title: Circular economy

text: In the 2010s, several models of a circular economy were developed that employed a set of steps, or levels of circularity, typically using English verbs or nouns starting with the letter "r". The first such model, known as the "Three R principle", was "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle", which can be traced back as early as the 1970s. According to Breteler (2022), the 'most comprehensive and extensive' of four compared models was the "10R principle", developed by sustainable entrepreneurship professor and former Dutch Environment Minister Jacqueline Cramer.


title: Circular economy

text: In 2013, a report was released entitled "Towards the Circular Economy: Economic and Business Rationale for an Accelerated Transition". The report, commissioned by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and developed by McKinsey & Company, was the first volume of its kind to consider the economic and business opportunity for the transition to a restorative, circular model. Using product case studies and economy-wide analysis, the report details the potential for significant benefits across the EU. It argues that a subset of the EU manufacturing sector could realize net materials cost savings worth up to $630 billion annually towards 2025—stimulating economic activity in the areas of product development, remanufacturing and refurbishment. "Towards the Circular Economy" also identified the key building blocks in making the transition to a circular economy, namely in skills in circular design and production, new business models, skills in building cascades and reverse cycles, and cross-cycle/cross-sector collaboration. This is supported by a case study from the automotive industry, highlighting the importance of integrating a circular model holistically within the entire value chain of a company, taking into account the interdependencies between the product, process, and system level.


title: Circular economy

text: Another report by WRAP and the Green Alliance (called "Employment and the circular economy: job creation in a more resource efficient Britain"), done in 2015 has examined different public policy scenarios to 2030. It estimates that, with no policy change, 200,000 new jobs will be created, reducing unemployment by 54,000. A more aggressive policy scenario could create 500,000 new jobs and permanently reduce unemployment by 102,000.


title: Circular economy

text: On the other hand, implementing a circular economy in the United States has been presented by Ranta et al. who analyzed the institutional drivers and barriers for the circular economy in different regions worldwide, by following the framework developed by Scott R. In the article, different worldwide environment-friendly institutions were selected, and two types of manufacturing processes were chosen for the analysis (1) a product-oriented, and (2) a waste management. Specifically, in the U.S., the product-oriented company case in the study was Dell, a US manufacturing company for computer technology, which was the first company to offer free recycling to customers and to launch to the market a computer made from recycling materials from a verified third-party source. Moreover, the waste management case that includes many stages such as collection, disposal, recycling in study was Republic Services, the second-largest waste management company in the US. The approach to measuring the drivers and barriers was to first identify indicators for their cases in study and then to categorize these indicators into drivers when the indicator was in favor of the circular economy model or a barrier when it was not.


title: Circular economy

text: On 2 March 2022 in Nairobi, representatives of 175 countries pledged to create a legally binding agreement to end plastic pollution by the end of the year 2024. The agreement should address the full lifecycle of plastic and propose alternatives including reusability. The agreement is expected to facilitate the transition to a circular economy that will reduce GHG emissions by 25 per cent, according to the published statement.


title: Circular economy

text: Product designs that optimize durability, ease of maintenance and repair, upgradability, re-manufacturability, separability, disassembly and reassembly are considered key elements for the transition toward circularity of products. Standardization can facilitate related "innovative, sustainable and competitive advantages for European businesses and consumers". Design for standardization and compatibility would make "product parts and interfaces suitable for other products and aims at multi-functionality and modularity". A "Product Family Approach" has been proposed to establish "commonality, compatibility, standardization, or modularization among different products or product lines".


title: Circular economy

text: It has been argued that emerging technologies should be designed with circular economy principles from the start, including solar panels.


title: Circular economy

text: For sustainability and health, the circularity process designs may be of crucial importance. Large amounts of electronic waste are already recycled but far from where they were consumed, with often low efficiency, and with substantial negative effects on human health and the foreign environment.


title: Circular economy

text: Recycling should therefore "reduce environmental impacts of the overall product/service provision system assessed based on the life-cycle assessment approach".


title: Circular economy

text: One study suggests that "a mandatory certification scheme for recyclers of electronic waste, in or out of Europe, would help to incentivize high-quality treatment processes and efficient material recovery".


title: Circular economy

text: While the initial focus of the academic, industry, and policy activities were mainly focused on the development of re-X (recycling, remanufacturing, reuse, etc.) technology, it soon became clear that the technological capabilities increasingly exceed their implementation. To leverage this technology for the transition toward a circular economy, various stakeholders have to work together. This shifted attention towards business-model innovation as a key leverage for 'circular' technology adaption. Rheaply, a platform that aims to scale reuse within and between organizations, is an example of a technology that focuses on asset management & disposition to support organizations transitioning to circular business models.


title: Circular economy

text: Circular business models can be defined as business models that are closing, narrowing, slowing, intensifying, and dematerializing loops, to minimize the resource inputs into and the waste and emission leakage out of the organizational system. This comprises recycling measures (closing), efficiency improvements (narrowing), use phase extensions (slowing), a more intense use phase (intensifying), and the substitution of products by service and software solutions (dematerializing). These strategies can be achieved through the purposeful design of material recovery processes and related circular supply chains. As illustrated in the Figure, these five approaches to resource loops can also be seen as generic strategies or archetypes of circular business model innovation. The development of circular products, circular business models, and, more generally, the circular economy is conditioned upon the affordances of the materials involved, that is the enablement and constraints afforded by these materials to someone engaging with them for circular purposes.


title: Circular economy

text: Circular business models, as the economic model more broadly, can have different emphases and various objectives, for example: extend the life of materials and products, where possible over multiple 'use cycles'; use a 'waste = food' approach to help recover materials, and ensure those biological materials returned to earth are benign, not toxic; retain the embedded energy, water, and other process inputs in the product and the material for as long as possible; Use systems-thinking approaches in designing solutions; regenerate or at least conserve nature and living systems; push for policies, taxes and market mechanisms that encourage product stewardship, for example 'polluter pays' regulations.


title: Circular economy

text: Building on circular business model innovation, digitalization and digital technologies (e.g., internet of things, big data, artificial intelligence, blockchain) are seen as a key enabler for upscaling the circular economy. Also referred to as the data economy, the central role of digital technologies for accelerating the circular economy transition is emphasized within the Circular Economy Action Plan of the European Green deal. The smart circular economy framework illustrates this by establishing a link between digital technologies and sustainable resource management. This allows assessment of different digital circular economy strategies with their associated level of maturity, providing guidance on how to leverage data and analytics to maximize circularity (i.e., optimizing functionality and resource intensity). Supporting this, a Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda for circular economy was published in the framework of the Horizon 2020 project CICERONE that puts digital technologies at the core of many key innovation fields (waste management, industrial symbiosis, products traceability). Researchers have emphasised the need to comply to several requirements for implementing blockchain technology in order to make a circular economy a reality.


title: Circular economy

text: In 2018, the World Economic Forum, World Resources Institute, Philips, Ellen MacArthur Foundation, United Nations Environment Programme, and over 40 other partners launched the Platform for Accelerating the Circular Economy (PACE). PACE follows on the legacy of WEF's CEO-led initiative, Project MainStream, which sought to scale up circular economy innovations. PACE's original intent has three focal areas: (1) developing models of blended finance for circular economy projects, especially in developing and emerging economies; (2) creating policy frameworks to address specific barriers to advancing the circular economy; and (3) promoting public–private partnership for these purposes.


title: Circular economy

text: In 2020, PACE released a report with partner Circle Economy claiming that the world is 8.6% circular, claiming all countries are "developing countries" given the unsustainable levels of consumption in countries with higher levels of human development.


title: Circular economy

text: PACE is a coalition of CEOs and Ministers—including the leaders of global corporations like IKEA, Coca-Cola, Alphabet Inc., and DSM (company), governmental partners and development institutions from Denmark, The Netherlands, Finland, Rwanda, UAE, China, and beyond. Initiatives currently managed under PACE include the Capital Equipment Coalition with Philips and numerous other partners and the Global Battery Alliance with over 70 partners. In January 2019, PACE released a report entitled "A New Circular Vision for Electronics: Time for a Global Reboot" (in support of the United Nations E-waste Coalition.


title: Circular economy

text: The coalition is hosted by a Secretariat headed by David B. McGinty, former leader of the Human Development Innovation Fund and Palladium International, and board member of BoardSource. Board Members include Inger Andersen, Frans van Houten, Ellen MacArthur, Lisa P. Jackson, and Stientje van Veldhoven.


title: Circular economy

text: To provide authoritative guidance to organizations implementing circular economy (CE) strategies, in 2017, the British Standards Institution (BSI) developed and launched the first circular economy standard "BS 8001:2017 Framework for implementing the principles of the circular economy in organizations". The circular economy standard BS 8001:2017 tries to align the far-reaching ambitions of the CE with established business routines at the organizational level. It contains a comprehensive list of CE terms and definitions, describes the core CE principles, and presents a flexible management framework for implementing CE strategies in organizations. Little concrete guidance on circular economy monitoring and assessment is given, however, as there is no consensus yet on a set of central circular economy performance indicators applicable to organizations and individual products.


title: Circular economy

text: In 2018, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) established a technical committee, TC 323, in the field of circular economy to develop frameworks, guidance, supporting tools, and requirements for the implementation of activities of all involved organizations, to maximize the contribution to Sustainable Development. Four new ISO standards are under development and in the direct responsibility of the committee (consisting of 70 participating members and 11 observing members).


