Jean Darling and Stephen Mason On Centring Place As A Changemaker To Build Regenerative Systems

Jean Darling and Stephen Mason are the driving force behind Cirque du Soil, aka 'Circular Soil' - a Social Traders & People + Planet First Certified social enterprise, focused on closing the loop on urban waste, using place based frameworks to reduce our impact on the planet.

Jean, Co-Founder and Managing Director, brings a multidisciplinary approach with a Master’s in Architecture, Placemaking, and Waste. Her work focuses on systemic solutions at the neighborhood scale, using regenerative design and the built environment as a catalyst for social and environmental transformation. Through strategic circular interventions weaving people and place, she advocates for reconnecting communities with the land and closing material loops, recognising that a whole-systems approach is key to resilience and climate action.

Stephen, Co-Founder and CFO, holds an MBA in Global Sustainable Development and is passionate about leading social and environmental change. He works with co-operatives, social enterprises, and not-for-profits to help organisations achieve their mission through stakeholder-led design. A firm believer in collective systems, he is driven driven by a commitment to shifting consumer behaviour and embedding circularity into everyday life, and envisions a world modelled on a hybrid version of Mondragon, where cooperation thrives and circular economy principles are ingrained in education from birth.

They have worked on a wide range of projects spanning diverse industry sectors across local councils, hospitality, events, film production and schools. As consultants, educators, program designers and storytellers, their work is grounded in collaboration and action, with the mission to reshape urban systems with practical, circular solutions that put people and the planet first.

Jean and Stephen discuss Accelerating the development of a thriving society by implementing place-based regenerative systems, and How principles of the circular economy can help us reduce waste on both local and national levels.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Indio Myles] - Could you both share a bit about your backgrounds and what led to you working in social enterprise and the circular economy?

[Jean Darling] - I have a background in architecture and placemaking, so I’ve spent 20 years working around built environment and sustainability. The last six years I dived deep into waste because that was definitely a sore area that was missing in terms of what's happening in the industry.

It's quite a unique blend of backgrounds but everything I like doing is around that community impact as well. Looking at how we get more designers and how supply chains change. People, place, and planet has always been my driving force, but food and shelter as well.

[Stephen Mason] - For me, it's always been around systems. I finished high school pretty young, and I was lucky enough that I grew up bouncing around farms and growing up overseas. When I got my first gig, after finishing year twelve at fourteen years old, I jumped straight into pulling businesses apart and learning how they worked. You work your way up from the bottom with some of them, but very quickly I got into doing business transformation, innovation, and running large retail and wholesale companies.

From there, I went into mergers and acquisitions, and that's even worse. You're pulling businesses apart, but you're not really creating value. You're just making money for the systems that don't deserve it. That pushed me into getting more and more angry.

I kept trying to find the perfect business system to work in. I moved out of the worst system, which was private equity. I worked both sides of franchising and shareholding, private companies, and eventually I landed on co-ops and mutuals. I thought, here is a model that is not about profits. There's something in that.

For the last 15 years, I've really been spending my time in purpose first businesses. We often joke about once you start playing with one bin, you have to work with them all. Once you start seeing a better way in one system, it feeds into all of them. I'm a bit greedy now; I work across charities, social enterprises, co-ops, and mutuals. I don't know how I could possibly participate in the other system. I'm lucky enough that I don't have to.

Jean is a founder and Stephen is chief financial officer at Cirque du Soil. Could you both share more about the organisation, some of its activities, its purpose, and what impact it's trying to inspire?

[Jean Darling] - The story started when I was working in an ESD consulting firm. For anyone who doesn't know, it's an environmental sustainability development business. You see the number of volumes of new builds and applications for council come through. Every day there's construction going on, and more buildings being built. Meanwhile, there's so much behavioural change and supply chain issues happening within each industry.

If, six years ago, you looked at all the different material and waste streams that came out of a high street, for example, it was a two bin system. Everywhere had a landfill bin and a recycling bin. That was it. That got me angry.

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At that point, I really wanted to hybrid some of my knowledge around understanding how buildings were built, designed, and delivered. What are the processes behind that? Who are the decision makers? With the part of place making, how do you bring that into a place-based environment?

I asked my ex-boss, why don’t we mobilise the building and some of the high street to share a composting bin? That was the impetus for questioning what on earth would process such a high volume of food waste. How do we get a third, fourth, or fifth bin?

That was the beginning of Cirque. In order to find if there was a problem in the first place, like any good startup, we did street engagement and questioned traders. Six years later it is still the same. The work has evolved a lot.

We started with the community composting program, which is what most people know us for. We are synonymous with organic waste. However, we've learned a lot and have started working with a variety of other industries and communities. We’re looking at all the associated waste streams, like packaging, plastics, and even film set waste. It’s been a really good ride.

