria Bille, that policy remains overly weighted towards recycling — calling for stronger targets across the waste hierarchy, enhanced producer responsibility and toxic-free circularity. Voice Ireland's Tad Kirakowski argued that public confidence depends on visible measures arriving on time and on circularity being embedded through schools, higher education and workforce training. IMR's Valentina Tarasco set out the practical barrier her team sees daily: fragmented value chains, limited investment and internal capability gaps that stop good pilots becoming commercial products. The session was chaired by Claire Downey, CEO of the Rediscovery Centre.
Taken together, that is a country doing something relatively unusual — showing a Commissioner both its working example and its unresolved arguments in the same day.
The Bottom Line
On 3 September 2026, Commissioner Jessika Roswall was shown Ireland's circular economy through a reuse company in Dublin rather than a policy document, and the choice made the point better than any slide could: the value sits in keeping products in use, and the obstacle is that nobody can yet properly count the benefit. Ireland's answer — CIRCULÉIRE's 90-plus members, 19 circular action plans, a metrics pilot with Re-Box designed to quantify avoided emissions from reuse, a Circular Economy Strategy running to 2028 and a grant scheme more than doubled to €1.5 million — is a credible one, arriving just as the Commission prepares to propose a Circular Economy Act aiming to lift Europe's refurbishment and reuse rate from around 11% to 30% during Ireland's EU Presidency. The country is not being asked to catch up on this file. It is being asked to help write it, and on the evidence of early September it turned up with the working example in hand.
Sustainability Pulse covers climate, energy, ESG and environmental policy through an Irish lens. Subscribe to the Sustainability Pulse Briefing — every Wednesday.