title: Circular economy

text: The CE does not aim at changing the profit maximization paradigm of businesses. Rather, it suggests an alternative way of thinking how to attain a sustained competitive advantage (SCA), while concurrently addressing the environmental and socio-economic concerns of the 21st century. Indeed, stepping away from linear forms of production most often leads to the development of new core competencies along the value chain and ultimately superior performance that cuts costs, improves efficiency, promote brand names, mitigate risks, develop new products, and meets advanced government regulations and the expectations of green consumers. But despite the multiple examples of companies successfully embracing circular solutions across industries, and notwithstanding the wealth of opportunities that exist when a firm has clarity over what circular actions fit its unique profile and goals, CE decision-making remains a highly complex exercise with no one-size-fits-all solution. The intricacy and fuzziness of the topic is still felt by most companies (especially SMEs), which perceive circular strategies as something not applicable to them or too costly and risky to implement. This concern is today confirmed by the results of ongoing monitoring studies like the Circular Readiness Assessment.


title: Circular economy

text: Strategic management is the field of management that comes to the rescue allowing companies to carefully evaluate CE-inspired ideas, but also to take a firm apart and investigate if/how/where seeds of circularity can be found or implanted. The book "Strategic Management and the Circular Economy" defined for the first time a CE strategic decision-making process, covering the phases of analysis, formulation, and planning. Each phase is supported by frameworks and concepts popular in management consulting – like idea tree, value chain, VRIE, Porter's five forces, PEST, SWOT, strategic clock, or the internationalization matrix – all adapted through a CE lens, hence revealing new sets of questions and considerations. Although yet to be verified, it is argued that all standard tools for strategic management can and should be calibrated and applied to a CE. A specific argument has already been made for the strategy direction matrix of product vs market and the 3 × 3 GE-McKinsey matrix to assess business strength vs industry attractiveness, the BCG matrix of market share vs industry growth rate, and Kraljic's portfolio matrix.


title: Circular economy

text: A circular economy within the textiles industry refers to the practice of clothes and fibers continually being recycled, to re-enter the economy as much as possible rather than ending up as waste.


title: Circular economy

text: A circular textiles economy is in response to the current linear model of the fashion industry, "in which raw materials are extracted, manufactured into commercial goods and then bought, used and eventually discarded by consumers" (Business of Fashion, 2017). 'Fast fashion' companies have fueled the high rates of consumption which further magnify the issues of a linear system. "The take-make-dispose model not only leads to an economic value loss of over $500 billion per year but also has numerous negative environmental and societal impacts" (Business of Fashion, 2018). Such environmental effects include tons of clothing ending up in landfills and incineration, while the societal effects put human rights at risk. A documentary about the world of fashion, "The True Cost" (2015), explained that in fast fashion, "wages, unsafe conditions, and factory disasters are all excused because of the needed jobs they create for people with no alternatives." This shows that fast fashion is harming the planet in more ways than one by running on a linear system.


title: Circular economy

text: It is argued that by following a circular economy, the textile industry can be transformed into a sustainable business. A 2017 report, "A New Textiles Economy", stated the four key ambitions needed to establish a circular economy: "phasing out substances of concern and microfiber release; transforming the way clothes are designed, sold and used to break free from their increasingly disposable nature; radically improving recycling by transforming clothing design, collection, and reprocessing; and making effective use of resources and moving to renewable input." While it may sound like a simple task, only a handful of designers in the fashion industry have taken charge, including Patagonia, Eileen Fisher, Nathalia JMag and Stella McCartney. An example of a circular economy within a fashion brand is Eileen Fisher's Tiny Factory, in which customers are encouraged to bring their worn clothing to be manufactured and resold. In a 2018 interview, Fisher explained, "A big part of the problem with fashion is overconsumption. We need to make less and sell less... you get to use your creativity but you also get to sell more but not create more stuff."


title: Circular economy

text: Circular initiatives, such as clothing rental startups, are also getting more and more highlight in the EU and in the US as well. Operating with circular business model, rental services offer everyday fashion, baby wear, maternity wear for rent. The companies either offer flexible pricing in a 'pay as you rent' model like Palanta does, or offer fixed monthly subscriptions such as Rent The Runway or Le Tote.


title: Circular economy

text: Another circular initiative is offering a take-back program. A company located in Colorado Circular Threads repurposes post-consumer waste materials such as old denim jeans, retired climbing rope, and discarded sails into new products, rather than letting them go to a landfill. Their take back program allows the consumer to return any product at any time so that it can be recycled again.


title: Circular economy

text: Both China and Europe have taken the lead in pushing a circular economy. McDowall et al. 2017 stated that the "Chinese perspective on the circular economy is broad, incorporating pollution and other issues alongside waste and resource concerns, [while] Europe's conception of the circular economy has a narrower environmental scope, focusing on waste and resources and opportunities for business".


title: Circular economy

text: The construction sector is one of the world's largest waste generators. The circular economy appears as a helpful solution to diminish the environmental impact of the industry.


title: Circular economy

text: Construction is very important to the economy of the European Union and its state members. It provides 18 million direct jobs and contributes to about 9% of the EU's GDP. The main causes of the construction's environmental impact are found in the consumption of non-renewable resources and the generation of contaminant residues, both of which are increasing at an accelerating pace.


title: Circular economy

text: Decision making about the circular economy can be performed on the operational (connected with particular parts of the production process), tactical (connected with whole processes) and strategic (connected with the whole organization) levels. It may concern both construction companies as well as construction projects (where a construction company is one of the stakeholders).


title: Circular economy

text: End-of-life buildings can be deconstructed, hereby creating new construction elements that can be used for creating new buildings and freeing up space for new development.


title: Circular economy

text: Modular construction systems can be useful to create new buildings in the future, and have the advantage of allowing easier deconstruction and reuse of the components afterwards (end-of-life buildings).


title: Circular economy

text: Another example that fits the idea of circular economy in the construction sector on the operational level, there can be pointed walnut husks, that belong to hard, light and natural abrasives used for example in cleaning brick surfaces. Abrasive grains are produced from crushed, cleaned and selected walnut shells. They are classified as reusable abrasives. A first attempt to measure the success of circular economy implementation was done in a construction company. The circular economy can contribute to creating new posts and economic growth. According to Gorecki, one of such posts may be the Circular economy manager employed for construction projects.


title: Circular economy

text: The circular economy is beginning to catch on inside the automotive industry. A case study within the heavy-duty and off-road industry analyses the implementation of circular practices into a lean manufacturing context, the currently dominant production strategy in automotive. Lean has continuously shown to increase efficiency by eliminating waste and focusing on customer value, contributing to eco-efficiency by narrowing resource loops. However, other measures are needed to slow down and close the resource loops altogether and reach eco-effectiveness. The study finds significant potentials by combining the lean and the circular approach, to not only focus on the product and process levels (eco-efficiency), but also on the system perspective (eco-effectiveness). There are also incentives for carmakers to do so as a 2016 report by Accenture stated that the circular economy could redefine competitiveness in the automotive sector in terms of price, quality, and convenience and could double revenue by 2030 and lower the cost base by up to fourteen percent. So far, it has typically translated itself into using parts made from recycled materials, remanufacturing of car parts and looking at the design of new cars.


title: Circular economy

text: With the vehicle recycling industry (in the EU) only being able to recycle just 75% of the vehicle, meaning 25% isn't recycled and may even end up in landfills, there is much to improve here. In the electric vehicle industry, disassembly robots are used to help disassemble the vehicle. In the EU's ETN-Demeter project (European Training Network for the Design and Recycling of Rare-Earth Permanent Magnet Motors and Generators in Hybrid and Full Electric Vehicles) they are looking at the sustainable design issue. They are for example making designs of electric motors of which the magnets can be easily removed for recycling the rare earth metals.


title: Circular economy

text: Some car manufacturers such as Volvo are also looking at alternative ownership models (leasing from the automotive company; "Care by Volvo").


title: Circular economy

text: The logistics industry plays an important role in the Dutch economy because the Netherlands is located in a specific area where the transit of commodities takes place on a daily basis. The Netherlands is an example of a country from the EU that has increasingly moved towards incorporating a circular economy given the vulnerability of the Dutch economy (as well as other EU countries) to be highly dependable on raw materials imports from countries such as China, which makes the country susceptible to the unpredictable importation costs for such primary goods.


title: Circular economy

text: Research related to the Dutch industry shows that 25% of the Dutch companies are knowledgeable and interested in a circular economy; furthermore, this number increases to 57% for companies with more than 500 employees. Some of the areas are chemical industries, wholesale trade, industry and agriculture, forestry and fisheries because they see a potential reduction of costs when reusing, recycling and reducing raw materials imports. In addition, logistic companies can enable a connection to a circular economy by providing customers incentives to reduce costs through shipment and route optimization, as well as, offering services such as prepaid shipping labels, smart packaging, and take-back options. The shift from linear flows of packaging to circular flows as encouraged by the circular economy is critical for the sustainable performance and reputation of the packaging industry. The government-wide program for a circular economy is aimed at developing a circular economy in the Netherlands by 2050.


title: Circular economy

text: Several statistics have indicated that there will be an increase in freight transport worldwide, which will affect the environmental impacts of the global warming potential causing a challenge to the logistics industry. However, the Dutch council for the Environment and Infrastructure (Dutch acronym: Rli) provided a new framework in which it suggests that the logistics industry can provide other ways to add value to the different activities in the Dutch economy. Examples of adding value in innovative ways to the Dutch economy are an exchange of resources (either waste or water flows) for production from different industries and changing the transit port to a transit hub concept. The Rli studied the role of the potentials of the logistics industry for three sectors, agriculture and food, chemical industries and high tech industries.