[Stephen Mason] - I've been in Melbourne for about 18 months, having decided that New South Wales was not where greatness was. At the time Jean and I met, I was working in fair trade and co-ops, and I was just finishing my masters in global sustainable management. I was trying to re-qualify to exercise my own interests in that area more.

When Jean gave me the offer to come support, what really drew me to the whole thing was the problem. I won't bore you with Melbourne business school type talk, but you have a system that, if you were talking a Porter's five forces approach and looking at differentiation or defining how you’d find your value, none of that works in circular economy or sustainability.

You're doing things that don't make sense on paper. You're going to work with businesses and find the more expensive operating models.

Sure, that'll do well, especially when you’re doing this in business categories that are massively cash strapped. From that point of view, I was really drawn to the challenge.

What I love about Jean and other people working in this space is there is a magnetism that brings likeminded people together. They might not know how to solve an issue, but they’ll have a bit of fun while they figure it out. That's what's interesting six years on.

We'll walk into a large corporate, a school, or a small café and we'll meet them where they are. We learn equally in the micro and the macro. It is so fun getting your arms in bins and knowing one week might’ve been bad for them since there's nothing in their bin and identifying a great week for a business because their bin is full.

At the same time, you're doing other random work at three in the morning, and you hit this eureka moment where you realise the problem with food systems is even bigger than you thought.

We thought food waste was roughly ten percent of the global GHGs. We looked at fertiliser and found that one part, NPK, is three and a half percent of the global greenhouse gases on its own.

That hunt for knowledge is quite infectious and you keep finding more people that share that infection. That's what's driven the innovation part of the services Cirque offers. It’s not about finding a market opportunity and moving into that space.

[Jean Darling] - The key thing is that food is everybody's entry point into life. It's your core basics. What's been really interesting about doing Cirque du Soil is everybody's connection to it. You could be a producer of food, a manufacturer, a chef, or you could sell products, but we all have to eat and we all commune while we do that.

In terms of what we do with the aftermath has been a really interesting touch point.

This work will infect you to the point where you can't even sit in an Airbnb without looking at their bin system. That's part of the journey to why this work keeps evolving. It's a rabbit hole.

What would it look like for Australia to become a more sustainable and regenerative nation in the future?

[Stephen Mason] - I think Australia is doomed in the best way possible. We are so far past certain planetary boundaries and it's a play to pay model. We know that unfortunately what's likely to happen is the resource sector is going to dig our way out of our financial challenges and our recession.

From an environmental point of view, over the next decade, my outlook is negative. The upside is that when there are really bad things happening, it energises and creates unity to do something about it.

From an Australian perspective, we're going to see this clash of people that already want to be doing the right thing.

We're seeing a generational shift coming into many medium sized corporates, but the economic lifeblood Australia runs on is coal and its minerals. It's digging stuff out of the ground and that's what drives the laws that make the nation since they pay all the politicians legally. I'm trying not to be too pessimistic because I think this will cause more outrage and more change. It's simply a waiting game until the correct generation is able to overthrow the current government system. I hope to be a part of that.

[Jean Darling] - For someone who's been in the sustainability realm since I was in my mere tweens, I don't even say the word sustainability anymore. If it took twenty years for sustainability to become mainstream, then we have another twenty years before circularity becomes a buzzword. Regenerative practices we have are light years behind.

The only reason we've adopted the terminology for circularity is because most people feel like that is the next acceptable stage. Even now there's still people who are trying to understand what sustainability means. I have to rank them by what's truly regenerative versus cut and cover.

To be regenerative means that, whatever you're doing, you're leaving a place thriving and always eternally reconciling with the land. We're not doing any of that.

In fact, last year, Australia released their first circular economy framework. The targets for 2035 are to shrink our per capita material footprint by ten percent and to lift our material productivity by thirty percent.

It's low hanging fruit when you put the bar so low. They're not just greenwashing. We can see from which government and which countries are trying to push through, that no matter what, as long as there are global supply chains, we're always going to get caught out in this material flux of chaos.

You can’t take a product from one country and recycle it in your local economy because it doesn't exist. If I take a shampoo bottle to Bali, what am I going to do with it if it gets finished there? If you're in Thailand and you brought some products home with you, what do you do with the end of life?

Interestingly, because we've just come back from a big trip, the simple act of going to a food court or restaurant has been very poignant. In a restaurant, you'd expect they would serve your meal, take your plate, and then wash it. In food courts, you'd expect that as well because you're eating there. If not, they'll have a takeaway option that wouldn’t be the norm. What's happening now is that if you go to a food court here, the norm is the takeaway container. It is ridiculous.

We've just come back from Singapore where they're rolling out initiatives around establishing reuse and return container systems and encouraging people to eat in. In Japan, we were up in the mountains where you have to be mindful of your resources, but they too had a return station. I'd love to see more of that here. We are very far from that.

