A group of the world’s leading experts on sustainability, including round-the-world yachtswoman Dame Ellen MacArthur, were in Bradford yesterday for the start of a summit.

The three-day Ten+One conference at the University of Bradford will see the world’s leading Circular Economy thinkers and advocates challenge business and society to re-design the materials we use and how we make them.

The new Ellen MacArthur Foundation has forged a three-year partnership with the university. It aims to equip young people for work in a world of increasingly-limited resources and inspire them to rethink, redesign and build a more sustainable future.

Within a Circular Economy, waste becomes food for another process, rather than being thrown away.

Dame Ellen said: “It’s time for a rethink. Cradle-to-Cradle products and services are designed so that after their useful life they provide value, either as ‘biological nutrients’ that safely re-enter the environment or as ‘technical nutrients’ that circulate without being down-cycled into low-grade uses.”

Dame Ellen, whose mother, grandmother and aunt grew up in Bradford, has spent the past four years working with the Government, business and the public sector to learn more about the challenges the world faces.

She said: “When you look at Bradford, it’s about the industrial revolution – most of its buildings come from the industrial revolution.

“Bradford has that heritage of creating things and that’s exactly what we are looking at, but how can we make that work in the future.”

For more information, visit bradford.ac.uk/ten-plus-one/book/online or ellenmacarthurfoundation.org.