title: Circular economy

text: The Netherlands, aiming to have a completely circular economy by 2050, intends a shift to circular agriculture ("kringlooplandbouw") as part of this plan. This shift plans on having a "sustainable and strong agriculture" by as early as 2030. Changes in the Dutch laws and regulations will be introduced. Some key points in this plant include:


title: Circular economy

text: When it comes to the furniture industry, most of the products are passive durable products, and accordingly implementing strategies and business models that extend the lifetime of the products (like repairing and remanufacturing) would usually have lower environmental impacts and lower costs. Companies such as GGMS are supporting a circular approach to furniture by refurbishing and reupholstering items for reuse.


title: Circular economy

text: The EU has seen a huge potential for implementing a circular economy in the furniture sector. Currently, out of 10,000,000 tonnes of annually discarded furniture in the EU, most of it ends up in landfills or is incinerated. There is a potential increase of €4.9 billion in Gross Value Added by switching to a circular model by 2030, and 163,300 jobs could be created.


title: Circular economy

text: A study about the status of Danish furniture companies' efforts on a circular economy states that 44% of the companies included maintenance in their business models, 22% had take-back schemes, and 56% designed furniture for recycling. The authors of the study concluded that although a circular furniture economy in Denmark is gaining momentum, furniture companies lack knowledge on how to effectively transition, and the need to change the business model could be another barrier.


title: Circular economy

text: Another report in the UK saw a huge potential for reuse and recycling in the furniture sector. The study concluded that around 42% of the bulk waste sent to landfills annually (1.6 million tonnes) is furniture. They also found that 80% of the raw material in the production phase is waste.


title: Circular economy

text: The uptake to reuse within the oil and gas industry is very poor, the opportunity to reuse is never more evident, or possible, as when the equipment is being decommissioned. Hundreds of thousands of tons of waste are being brought back onshore to be recycled. Unfortunately, what this equates to; is equipment, which is perfectly suitable for continued use, being disposed of.


title: Circular economy

text: In the next 30–40 years, the oil and gas sector will have to decommission 600 installations in the UK alone. Over the next decade around 840,000 tonnes of materials will have to be recovered at an estimated cost of £25Bn. In 2017 North Sea oil and gas decommissioning became a net drain on the public purse. With UK taxpayers covering 50%–70% of the bill, there is an urgent need to discuss the most economic, social and environmentally beneficial decommissioning solutions for the general public.


title: Circular economy

text: Organizations such as Zero Waste Scotland have conducted studies to identify areas with reuse potential, allowing equipment to continue life in other industries, or be redeployed for oil and gas .


title: Circular economy

text: Oil and gas energy resources are incompatible with the idea of a circular economy, since they are defined as "development that meets the needs of the present while compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs". A sustainable circular economy can only be powered by renewable energies, such as wind, solar, hydropower, and geothermal.


title: Circular economy

text: What gives entities the ability to achieve 'net zero' carbon-emissions, is that they can offset their fossil fuel consumption by removing carbon from the atmosphere. While this is a necessary first step, global smart grid technologist, Steve Hoy, believes that in order to create a circular economy we should adapt the concept of 'True Zero' as opposed to 'net zero', which is eliminating fossil fuel consumption entirely so that all energy is produced from renewable sources.


title: Circular economy

text: Current growth projections in the renewable energy industry expect a significant amount of energy and raw materials to manufacture and maintain these renewable systems. "Due to the emissions attributed to fossil-fuel electricity generation, the overall carbon footprint of renewable energy technologies is significantly lower than for fossil-fuel generation over the respective systems lifespan." However, there are still linear trajectories when establishing renewable energy systems that should be assessed in order to fully transition to a circular economy.


title: Circular economy

text: In 2018, The Ellen MacArthur Foundation identified 138 institutions with circular economy course offerings. Since then the theme of CE topics in teaching has been incorporated at a steadily increasing pace, with plans for adoption at university, city, and country wide levels. Zero Waste Scotland is an example of a country wide program that plans to implement CE into the Scottish education system through the "YES Circular Economy Challenge" which advocates that "every learning environment should have a whole-environment approach to learning for sustainability that is robust, demonstrable, evaluated and supported by leadership at all levels". A 2021 report by the EMF compares London and New York CE course offerings and finds that there is not a "whole-environment" representation when it comes to different CE topics, with an element of the technical CE cycle being covered in 90% and element of the biological cycle covered in 50% of the 80 analyzed circular economy courses. The EMF looks critically at the distribution of CE courses and researchers at Utrecht University Julian Kirchherr and Laura Piscicelli analyze the success of their introductory CE course in "Towards an Education for the Circular Economy (ECE): Five Teaching Principles and a Case Study". With 114 published definitions for the Circular Economy, synthesis and collaboration, previously exemplified, could benefit and popularize CE application in higher education.


title: Circular economy

text: One study suggests that by 2050, up to 40 to 75% of the EU's clean energy metal needs could come from local recycling.


title: Circular economy

text: A study estimates losses of 61 metals, showing that usespans of, often scarce, tech-critical metals are short. A study using Project Drawdown's modeling framework indicates that, even without considering costs or bottlenecks of expansion of renewable energy generation, metal recycling can lead to significant climate change mitigation.


title: Circular economy

text: Researchers have developed recycling-routes for 200 industrial waste chemicals into important drugs and agrochemicals, for productive reuse that reduces disposal costs and hazards to the environment. A study has called for new molecules and materials for products with open-environmental applications, such as pesticides, that can be neither circulated nor recycled and provides a set of guidelines on how to integrate chemistry into a circular economy.


title: Circular economy

text: Already since 2006, the European Union has been concerned about environmental transition issues by translating this into directives and regulations. Three important laws can be mentioned in this regard:


title: Circular economy

text: On 17 December 2012, the European Commission published a document entitled "Manifesto for a Resource Efficient Europe".


title: Circular economy

text: In July 2014, a zero-waste program for Europe has been put in place aiming at the circular economy. Since then, several documents on this subject have been published. The following table summarizes the various European reports and legislation on the circular economy that have been developed between 2014 and 2018.


title: Circular economy

text: In addition to the above legislation, the EU has amended the Ecodesign Working Plan to add circularity criteria and has enacted ecodesign regulations with circular economy components for 7 product types (refrigerators, dishwashers, electronic displays, washing machines, welding equipment and servers and data storage products). These ecodesign regulations are aimed at increasing the repairability of products by improving the availability of spare parts and manuals. At the same time, the European research budget related to the circular economy has increased considerably in the last few years: it has reached 964 million euros between 2018 and 2020. In total, the European Union has invested 10 billion euros on Circular Economy projects between 2016 and 2019.


title: Circular economy

text: One waste atlas aggregates some data about waste management of countries and cities, albeit the data is very limited.


title: Circular economy

text: The "Circularity Gap Report" indicates that "out of all the minerals, biomass, fossil fuels and metals that enter the world's economy, only 8.6 percent are reused".


title: Circular economy

text: The "Manifesto for a Resource Efficient Europe" of 2012 clearly stated that "In a world with growing pressures on resources and the environment, the EU has no choice but to go for the transition to a resource-efficient and ultimately regenerative circular economy." Furthermore, the document highlighted the importance of "a systemic change in the use and recovery of resources in the economy" in ensuring future jobs and competitiveness, and outlined potential pathways to a circular economy, in innovation and investment, regulation, tackling harmful subsidies, increasing opportunities for new business models, and setting clear targets.


title: Circular economy

text: The European environmental research and innovation policy aims at supporting the transition to a circular economy in Europe, defining and driving the implementation of a transformative agenda to green the economy and the society as a whole, to achieve a truly sustainable development. Research and innovation in Europe are financially supported by the program Horizon 2020, which is also open to participation worldwide. Circular economy is found to play an important role to economic growth of European Countries, highlighting the crucial role of sustainability, innovation, and investment in no-waste initiatives to promote wealth.


title: Circular economy

text: The European Union plans for a circular economy are spearheaded by its 2018 Circular Economy Package. Historically, the policy debate in Brussels mainly focused on waste management which is the second half of the cycle, and very little is said about the first half: eco-design. To draw the attention of policymakers and other stakeholders to this loophole, the Ecothis, an EU campaign was launched raising awareness about the economic and environmental consequences of not including eco-design as part of the circular economy package.


title: Circular economy

text: This first circular economy Action Plan consisted of 54 measures to strengthen Europe's global competitiveness, promote sustainable economic growth and create more jobs. Among these 54 measures, for example, is the importance of optimizing the use of raw materials, products and waste in order to create energy savings and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The main goal being in this respect to lead to the development of a framework conducive to the circular economy. In addition, the development of this Action Plan was also intended to enable the development of a new market for secondary raw materials. Concretely, here are the principal areas concerned by the Action Plan:


title: Circular economy

text: The Action plan was also a way to integrate a policy framework, an integration of existing policies and legal instruments. It includes notably some amendments. As a matter of fact, the implementation of this new plan was supported by the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC). This support included in-depth consultation.