What are the principles of the circular economy and how can a regular business use that to create change?

[Stephen Mason] - It's actually really simplistic stuff. Continuous improvement is a big feature of the circular economy. If you want to talk about a small business, say they've got eight staff, you can't achieve greatness on day one. What is greatness? Claiming to be one hundred percent circular? What does that mean? How far down the line can you go? It's really challenging. Every day you learn more.

It’s about adopting a mindset of continuous improvement and not doing it alone. If you're a small business and you've got five or six staff, share the journey you're on, empower them, get them to weigh in and make suggestions.

Suddenly you're able to align their passions. You'll have better staff engagement and more pride in your work.

From a principal point of view, when you talk about circular systems, we know there's lots of systems within those systems. You can't pick everyone from day one, but one of the ones I'd like to continue to point to, which really transcends personal behaviours and business behaviours, is the financial systems that we operate in.

If there was a hundred thousand mid-thirty-year-olds that shifted their super into somewhere to do good, such as Future Super, that's ten billion in investment. Starve the bad actors and give it to the good actors.

The other great principle of the circular economy, that isn’t a formal principle, is transparency. Transparency in your businesses often means discussing what we're not doing well today and showing we're working towards it. It’s being honest about that, rather than trying to hide it and pretend everything's perfect.

[Jean Darling] - There's a lot of circular economy education material out there that will tell you the same. How to keep materials in use and recirculation to keep the world regenerative through less material extraction. How to rethink your design model, how you manufacture, and what happens after you've sold it.

Have you watched the show Alone? When you are a participant in that show, you realise you need to live with what little resources and tools you have. You get creative about what you're going to do with those materials to help you survive.

The problem now is we live in a world of too much abundance. We're so used to having everything one tick away on a phone app or having Amazon deliver your goods just because of whatever craving you have.

I love the principle of the show, which is the return to simplicity. Circular economy and regenerative practice are treading lightly where you are. It's not about the constant consumable, the chase for the next big thing or the next new iPhone.

[Stephen Mason] - One of the contestants on the new season is an amazing lady from up in central coasts who runs an off-grid mob called Wild Beings. There's a similarity between what they do and what some of interesting restaurants do. They know what's around them. In this case, it might be the plant medicine, the trees, the bark, the water. They know that if they get stung by a bull ant, they can churn it and make a poultice. We've got restaurants that we work with where they know how to utilise their spent fry oil and use it to make lavosh.

It's things other people are putting in the bin and they're finding value in it. That really comes back to a principle of skill sharing.

You're not trying to hoard and own this knowledge. We're sharing what we know, trying to build on it, and connect on that. That's one thing I appreciate most about working in this space.

When you go to an event where there's corporate sustainability officers or people responsible for that part of the business strategy, they usually don’t hide all their secrets and IP. They might not tell their bosses they're off talking to their competition, but they're usually sharing practices that work for them. I think that's what's going to save us.

What are the benefits of building local systems in communities for food, products, and services, and what does that create in terms of regenerative change?

[Jean Darling] - There's a lot of talk about climate anxiety at the moment that I don't talk about. Focusing on the place you live helps mediate control, faith, and hope that we can do something, instead of looking at everything as one big wibbly-wobbly, painful thing to troubleshoot. That is the keystone of what we try to do. We look at everything from a personal demographic, looking at who you are and what kind of neighbourhood you live in. Who are the people around you?

There will always be people who don't believe in this work or understand what it means. To them, they live in a different realm.

I don't even know what to call them anymore, but you see them on planes with all the single use plastic bottles and you're the only one standing there with your reusable coffee cup and water bottle.

There's a joke where I've always divided the world in some strange way through those who are Mac users versus PC users. This to me is like early adopters and those who just wouldn't subscribe to this world. It doesn't take long to see someone's eyes glaze over if I talk about this stuff in great detail. What we have learned is how to communicate these values or these thoughts around circular economy without telling them off about it.

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It's about covertly incorporating these principles in the best way so that no matter who you talk to, whether they’re five years old or ninety and from any culture, they will get it. This has been the mainframe of how we've operated, which is to leave no stone unturned. That's why when we do street engagement, we talk to everyone.

[Stephen Mason] - I'd say there’s almost a hygiene factor there; things either work or they don't. It reminds me of a time I was slightly unkind. I was working in an innovation role, and we'd come away from having this big love in. We're having a few drinks and my boss at the time was having an absolute whinge.

He was complaining about all these negative people throwing roadblocks in the way in fear of change. I told him no, his ideas were just dumb. They didn't fear change. They fear the fact you're not listening to them.

Some of these people have worked in this space as coalface experts for over a decade, and you don't care. You know better. That's why they're throwing up negatives. The only time I've ever had anything scarier than that was when people didn't throw up negatives. They give up. They know they won’t be listened to anyway, so they give the tick.

