Circular economy professionals

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The circular economy is being talked about by the public, politicians, the media, and companies. It has filtered into the popular imagination and crops up when people talk of fighting climate change or the energy transition. As a result, courses based around this topic have proliferated. One of the first schools to offer them was the Bilbao Engineering School of the University of the Basque Country (UPV) back in 2002, which was teaching its students to ecodesign a product: How to design an item to minimize its environmental footprint.

Since then, the range offered by this university and other schools has grown and diversified. Today, the UPV has a Master's in Circular Economy: Application to Companies, which began as a postgraduate degree and is now in its third consecutive year. Rikardo Mínguez, its director, explains that there are 25 students per year from very different backgrounds: “We have professionals who are sustainability directors or CSR managers for their companies. They come from industries like construction, food, or automotive. They want to move on and be retrained with circular economy skills. And in class, they are mixed in with new graduates. There's a lot of synergy among them. It leads to a very good educational environment and information exchange. In parallel, the school and Repsol Foundation are sponsoring an education and research program to disseminate the circular economy and study its impact on the value chain.

Experts emphasize that this economy is a philosophy that encompasses everything, and not just a degree in itself. Companies are transforming their essential nature and their practices. They start with the technical aspects but include the cultural aspects as well. Trash is no longer trash. It's now waste – a resource that can be transformed into a raw material and can enter the production chain over and over again. Ignacio Fresneda, from the Industrial Transformation and Circular Economy's People and Organization Department at Repsol, explained that what most characterizes this new order is that its cross-disciplinary: “People go into master's in circular economy with anything from a degree in chemical engineering to law, economics, or agroforestry engineering. The practices, whether in the fashion or energy industries, may be different, but they will be governed by the same principles.

This mixture of backgrounds, where beginners and veterans come together, results in diverse, versatile teams. Fresneda described a practical case: “Scientists are responsible for selecting the most efficient technologies. They tend to be chemists, engineers, or biologists, who, together with industrial or process engineers, adapt them and integrate them into our current processes.” Afterwards, they must learn to communicate this transformation on a board with different rules of the game. The students are also prepared for this: “When a model undergoes such great change, the challenge also lies in the way to talk about it. You have to motivate people and explain so that they become involved. Emphasizing not only what is good but also what is bad or complicated, with no corporate whitewash,” noted Fresneda.

Ten up-and-coming green-economy professions

The report Employment in sustainability and the environment: 10 professions with a future by the International University of La Rioja and Infoempleo (2021) listed ten positions as some of the careers in sustainability with the brightest future.

1. Sustainable technological solutions and projects analyst: Analyzes the activities that could be harmful for a company and alters them to be more sustainable solutions.
2. Occupational risk, quality, environment, and CSR technician: Advises companies on how to manage the implementation of regulations or standards for risk prevention, the implementation of quality systems, environmental impact reduction, and corporate social responsibility.
3. Sustainable logistics consultant: Performs tasks relating to labeling or packaging, product costs (types of contracts and transportation), controlling the company’s contamination levels, and selecting a less polluting means of transportation.
4. Ecodesigner: Includes environmental criteria in the product design and development phase, trying to take preventive measures to lessen the environmental impact.
5. Circular economy specialist: Works to ensure that the products that companies put on the market are produced taking sustainability criteria into account.
6. Environmental education specialist: Teaches about environmental, economic, and cultural processes through the acquisition of skills such as critical thinking and a systemic approach.
7. Environmental sustainability expert: Manages a company's resources sustainably, both for the production and distribution of its goods and services.
8. Cultural manager specializing in sustainability: Preserves the sustainability of the management and development of cultural and artistic projects.
9. Renewable energies expert: Manages a company's resources sustainably, both for the production and distribution of its goods and services.
10. Environmental engineer: Assessess, prevents, and seeks technical solutions for the environmental problems that a company’s production processes may cause.

While waiting for these roles, the tasks intrinsic to this new reality, such as ensuring a company is elegible to apply for green subsidies or balancing the books so that a change in energy supply is profitable, are absorbed by a mixture of professionals who are trained and expand their skills along the way. However, an unprecedented position is coming: that of the pure circular economist, in other words, professionals who have grown up in this field, not experts on the fringe of it. This is what Luis Salvatella, director of the joint Master's in Circular Economy at the University of La Rioja, University of Lleida, University of Zaragoza, and Public University of Navarre, believes: “There is still no circular economy manager in every company, unlike with occupational risk prevention, but they will probably start to appear soon.”

This job will emerge in the end. Meanwhile, the demand for circularized professionals continues to grow. Companies and governments, pushed by climate change, are increasingly tightening up their environmental obligations. The circular economy permeates all these requirements: “It is an enormous challenge for society that transcends all sectors and all levels. The most obvious is related to leveraging renewable raw materials through reuse, repair, and recycling. It affects many aspects of companies such as digitalization, logistics, and accounting management. It is difficult to find a sector that is untouched by this necessary revolution,” explained professor Salvatella.

The students in the master’s program he runs stand behind the need for this challenge to be met by a mixed and very well-prepared army. Its classrooms accomodate graduates in chemistry, law, economics, business administration and management, and a variety of branches of engineering. They are the professionals who will cover the scientific, technical, legal, social, and economic aspects of an unstoppable change. The potential circular economists of the future.

_{Publiished in El País}