title: Circular economy

text: This new action was adopted by the European Commission in March 2020. A total of 574 out of 751 MEPs voted in favour of the action plan. It focuses on better management of resource-intensive industries, waste reduction, zero-carbonization and standardization of sustainable products in Europe. Prior to the development of this new action plan, we can also mention the Green Deal of 2019, which integrated ecological and environmental ambitions to make Europe a carbon-neutral continent. On 10 February 2021, the European Parliament submitted its proposals to the Circular Economic Action Plan (CEAP) of the commission, highlighting five major areas in particular. Those are the following:


title: Circular economy

text: The European leaders in terms of circular economy are designated mostly by their current efforts for a shift towards circular economy but also by their objectives and the means implemented in this shift. It remains difficult to precisely rank how countries score in terms of circular economy, given the many principles and aspects of it and how differently one single country can score in each of these principles but some tendencies do appear in the average score, when combining the principles.


title: Circular economy

text: Outside the EU, countries such as Brazil, China, Canada, the USA and especially Japan are working on the shift towards it.


title: Circular economy

text: Most countries that are in the lead in the field of circular economy are European countries, meaning that Europe in general is in the lead group at the moment. The reasons behind this are numerous. First of all, circular economy is a field that is, at the moment mostly advanced in the developed countries, thanks to, between others, technology. The efforts of the European Commission are also non negligible, with documents such as the Commission staff working document "Leading the way to a global circular economy: state of play and outlook" or the new action plan for circular economy in Europe, being one of the main blocs of the green deal.


title: Circular economy

text: Even if Europe as a whole is a good actor in the field, some European countries are still struggling to make the shift faster. These countries are mostly the eastern European countries (Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia, etc.) but also in some fields Portugal, Greece, Croatia and even Germany.


title: Circular economy

text: In 2018, the newspaper Politico made a ranking of the (by then) 28 European countries by making an aggregation of the 7 key metrics of the commission for each country. The advantage here is that it gives a general view of how countries work towards circular development and how they compare to each other but the main drawback is that, as mentioned in the article, the 7 metrics all have equal weight and importance in Politico's calculations, which isn't the case in real life. Indeed, it is said in the same article that the countries that score the highest in CE are not necessarily the greenest according to the Environmental Performance Index. For example, Germany, which scores 1st in the Politico ranking, only scores 13th worldwide in the EPI and is behind 10 European countries.


title: Circular economy

text: Since 2015, there is a plan concerning the circular economy adopted by the European Commission. This first plan includes 54 actions.


title: Circular economy

text: During the 2018 negotiations between the Parliament and the council, different elements will be adopted in four directives. These are mainly: « The main objectives are the following in the European framework


title: Circular economy

text: Since 2020, Europe's new green deal plan focuses on "design and production from the perspective of the circular economy", its main objective is to ensure that the European economy keeps these resources as long as possible.


title: Circular economy

text: Europe's green deal, which came into being in 2019, aims at a climate-neutral circular economy. For this, a distinct difference between economic growth and resources will be found. "A circular economy reduces the pressure on natural resources and is an indispensable prerequisite for achieving the goal of climate neutrality by 2050 and halting biodiversity loss."


title: Circular economy

text: Since 2014, Belgium has adopted a circular strategy. This is marked by 21 measures to be followed.In Belgium, the three Belgian regions (Flanders, Brussels and Wallonia) have different personal objectives. For Flanders, a strategy called vision 2050 has been put in place. For Wallonia, there is a plan following the declaration of the regional policy for Wallonia from 2019 to 2024. Since 23 January 2020, Wallonia has adopted a new strategy including three governance bodies: a steering committee, an intra-administration platform and a "steering committee"??.


title: Circular economy

text: For Brussels, a plan was adopted in 2016 to develop the circular economy in its region. This plan will be in place for a period of 10 years.


title: Circular economy

text: The Netherlands set a plan of action for circular economy in 2016 and have been doing additional efforts for a transition towards a 100% circular economy by 2050 (and 50% by 2030). The Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research estimates that a full shift towards Circular Economy will, at the long term, generate not less than 7,3 billion euros and 540.000 new jobs in the sector. The work will be developed around the five pillars mentioned above: plastics, biomass and food, the construction sector, the manufacturing industry, and consumer goods. The government has also put a fund in place to facilitate and accelerate the shift. These funds are part of the 300 million € annually spent by the government for climate-related decisions and actions. The envelope is also completed by the ministry of infrastructure, which allocated €40 million for circular economy-related actions in 2019 and 2020. Other actions such as an allocation of subsidies for enterprises that make change or invest in the field have been taken. Initiatives at the subnational level are also encouraged and regions such as Groeningen, Friesland, the Northern Netherlands, etc. ere taking actions to not only reduce their environmental impact but accelerate and accentuate their actions towards Circular economy.


title: Circular economy

text: The Luxembourg added in 2019 Circular economy in their data-driven innovation strategy, considering it now as a crucial field for innovation in the next years. It is present in most sectors of the country's development plan even if it is still only at the beginning of its development.


title: Circular economy

text: · The 2019 "Circular economy strategy Luxembourg", a document testifying on the efforts made and to be made and the willingness to transform the Grand Duchy into an example in the field;


title: Circular economy

text: · insertion of circular economy as a subject to be discussed by all the six main pillars of the "third industrial revolution";


title: Circular economy

text: · Participation in Circular economy-related events such as "Financing the circular economy" (2015) at the European Investment Bank or the "Circular economy hotspot" (2017);


title: Circular economy

text: · Collaboration with municipalities, at the subnational level, to encourage them to become more circular;


title: Circular economy

text: · The establishment of value chains for local materials such as wood and a better gestion of raw materials in general;


title: Circular economy

text: · The ‘Product Circularity Data Sheet’ (PCDS) launched in 2019 by the government to study and determine the circular potential of products and materials;


title: Circular economy

text: · An implementation of tools and methods such as a regulatory framework (laws), a financial framework (financial helps and sanctions), creation, management and sharing of knowledge on the subject, etc.;


title: Circular economy

text: The bio-economy, especially the circular bio-economy, decreases dependency on natural resources by encouraging sustainable goods that generate food, materials, and energy using renewable biological resources (such as lupins). According to the European Commission's EU Science Center, the circular bioeconomy produces €1.5 trillion in value added, accounting for 11% of EU GDP. The European Investment Bank invests between €6 billion and €9 billion in the bio-economy per year.


title: Circular economy

text: Eligibility requirements and core terms of reference for an equity and mezzanine debt fund were established by the European Investment Bank and the European Commission directorates-general for agriculture and research and innovation. As a result, an investment adviser was chosen, and the European Circular Bioeconomy Fund was created.


title: Circular economy

text: The European Circular Bioeconomy Fund invests in early-stage companies with developed innovations that are searching for funds to broaden their activities and reach new markets. It specifically invests in:


title: Circular economy

text: During the 2019 COP25 in Madrid, William McDonough and marine ecologist Carlos Duarte presented the Circular Carbon Economy at an event with the BBVA Foundation. The Circular Carbon Economy is based on McDonough's ideas from Carbon Is Not The Enemy[1] and aims to serve as the framework for developing and organizing effective systems for carbon management.


title: Circular economy

text: McDonough used the Circular Carbon Economy to frame discussions at the G20 workshops in March 2020 before the framework's formal acceptance by the G20 Leaders in November 2020.


title: Circular economy

text: There is some criticism of the idea of the circular economy. As Corvellec (2015) put it, the circular economy privileges continued economic growth with soft "anti-programs", and the circular economy is far from the most radical "anti-program". Corvellec (2019) raised the issue of multi-species and stresses "impossibility for waste producers to dissociate themselves from their waste and emphasizes the contingent, multiple, and transient value of waste". "Scatolic engagement draws on Reno's analogy of waste as scats and of scats as signs for enabling interspecies communication. This analogy stresses the impossibility for waste producers to dissociate themselves from their waste and emphasizes the contingent, multiple, and transient value of waste".


title: Circular economy

text: Corvellec and Stål (2019) are mildly critical of apparel manufacturing circular economy take-back systems as ways to anticipate and head off more severe waste reduction programs:


title: Circular economy

text: Research by Zink and Geyer (2017: 593) questioned the circular economy's engineering-centric assumptions: "However, proponents of the circular economy have tended to look at the world purely as an engineering system and have overlooked the economic part of the circular economy. Recent research has started to question the core of the circular economy—namely, whether closing material and product loops do, in fact, prevent primary production."


title: Circular economy

text: There are other critiques of the circular economy (CE). For example, Allwood (2014) discussed the limits of CE 'material circularity', and questioned the desirability of the CE in a reality with growing demand. Do CE secondary production activities (reuse, repair, & remake) actually reduce, or instead displace, primary production (natural resource extraction)? The problem CE overlooks, its untold story, is how displacement is governed mainly by market forces, according to McMillan et al. (2012). It's the tired old narrative, that the invisible hand of market forces will conspire to create full displacement of virgin material of the same kind, said Zink & Geyer (2017). Korhonen, Nuur, Feldmann, and Birkie (2018) argued that "the basic assumptions concerning the values, societal structures, cultures, underlying world-views and the paradigmatic potential of CE remain largely unexplored".