From working local, you can have concepts that might sound great, but if you don't understand how they're applied at the street, there's a great chance they'll fail, even if you happen to have everything perfectly lined up. If the person you're working with at street level doesn't believe that you've listened to them and doesn't feel understood, they're not going to walk bravely with you. You're going to have to do a lot more work to get change to happen.

That's really the thing to get right at the coalface or local level.

You've got to actually give up power. You've got to give up a bit of pride and allow people to tell you if something's going to work or not. You have to be prepared to alter it.

How have you seen the business for good sector evolve in Australia and what do you think it needs to propel it and make it stronger than ever?

[Jean Darling] - I remember there was a period where social enterprise or business for good ran in its own lane. Circular economy, circular startups, zero waste, all of that was running on a different laneway. It was at the 2023 Social Enterprise World Forum when I suddenly saw everything collide all at once. Suddenly everyone was speaking the same language.

Maybe because there was that many great people in the room that, even though we all came in with our own agendas, they were crossing over. Stephen, whose world had been predominantly cooperatives, for that period they were looped in. It was like we'd all finally found each other.

I saw an interesting post on LinkedIn today about someone saying they spoke to another social enterprise or impact leader who didn't realise that biodegradable wasn't biodegradable. It was a whole riff on greenwashing and the main point of this post was that they thought this person should have known better because they were working in this industry. It takes years to understand where material streams go so I don't think we should be so hard on that.

[Stephen Mason] - My take is slightly different. I'll come back to the question of what's required to help this movement of business for good to get more traction. Fair trades face this challenge. Even before B Corp and Social Traders, we've had the fair trade movement for decades. They are based on a model of continuous improvement, which is great.

One of the challenges is that a fifteen-to-twenty-year fair trade certified operator should have a different standard to a year one, but you both get to wear the same label. You need everyone to keep striving towards continuous improvement. We have to hold Nestle to a much different standard than a sub half a million dollar turnover company. I'm seeing the ISO standards become a barrier that's keeping smaller businesses out.

I think we need graduated standards for some of these things and we need transparency. From that point of view, we're on a really good path. For instance, Victoria is one of the best states because they're one of the few that formally recognised co-ops. They're also one of the few that formally adopts social enterprises as a structure.

[Jean Darling] - We also have CEBIC.

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[Stephen Mason] - Yes, all of that. Governments need to recognise these extra business models, and they slowly are, but then they've almost become pseudo regulators themselves. Social Traders will have a moment at a certain point where they either go for growth or they maintain transparency. That means they're prepared to kick people out. I do see good stuff happening there and the more people that get involved in the movement, the higher the standard they go for, and the more we can hold bigger businesses accountable.

[Jean Darling] - I'm going to say coalitions as well. When you run around this many networks of small businesses or social enterprises, we all have the same operating costs and multitude of subscriptions. Whether it's CRMs, marketing, or even your accounting, there’s all sorts. We're constantly trying to just survive.

I've had lots of conversations with likeminded businesses where we want to partner and collaborate, but sometimes there’s a pause where if we just had a bigger umbrella to hold us, we could get on and do the good work.

I likened this to a charity that has to spend so much time looking for grants that they don't have time to do the work.

I will plot that there because I can say this until I'm breathless, but if there were ways to tie it all in that didn't become a subscription model, I believe there would be lots of growth. However, we will still be operating in small silos unless we do something about that. Who knows, maybe a government official will listen to this and something will happen.

To finish off, are there any books or resources you would recommend for our audience to check out?

[Stephen Mason] - I have two favourite books. One is a more recent one, the Carbon Almanac, and it is bloody brilliant. It is so easy to digest, and it has drawdown rankings. It's like a grown-up dummies guide for climate and very actionable. It’s by Seth Godin and they've not overpriced it.

The other one's a bit more old-school. I love behavioural economics. It's called Priceless: The Myth Of Fair Value. It helps you understand, as a consumer or a business leader, how humans assign value to things. I've probably given a hundred plus copies away of that book in the last decade or two. It's a very easy read, its great stories. Those are my two favourites, old-school and new-school.

[Jean Darling] - It's really cliché. I'm sure lots of people have read the Doughnut Economics book, but it is still incredible. When you see someone walking around and holding that copy, you know they are your kin.

The other book that I absolutely loved is by Carol Sanford, who just passed last year. She wrote The Regenerative Business. I highly recommend her work. It's been my North Star and it hones in on how to live and work regeneratively, all our favourite topics.

My other favourite book that I just remembered is The Thinking Environment by Nancy Kline, which also helps you to set the conditions to think. It's a great framework. Sometimes when you do this sort of wicked problem work, you need time to think. Then you have a couple more drinks with it.