title: Circular economy

text: It is also often pointed out that there are fundamental limits to the concept, which are based, among other things, on the laws of thermodynamics. According to the second law of thermodynamics, all spontaneous processes are irreversible and associated with an increase in entropy. It follows that in a real implementation of the concept, one would either have to deviate from the perfect reversibility in order to generate an entropy increase by generating waste, which would ultimately amount to still having parts of the economy which follow a linear scheme, or enormous amounts of energy would be required (from which a significant part would be dissipated in order to for the total entropy to increase). In its comment to concept of the circular economy the European Academies' Science Advisory Council (EASAC) came to a similar conclusion:


title: Circular economy

text: In addition to this, the circular economy has been criticized for lacking a strong social justice component. Indeed, most circular economy visions, projects and policies don't address key social questions regarding how circular economy technologies and solutions will be controlled and how their benefits and costs will be distributed. To respond to these limitations some academics and social movements prefer to speak of a circular society rather than a circular economy. They thereby advocate for a circular society where knowledge, political power, wealth, and resources are sustainably circulated in fundamentally democratic and redistributive manners, rather than just improving resource efficiency as most circular economy proposals do.


title: Circular economy

text: Moreover, it has been argued that a post-growth approach should be adopted for the circular economy where material loops are put (directly) at the service of wellbeing, instead of attempting to reconcile the circular economy with GDP growth. For example, efficiency improvements at the level of individual products could be offset by a growth in total or per-capita consumption, which only beyond-circularity measures like choice editing and rationing unsustainable products or emissions may be able to address.


title: Circular economy

text: The various approaches to 'circular' business and economic models share several common principles with other conceptual frameworks:


title: Circular economy

text: Janine Benyus, author of "Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature", defined biomimicry as "a new discipline that studies nature's best ideas and then imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems. Studying a leaf to invent a better solar cell is an example. I think of it as 'innovation' inspired by nature".


title: Circular economy

text: Initiated by former Ecover CEO and Belgian entrepreneur Gunter Pauli, derived from the study of natural biological production processes the official manifesto states, "using the resources available...the waste of one product becomes the input to create a new cash flow".


title: Circular economy

text: Created by Walter R. Stahel and similar theorists, in which industry adopts the reuse and service-life extension of goods as a strategy of waste prevention, regional job creation, and resource efficiency in order to decouple wealth from resource consumption.


title: Circular economy

text: Industrial ecology is the study of material and energy flows through industrial systems. Focusing on connections between operators within the "industrial ecosystem", this approach aims at creating closed-loop processes in which waste is seen as input, thus eliminating the notion of undesirable by-product.


title: Circular economy

text: Resource recovery is using wastes as an input material to create valuable products as new outputs. The aim is to reduce the amount of waste generated, therefore, reducing the need for landfill space and also extracting maximum value from waste.


title: Circular economy

text: The ability to understand how things influence one another within a whole. Elements are considered as 'fitting in' their infrastructure, environment and social context.


title: Circular economy

text: The Biosphere Rules is a framework for implementing closed-loop production processes. They derived from nature systems and translated for industrial production systems. The five principles are Materials Parsimony, Value Cycling, Power Autonomy, Sustainable Product Platforms and Function Over Form.


title: Margaret Mead

text: Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901 – November 15, 1978) was an American cultural anthropologist who featured frequently as an author and speaker in the mass media during the 1960s and the 1970s.


title: Margaret Mead

text: She earned her bachelor's degree at Barnard College of Columbia University and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia. Mead served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1975.


title: Margaret Mead

text: Mead was a communicator of anthropology in modern American and Western culture and was often controversial as an academic. Her reports detailing the attitudes towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures influenced the 1960s sexual revolution. She was a proponent of broadening sexual conventions within the context of Western cultural traditions.


title: Margaret Mead

text: Margaret Mead, the first of five children, was born in Philadelphia but raised in nearby Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Her father, Edward Sherwood Mead, was a professor of finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and her mother, Emily (née Fogg) Mead, was a sociologist who studied Italian immigrants. Her sister Katharine (1906–1907) died at the age of nine months. That was a traumatic event for Mead, who had named the girl, and thoughts of her lost sister permeated her daydreams for many years. Her family moved frequently and so her early education was directed by her grandmother until, at age 11, she was enrolled by her family at Buckingham Friends School in Lahaska, Pennsylvania. Her family owned the Longland farm from 1912 to 1926. Born into a family of various religious outlooks, she searched for a form of religion that gave an expression of the faith with which she had been formally acquainted, Christianity. In doing so, she found the rituals of the United States Episcopal Church to fit the expression of religion she was seeking. Mead studied one year, 1919, at DePauw University, then transferred to Barnard College.


title: Margaret Mead

text: Mead earned her bachelor's degree from Barnard in 1923, began studying with professors Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict at Columbia University, and earned her master's degree in 1924. Mead set out in 1925 to do fieldwork in Samoa. In 1926, she joined the American Museum of Natural History, New York City, as assistant curator. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1929.


title: Margaret Mead

text: Before departing for Samoa, Mead had a short affair with the linguist Edward Sapir, a close friend of her instructor Ruth Benedict. However, Sapir's conservative stances about marriage and women's roles were unacceptable to Mead, and as Mead left to do field work in Samoa, they separated permanently. Mead received news of Sapir's remarriage while she was living in Samoa. There, on a beach, she later burned their correspondence.


title: Margaret Mead

text: Mead was married three times. After a six-year engagement, she married her first husband (1923–1928), Luther Cressman, an American theology student who later became an anthropologist. Between 1925 and 1926, she was in Samoa from where on the return boat she met Reo Fortune, a New Zealander headed to Cambridge, England, to study psychology. They were married in 1928, after Mead's divorce from Cressman. Mead dismissively characterized her union with her first husband as "my student marriage" in her 1972 autobiography "Blackberry Winter", a sobriquet with which Cressman took vigorous issue. Mead's third and longest-lasting marriage (1936–1950) was to the British anthropologist Gregory Bateson with whom she had a daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, who would also become an anthropologist.


title: Margaret Mead

text: Mead's pediatrician was Benjamin Spock, whose subsequent writings on child rearing incorporated some of Mead's own practices and beliefs acquired from her ethnological field observations which she shared with him; in particular, breastfeeding on the baby's demand, rather than by a schedule. She readily acknowledged that Gregory Bateson was the husband she loved the most. She was devastated when he left her and remained his loving friend ever afterward. She kept his photograph by her bedside wherever she traveled, including beside her hospital deathbed.


title: Margaret Mead

text: Mead also had an exceptionally-close relationship with Ruth Benedict, one of her instructors. In her memoir about her parents, "With a Daughter's Eye", Mary Catherine Bateson strongly implies that the relationship between Benedict and Mead was partly sexual. Mead never openly identified herself as lesbian or bisexual. In her writings, she proposed that it is to be expected that an individual's sexual orientation may evolve throughout life.


title: Margaret Mead

text: She spent her last years in a close personal and professional collaboration with the anthropologist Rhoda Metraux with whom she lived from 1955 until her death in 1978. Letters between the two published in 2006 with the permission of Mead's daughter clearly express a romantic relationship.


title: Margaret Mead

text: Mead had two sisters and a brother, Elizabeth, Priscilla, and Richard. Elizabeth Mead (1909–1983), an artist and teacher, married the cartoonist William Steig, and Priscilla Mead (1911–1959) married the author Leo Rosten. Mead's brother, Richard, was a professor. Mead was also the aunt of Jeremy Steig.


title: Margaret Mead

text: During World War II, Mead was executive secretary of the National Research Council's Committee on Food Habits. She was curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History from 1946 to 1969. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1948, the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1975, and the American Philosophical Society in 1977. She taught at The New School and Columbia University, where she was an adjunct professor from 1954 to 1978 and a professor of anthropology and chair of the Division of Social Sciences at Fordham University's Lincoln Center campus from 1968 to 1970, founding their anthropology department. In 1970, she joined the faculty of the University of Rhode Island as a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Anthropology.


title: Margaret Mead

text: Following Ruth Benedict's example, Mead focused her research on problems of child rearing, personality, and culture. She served as president of the Society for Applied Anthropology in 1950 and of the American Anthropological Association in 1960. In the mid-1960s, Mead joined forces with the communications theorist Rudolf Modley in jointly establishing an organization called Glyphs Inc., whose goal was to create a universal graphic symbol language to be understood by any members of culture, no matter how "primitive." In the 1960s, Mead served as the Vice President of the New York Academy of Sciences. She held various positions in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, notably president in 1975 and chair of the executive committee of the board of directors in 1976. She was a recognizable figure in academia and usually wore a distinctive cape and carried a walking stick.


title: Margaret Mead

text: Mead was a key participant in the Macy conferences on cybernetics and an editor of their proceedings. Mead's address to the inaugural conference of the American Society for Cybernetics was instrumental in the development of second-order cybernetics.


title: Margaret Mead

text: Mead was featured on two record albums published by Folkways Records. The first, released in 1959, "An Interview With Margaret Mead", explored the topics of morals and anthropology. In 1971, she was included in a compilation of talks by prominent women, "But the Women Rose, Vol. 2: Voices of Women in American History".


title: Margaret Mead

text: In later life, Mead was a mentor to many young anthropologists and sociologists, including Jean Houston, author Gail Sheehy, John Langston Gwaltney, Roger Sandall, filmmaker Timothy Asch, and anthropologist Susan C. Scrimshaw, who later received the 1985 Margaret Mead Award for her research on cultural factors affecting public health delivery.


title: Margaret Mead

text: Mead died of pancreatic cancer on November 15, 1978, and is buried at Trinity Episcopal Church Cemetery, Buckingham, Pennsylvania.


title: Margaret Mead

text: Courtesy, modesty, good manners, conformity to definite ethical standards are universal, but what constitutes courtesy, modesty, very good manners, and definite ethical standards is not universal. It is instructive to know that standards differ in the most unexpected ways.


title: Margaret Mead

text: Mead's findings suggested that the community ignores both boys and girls until they are about 15 or 16. Before then, children have no social standing within the community. Mead also found that marriage is regarded as a social and economic arrangement in which wealth, rank, and job skills of the husband and wife are taken into consideration.


title: Margaret Mead

text: In 1970, National Educational Television produced a documentary in commemoration of the 40th anniversary Mead's first expedition to New Guinea. Through the eyes of Mead on her final visit to the village of Peri, the film records how the role of the anthropologist has changed in the forty years since 1928.


title: Margaret Mead

text: After her death, Mead's Samoan research was criticized by the anthropologist Derek Freeman, who published a book arguing against many of Mead's conclusions in "Coming of Age in Samoa". Freeman argued that Mead had misunderstood Samoan culture when she argued that Samoan culture did not place many restrictions on youths' sexual explorations. Freeman argued instead that Samoan culture prized female chastity and virginity and that Mead had been misled by her female Samoan informants. Freeman found that the Samoan islanders whom Mead had depicted in such utopian terms were intensely competitive and had murder and rape rates higher than those in the United States. Furthermore, the men were intensely sexually jealous, which contrasted sharply with Mead’s depiction of 'free love" among the Samoans.


title: Margaret Mead

text: Freeman's book was controversial in its turn and was met with considerable backlash and harsh criticism from the anthropology community, but it was received enthusiastically by communities of scientists who believed that sexual mores were more or less universal across cultures. Later in 1983, a special session of Mead's supporters in the American Anthropological Association (to which Freeman was not invited) declared it to be "poorly written, unscientific, irresponsible and misleading." Some anthropologists who studied Samoan culture argued in favor of Freeman's findings and contradicted those of Mead, but others argued that Freeman's work did not invalidate Mead's work because Samoan culture had been changed by the integration of Christianity in the decades between Mead's and Freeman's fieldwork periods.


title: Margaret Mead

text: Mead was careful to shield the identity of all her subjects for confidentiality, but Freeman found and interviewed one of her original participants, and Freeman reported that she admitted to having willfully misled Mead. She said that she and her friends were having fun with Mead and telling her stories.


title: Margaret Mead

text: In 1996, the author Martin Orans examined Mead's notes preserved at the Library of Congress and credits her for leaving all of her recorded data available to the general public. Orans points out that Freeman's basic criticisms, that Mead was duped by ceremonial virgin Fa'apua'a Fa'amu, who later swore to Freeman that she had played a joke on Mead, were equivocal for several reasons. Mead was well aware of the forms and frequency of Samoan joking, she provided a careful account of the sexual restrictions on ceremonial virgins that corresponds to Fa'apua'a Fa'auma'a's account to Freeman, and Mead's notes make clear that she had reached her conclusions about Samoan sexuality before meeting Fa'apua'a Fa'amu. Orans points out that Mead's data support several different conclusions and that Mead's conclusions hinge on an interpretive, rather than positivist, approach to culture. Orans went on to point out concerning Mead's work elsewhere that her own notes do not support her published conclusive claims. Evaluating Mead's work in Samoa from a positivist stance, Orans's assessment of the controversy was that Mead did not formulate her research agenda in scientific terms and that "her work may properly be damned with the harshest scientific criticism of all, that it is 'not even wrong'."


title: Margaret Mead

text: On the whole, anthropologists have rejected the notion that Mead's conclusions rested on the validity of a single interview with a single person and find instead that Mead based her conclusions on the sum of her observations and interviews during her time in Samoa and that the status of the single interview did not falsify her work. Others such as Orans maintained that even though Freeman's critique was invalid, Mead's study was not sufficiently scientifically rigorous to support the conclusions she drew.


title: Margaret Mead

text: In 1999, Freeman published another book, "The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research", including previously unavailable material. In his obituary in "The New York Times", John Shaw stated that his thesis, though upsetting many, had by the time of his death generally gained widespread acceptance. Recent work has nonetheless challenged his critique. A frequent criticism of Freeman is that he regularly misrepresented Mead's research and views. In a 2009 evaluation of the debate, anthropologist Paul Shankman concluded:


title: Margaret Mead

text: There is now a large body of criticism of Freeman's work from a number of perspectives in which Mead, Samoa, and anthropology appear in a very different light than they do in Freeman's work. Indeed, the immense significance that Freeman gave his critique looks like 'much ado about nothing' to many of his critics.


title: Margaret Mead

text: While nurture-oriented anthropologists are more inclined to agree with Mead's conclusions, there are other non-anthropologists who take a nature-oriented approach following Freeman's lead, such as Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, biologist Richard Dawkins, evolutionary psychologist David Buss, science writer Matt Ridley, classicist Mary Lefkowitz, and moral philosopher Peter Singer.


title: Margaret Mead

text: In her 2015 book "Galileo's Middle Finger", Alice Dreger argues that Freeman's accusations were unfounded and misleading. A detailed review of the controversy by Paul Shankman, published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2009, supports the contention that Mead's research was essentially correct and concludes that Freeman cherry-picked his data and misrepresented both Mead and Samoan culture.


title: Margaret Mead

text: A survey of 301 anthropology faculty in the United States in 2016 had two thirds agreeing with a statement that Mead "romanticizes the sexual freedom of Samoan adolescents" and half agreeing that it was ideologically motivated.


title: Margaret Mead

text: Mead's "Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies" became influential within the feminist movement since it claimed that females are dominant in the Tchambuli (now spelled Chambri) Lake region of the Sepik basin of Papua New Guinea (in the western Pacific) without causing any special problems. The lack of male dominance may have been the result of the Australian administration's outlawing of warfare. According to contemporary research, males are dominant throughout Melanesia (although some believe that female witches have special powers). Others have argued that there is still much cultural variation throughout Melanesia, especially in the large island of New Guinea. Moreover, anthropologists often overlook the significance of networks of political influence among females. The formal male-dominated institutions typical of some areas of high population density were not, for example, present in the same way in Oksapmin, West Sepik Province, a more sparsely-populated area. Cultural patterns there were different from, say, Mount Hagen. They were closer to those described by Mead.


title: Margaret Mead

text: Mead stated that the Arapesh people, also in the Sepik, were pacifists, but she noted that they on occasion engage in warfare. Her observations about the sharing of garden plots among the Arapesh, the egalitarian emphasis in child rearing, and her documentation of predominantly peaceful relations among relatives are very different from the "big man" displays of dominance that were documented in more stratified New Guinea cultures, such as by Andrew Strathern. They are a different cultural pattern.


title: Margaret Mead

text: Deborah Gewertz (1981) studied the Chambri (called Tchambuli by Mead) in 1974–1975 and found no evidence of such gender roles. Gewertz states that as far back in history as there is evidence (1850s), Chambri men dominated the women, controlled their produce, and made all important political decisions. In later years, there has been a diligent search for societies in which women dominate men or for signs of such past societies, but none has been found (Bamberger 1974). Jessie Bernard criticised Mead's interpretations of her findings and argued that Mead's descriptions were subjective. Bernard argues that Mead claimed the Mundugumor women were temperamentally identical to men, but her reports indicate that there were in fact sex differences; Mundugumor women hazed each other less than men hazed each other and made efforts to make themselves physically desirable to others, married women had fewer affairs than married men, women were not taught to use weapons, women were used less as hostages and Mundugumor men engaged in physical fights more often than women. In contrast, the Arapesh were also described as equal in temperament, but Bernard states that Mead's own writings indicate that men physically fought over women, yet women did not fight over men. The Arapesh also seemed to have some conception of sex differences in temperament, as they would sometimes describe a woman as acting like a particularly quarrelsome man. Bernard also questioned if the behaviour of men and women in those societies differed as much from Western behaviour as Mead claimed. Bernard argued that some of her descriptions could be equally descriptive of a Western context.


title: Margaret Mead

text: Despite its feminist roots, Mead's work on women and men was also criticized by Betty Friedan on the basis that it contributes to infantilizing women.


title: Margaret Mead

text: In 1926, there was much debate about race and intelligence. Mead felt the methodologies involved in the experimental psychology research supporting arguments of racial superiority in intelligence were substantially flawed. In "The Methodology of Racial Testing: Its Significance for Sociology," Mead proposes that there are three problems with testing for racial differences in intelligence. First, there are concerns with the ability to validly equate one's test score with what Mead refers to as "racial admixture" or how much "Negro or Indian blood" an individual possesses. She also considers whether that information is relevant when interpreting IQ scores. Mead remarks that a genealogical method could be considered valid if it could be "subjected to extensive verification." In addition, the experiment would need a steady control group to establish whether racial admixture was actually affecting intelligence scores. Next, Mead argues that it is difficult to measure the effect that social status has on the results of a person's intelligence test. She meant that environment (family structure, socioeconomic status, and exposure to language, etc.) has too much influence on an individual to attribute inferior scores solely to a physical characteristic such as race. Then, Mead adds that language barriers sometimes create the biggest problem of all. Similarly, Stephen J. Gould finds three main problems with intelligence testing in his 1981 book "The Mismeasure of Man" that relate to Mead's view of the problem of determining whether there are racial differences in intelligence.


title: Margaret Mead

text: In 1929, Mead and Fortune visited Manus, now the northernmost province of Papua New Guinea, and traveled there by boat from Rabaul. She amply describes her stay there in her autobiography, and it is mentioned in her 1984 biography by Jane Howard. On Manus, she studied the Manus people of the south coast village of Peri. "Over the next five decades Mead would come back oftener to Peri than to any other field site of her career.'


title: Margaret Mead

text: Mead has been credited with persuading the American Jewish Committee to sponsor a project to study European Jewish villages, "shtetls", in which a team of researchers would conduct mass interviews with Jewish immigrants living in New York City. The resulting book, widely cited for decades, allegedly created the Jewish mother stereotype, a mother intensely loving but controlling to the point of smothering and engendering guilt in her children through the suffering she professed to undertake for their sakes.


title: Margaret Mead

text: Mead worked for the RAND Corporation, a US Air Force military-funded private research organization, from 1948 to 1950 to study Russian culture and attitudes toward authority.


title: Margaret Mead

text: As an Anglican Christian, Mead played a considerable part in the drafting of the 1979 American Episcopal Book of Common Prayer.


title: Margaret Mead

text: On January 19, 1979, US President Jimmy Carter announced that he was awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously to Mead. UN Ambassador Andrew Young presented the award to Mead's daughter at a special program honoring her contributions that was sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History, where she spent many years of her career. The citation read:


title: Margaret Mead

text: The US Postal Service issued a stamp of face value 32¢ on May 28, 1998 as part of the Celebrate the Century stamp sheet series.


title: Margaret Mead

text: The Margaret Mead Award is awarded in her honor jointly by the Society for Applied Anthropology and the American Anthropological Association, for significant works in communicating anthropology to the general public.


title: Margaret Mead

text: In addition, there are several schools named after Mead in the United States: a junior high school in Elk Grove Village, Illinois, an elementary school in Sammamish, Washington and another in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, New York.


title: Margaret Mead

text: In 1979, the Supersisters trading card set was produced and distributed; one of the cards featured Mead's name and picture.


title: Margaret Mead

text: The 2014 novel "Euphoria" by Lily King is a fictionalized account of Mead's love/marital relationships with fellow anthropologists Reo Fortune and Gregory Bateson in New Guinea before World War II.


title: Margaret Mead

text: In the 1967 musical "Hair", her name is given to a tranvestite "tourist" disturbing the show with the song "My Conviction."


title: Margaret Mead

text: Note: See also "Margaret Mead: The Complete Bibliography 1925–1975", Joan Gordan, ed., The Hague: Mouton.


title: So You Think You Can Dance (American TV series)

text: So You Think You Can Dance (SYTYCD) is an American reality television dance competition show that airs on Fox in the United States and is the flagship series of the international "So You Think You Can Dance" television franchise. It was created by "American Idol" producers Simon Fuller and Nigel Lythgoe and is produced by 19 Entertainment and Dick Clark Productions The series premiered on July 20, 2005, with over ten million viewers and ended the summer season as the top-rated show on television. The first season was hosted by American news personality Lauren Sánchez. Since the second season, it has been hosted by English former children's television personality and game show emcee Cat Deeley.


text: The show features a format where dancers trained in a variety of dance genres enter open auditions held in a number of major U.S. cities to showcase their talents and move forward through successive additional rounds of auditions to test their ability to adapt to different styles. At the end of this process, a small number of dancers are chosen as finalists. These dancers move on to the competition's main phase, where they perform solo, duet, and group dance numbers on live television, attempting to master a diverse selection of dance styles, including classical, contemporary, ballroom, hip-hop, street, club, jazz and musical theatre styles, among others. They compete for the votes of the broadcast viewing audience which, combined with the input of a panel of judges, determines which dancers advance to the next stage from week to week, until a winner is crowned as "America's favorite dancer".


text: "So You Think You Can Dance" has won seven Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Choreography and a total of nine Emmy Awards altogether. Licensed variations of the show, produced for broadcast markets in other nations, began airing in August 2005 and dozens of localized adaptations of the show have been produced since, airing in 41 countries to date. The sixteenth season premiered June 3, 2019. On February 20, 2020, the show was renewed for a seventeenth season, that was set to air in the summer of 2020, but, due to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, the season was indefinitely postponed on June 18, 2020. On February 16, 2021, Fox said they would not move forward with producing the seventeenth season in 2021, which left the show's future in doubt. However, in February 2022, it was announced that season 17 would head into production. On April 5, 2022, it was announced that season 17 would premiere on May 18, 2022.


text: A typical season of "So You Think You Can Dance" is divided between a selection process, during which expert judges select competitors from a wide pool of applicant dancers, and a competition phase, during which these 'finalists' (more typically referred to as the 'Top 20') compete for votes from home viewers. Although it is produced over the course of months, the selection phase is highly edited and usually constitutes only the first 2 to 4 weeks of aired episodes with the competition episodes forming the remaining 7 to 9 weeks of the season.


text: The open auditions, the first stage in determining a season's finalists, take place in 2 to 6 major U.S. cities each season and are typically open to anyone aged 18 to 30 at the time of their audition, although season 13 focused on a younger class of competitors, ages 8 to 14. The cities where auditions are held change from season to season but some, such as Los Angeles and New York City, have featured in most seasons. During this stage, the dancers perform a brief routine (typically a solo, but duet and group routines are allowed as well) before a panel of dance experts usually headed by series creator and executive producer Nigel Lythgoe. This panel then decides on-the-spot whether the dancer demonstrated enough ability and performance value to proceed further. If the dancer exhibited exceptional ability in their performance, judges award "a ticket to Vegas" (or in more recent seasons "a ticket to the Academy"), moving them instantly one step forward in the competition. Alternatively, if judges are on the fence about the dancer, they may ask the contestant to wait until the end of that day's auditions to participate in a short test of their ability to pick up professional choreography.


text: The second stage of the selection process is referred to as "the callbacks" (this round was referenced as "Vegas Week" for much of the show's run, as it was held in Las Vegas, but has been called Academy Week since season 13). The callbacks consist of a several-day-long process in which the remaining hopefuls are tested for overall well-rounded dance ability, stamina, creativity and their ability to perform under pressure. The dancers are put through a battery of rounds that test their ability to pick up various dance styles; these are typically some of the more well-represented genres that are later prominent in the competition phase, such as hip-hop, jazz, ballroom, and contemporary. Additionally the dancers may be asked to perform further solos in styles of their choosing and participate in a group choreography round in which small teams of contestants must display their musicality and ability to communicate professionally by choreographing a performance to a randomly selected piece of music — this challenge is notable as being the only time competitors are asked to choreograph themselves, aside from solos.


text: The callbacks are often collectively portrayed as one of the most exhausting and stressful stages of the competition; each successive round sees cuts in which a significant portion of the remaining dancers are eliminated from competition and are given a limited amount of time to adapt to styles they are sometimes wholly unfamiliar with while being physically taxed by the rapid progression of rounds and a limited amount of rest. At the end of this process, usually less than 40 competitors remain in a pool that final contestants are chosen from. Most seasons have featured 20 "top" finalists for the competition portion of the show, but season 1 was represented by a Top 16, season 7 saw a Top 11 and seasons 13 through 15 have featured a Top 10.


text: Following the finalist selection process, the show transitions into its regular competition phase, which lasts for the rest of the season. The competition stage is typically divided into eight weeks, generally with two contestants eliminated per week. Dancers are paired up into male-female couples that will sometimes stay paired for much of the remaining competition if neither is eliminated (since season 7, competitors have also been occasionally paired with "All Stars", returning dancers from previous seasons who partner with the contestant dancers, but who are not themselves competing). These couples perform 1 or 2 duets per week in different styles which are typically, but not always, randomly selected. These duets, as with all non-solo performances at this stage in the competition, are choreographed by professional choreographers. Prior to most duet performances, a video packet of clips of the couple preparing to perform the routine is shown. These packets are intended not only to demonstrate the couple's efforts to master the routine, but also to give glimpses of the personalities and personal histories of the dancers, as well as insights from the choreographer as to the thematic, narrative and artistic intentions of the piece. Following each duet performance, the week's panel of judges gives critical feedback, often emphasizing the two key areas of technique and performance value. Duets and their accompanying video packets and critiques typically take up the majority of an episode but are often supplemented by solos, group numbers, and occasionally guest dance or musical performances.


text: In season 1, each week of the competition featured a single episode, with dancers' eliminations pre-recorded the week they occurred and then broadcast at the beginning of the next week's episode. In seasons 2 to 8, the show's weekly format was split between two episodes, a performance episode, as described above, and a results show which revealed the outcome of the at-home-viewer voting following the performance show of the same week. More recent seasons have returned to a one-show-per-week format, but with each week's episode typically reflecting the results of voting for the previous week's performances, with these results revealed at the end of the following week's performances. Depending on the stage of the competition, each week may feature eliminations which are based entirely on an at-home viewer vote, or the vote may simply create a group of bottom dancers from which the show's judges will select the final eliminations. Voting has also varied by season (and often within seasons) with regard to whether the voter selected individuals or couples. Following the announcement of their elimination, dancers are typically given a brief send-off via a video montage. Each competitive episode ends with a quick recap of the night's routines accompanied by voting prompts. Episodes typically last around two hours, commercials included. There has also been variability in how long couples are kept together and how the at-home-viewer votes are balanced against judge decisions, though ultimately at some point in every season, the judges give up their power to save dancers and eliminations are determined exclusively by viewer votes. The total number of hours shown in a given week during the performance phase of the competition has varied from two to four hours.


text: The finale episode is often the most elaborately produced show of a season and features the last performances of the competitors, encore performances of many of the season's most acclaimed routines, guest dancers (including returning past season competitors and cast members from other international versions of the franchise), musical performances, and multiple video packets chronicling the course of the season's events, all culminating in the announcement of the winner of the competition. Most seasons have featured a single winner, while seasons 9 and 10 featured both a male and female winner. Following the closure of the season, the Top Ten dancers often go on tour for several months, performing hit routines from the season among other performances.


text: A typical season of "So You Think You Can Dance" is presided over by a panel of 2 to 4 permanent judges, supplemented by occasional guest judges, with the panel sometimes ballooning up to twice or more its normal size for callback episodes or season finales. Executive producer and co-creator of the show Nigel Lythgoe is the only judge to have sat as a permanent member of the panel across all seasons except Season 17, although ballroom specialist Mary Murphy has also sat as a permanent member of the panel for the majority of seasons. Other permanent judges have included film director and choreographer Adam Shankman, contemporary choreographer Mia Michaels, pop music and dance icon Paula Abdul, noted youth dancer Maddie Ziegler, actress and singer Vanessa Hudgens, music and dance artist Jason Derulo, choreographer and TV personality Laurieann Gibson, actress, dancer and singer JoJo Siwa, actor and singer Matthew Morrison and successful show alumni Stephen "tWitch" Boss and Dominic "D-Trix" Sandoval.


text: Many earlier seasons frequently featured guest judges in occasional episodes, although this practice has become increasingly rare. These guest judge positions have typically been filled by choreographers who regularly work on the show (who in rare cases may also be former contestants themselves) as well as by iconic names from the entertainment industry. Guest judges for the show have included: Debbie Allen, Christina Applegate, Robin Antin, Toni Basil, Cicely Bradley, Kristin Chenoweth, Misty Copeland, Alex Da Silva, Ellen DeGeneres, Tyce Diorio, Joey Dowling, Napoleon and Tabitha D'umo, Carmen Electra, Brian Friedman, Jean-Marc Généreux, Jason Gilkison, Neil Patrick Harris, Hi-Hat, Katie Holmes, Dan Karaty, Lady Gaga, Carly Rae Jepsen, Lil' C, Rob Marshall, Mandy Moore, Megan Mullally, Kenny Ortega, Toni Redpath, Debbie Reynolds, Wade Robson, Doriana Sanchez, Shane Sparks, Sonya Tayeh, Olisa Thompson, Stacey Tookey, Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Travis Wall.


text: Over the course of its seventeen seasons, "So You Think You Can Dance" has featured dozens of distinct dance styles in its choreographed routines. Most of these styles fall into four categories that are regularly showcased and can be found in almost every performance episode: western contemporary/classical styles, ballroom styles, hip-hop/street styles as well as Jazz and its related styles. Various other forms of dance that do not especially fall into these broad categories are seen as well, but not as regularly. The following styles have all been seen in a choreographed duet or group routine; styles featured only in auditions or solos are not listed.


text: Routines from the classically derived style of contemporary dance are the most common dances seen on the show, being seen in every performance episode of the series (and typically at least twice per episode). While contemporary, lyrical, and modern dance are typically considered three separate (if overlapping) styles of dance, the practice on "So You Think You Can Dance" has been to refer to all routines in this area as "contemporary", except in the first season where the label "lyrical" was used for the same purpose. Ballet routines occur much more rarely, at a rate of one or two per season, since their introduction in the fourth season.


text: Hip-hop routines are also present in every performance episode. While these routines frequently feature elements from many different subgenres of hip-hop (locking and popping, for example) and various "street" styles (such as "breaking)," they are typically all labelled under the umbrella term of "hip-hop." An exception is the now frequently featured "lyrical hip-hop", which is unique amongst all styles on "SYTYCD" in that it is the only one that is held to have become a known distinct style at least in-part as a result of the show; the style is widely attributed to regular show choreographers Tabitha and Napoleon D'umo and the term itself to judge Adam Shankman. These two broad categories are occasionally supplemented by routines which are labelled as krump, breakdancing, waacking and stepping.


text: Ballroom styles are also seen regularly in every performance episode. These routines may use the movement of traditional International Standard forms or lean toward American competitive styles. Other routines may use street or regional variants or may combine elements of different variations.


text: Jazz is featured in nearly all performance episodes. While these routines are typically labelled simply "Jazz", the genre is notable as being one of the most fusional featured on the show and various style combinations and sub-categories have been referenced. Descended from Jazz but treated as a separate genre on "SYTYCD", "Broadway" is analogous to the label "Musical Theater" outside the U.S.


text: These dance styles are featured less frequently than their ballroom relatives, but have been seen intermittently since the first season.


text: In addition to the broad categories above, many more styles that are less common in the U.S. are sometimes featured. Most of these are seen only once, but the Bollywood style has been featured several times per season since the fourth season.


text: On September 2, 2009, as a prelude to season 6, a special show aired featuring judge picks for the top 15 routines from the first five seasons. At the end of the show, show creator and judge Nigel Lythgoe presented his favorite performance, a contemporary piece choreographed by Tyce Diorio and performed by Melissa Sandvig and Ade Obayomi.


text: In March 2014, Chinese television station CCTV broadcast a promotional episode in which notable all-star dancers from the U.S. and Chinese versions of "So You Think You Can Dance" competed directly against one another as teams. Titled "Zhōngměi Wǔ Lín Guànjūn Duìkàngsài - Super Dancer Born Tonight", the show was shot in Las Vegas but never aired on U.S. television.


text: "So You Think You Can Dance" premiered with over 10 million viewers in 2005. For season 1, it was the No. 1 summer show on television. However, when NBC's "America's Got Talent" premiered in the summer of 2006, it took the title of "#1 summer show" and, over the following few years, broadened its lead. In summer 2009, SYTYCD premiered strong with a 3.4 rating in its target demographic, although with the start of "America's Got Talent" roughly a month later in the same timeslot, "Dance" fell to No. 4 on the ratings board. It continued to lose viewers throughout the summer of 2009 and ended up with an average of approximately 8 million viewers. Fox then moved SYTYCD to its fall 2009 schedule where its ratings continued to decline; hitting an all-time series low of 4.6 million viewers for a "special" episode hosted by Nigel Lythgoe on September 2, 2009. The move to the fall was short-lived. After dropping to an average of 6 million viewers, Fox moved SYTYCD back to the summer in 2010. With Mia Michaels replacing Mary Murphy and former contestants termed as "All-Stars" being used as partners, the ratings for "Dance" continued to slide to all-time series lows; dropping to just 5.6 million viewers on July 15, 2010. For season 7, "So You Think You Can Dance" averaged just over 5 million viewers. After season 7, Mia Michaels was replaced on the judge's panel by returning personality Mary Murphy. The change appeared to have little effect on the ratings, and the show continued to average just over five million viewers per episode in 2011's season 8. Season 9 saw a slight uptick in ratings early on, with each of the season's first five episodes garnering between six and seven million viewers, but the rise was short-lived and the show's ratings hit a new low of 4.16 million viewers on August 29, 2012. Season 10 maintained similar numbers, averaging about 4 million viewers per episode in 2013, with a 4.3 million viewership for the last episode of the season, an all-time series low for a finale.


text: In April 2014, Lythgoe appealed to fans on Twitter to share information about the show ahead of the 11th season's May premiere in an attempt to augment the show's ratings for the upcoming season and bolster its chances of renewal thereafter. The show was renewed for a 12th season, but ratings continued to decline, with an average of around 3.5 million viewers per show. FOX renewed the show for a 13th season, but with a drastically re-worked format focused on child dancers. Ratings declined further for the new version, with only five episodes breaking the 3 million viewer mark; the finale saw a series low viewership of just 2.27 million viewers.


text: In 2016, a "New York Times" study of the 50 TV shows with the most Facebook Likes found that "in general", "Dance" "is more popular in cities, though it hits peak popularity in Utah".


text: Dance competition had been a part of American television for decades before the premiere of "So You Think You Can Dance", but usually in the form of all-around talent searches (such as "Star Search", "Soul Train", or "Showtime at the Apollo"). However, a season-long American Idol-like talent-search show with a sole focus on dance had never been broadcast on American network television. Producers and judges associated with the show have stated on numerous occasions, both within broadcasts of the show and in interviews, that the series was meant to rejuvenate the visibility and appreciation of dance as an art form in the U.S. and to give exposure to struggling dancers. Series judge Mary Murphy says, for example, "Of course you hope you can make a living at it, because you don't want to give up on something that you do, but the honest truth is most dancers have to carry one or two jobs and dance as much as they can on the side -- it's a very lucky dancer who gets a full scholarship." A number of dance-themed competition shows have been produced for American television since the premiere of "So You Think You Can Dance", including "America's Best Dance Crew", "Superstars of Dance", "Live to Dance", and "World of Dance".


text: In 2009, Lythgoe came together with fellow "SYTYCD" judge Adam Shankman as well as Katie Holmes, Carrie Ann Inaba and others in the dance entertainment industry in an effort to launch "The Dizzyfeet Foundation", with the aim of providing scholarships and training to young dancers of limited means. The foundation has been referenced sporadically on the show since. In 2010, Lythgoe, with the assistance of other "SYTYCD" personalities and long-time healthy lifestyles proponent Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, was successful in getting another of his dance-oriented concepts realized—an official National Dance Day, now held annually on the last Saturday of July, to promote fitness through movement. This national dance day has been celebrated annually by the show since.