Host: Roy Vercoulen, Founder of Circular IQGuest: Trine Pondal, Sustainability Manager at Flying Tiger Copenhagen
Podcast Episode: Progress Over Perfection
In this episode of Circularity: Why Bother?, host Roy Vercoulen sits down with Trine Pondal from Flying Tiger Copenhagen to explore how a variety retailer with 1,000 stores across 42 countries is making circularity actionable, not through perfection, but through consistent, measurable progress.
Together, they dive into the power of training and embedding sustainability across organizations, the critical role of data in driving change, and how to make circular thinking stick beyond one-time initiatives. The episode offers candid insights into packaging transformations, consumer behavior realities, and the importance of policy frameworks in accelerating the transition.
Perfection is binary, it either is or it isn't. That binary nature can be paralyzing for organizations trying to start their sustainability journey. Progress, however, is actionable. It requires movement, learning, and continuous improvement.
At Flying Tiger Copenhagen, this philosophy drives everything. Starting in 2019 with scope 1, 2, and 3 calculations, the team quickly identified that 97% of their climate impact comes from products and packaging, scope 3 emissions. This clarity pointed directly to one key stakeholder group: the buying department.
But knowing where change needs to happen and actually making it happen are two different challenges. The sustainability team's role isn't to implement change themselves, it's to equip and empower those who can.
Trine emphasizes a crucial insight from her ethnology background: understand your stakeholders as you would a culture. The buying team at Flying Tiger consists of 40-50 colleagues who run extremely fast, constantly working on next campaigns and categorizations. They operate on a train moving at full speed.
If you want them to change anything, you must operationalize it for them and make definitions easy. Full-blown lifecycle assessments (LCAs) on 6,000-8,000 products sourced annually? Not practical. Instead, Flying Tiger developed two core tools specifically designed for their buying team's reality:
The Material Hierarchy: A simple framework asking buyers to move up whenever possible, beyond plastic, beyond recycled plastic, toward renewable materials. While Trine acknowledges gray zones exist in "renewable," the direction matters more than perfection.
Eco-Conscious Definition: An internal scoring system (never called "sustainable" internally because nothing truly is yet) based on hard data from bills of material. Products qualify as eco-conscious if they're 95% renewable materials, 95% highly recyclable materials (glass and metal, not plastic), 80% recycled content, or a mix of these thresholds.
These aren't feelings or estimates, they're database-driven metrics tied to every product's bill of material.
Training isn't just about information transfer, it's about cultural transformation. Trine and her team train weekly, never asking permission, because they believe it's essential. But their approach is strategic:
Timing matters: Don't train buyers during Christmas campaign crunch time. They have zero brain capacity to listen. Train when it's feasible for them to actually absorb information.
Duration matters: Keep sessions to one to one-and-a-half hours maximum. Respect that people have many competing priorities.
Language matters: Talk into their reality. When a buyer asked about removing plastic packaging from pencils, the team calculated: "Sophie, if you do this, you will personally remove three tons of plastic a year. That's equivalent to 12 tons of CO2. All stars to you, Sophie. Well done."
Humanizing data and making individuals feel like superheroes for their contributions creates internal motivation that policies alone cannot achieve.
The team brought in external voices like Danish NGO Plastic Change for plastic training, sometimes people listen better when it comes from outside, even if the message is identical.
Small changes create massive impact when you're a large brand. Two examples illustrate this perfectly:
The mint box: A buyer named Julie questioned whether a small plastic lid with a dispensing hole was necessary in metal mint boxes. Quick calculations showed removing it would eliminate four tons of plastic annually. The producer agreed immediately, and saved production costs too.
The dice: Games traditionally used plastic dice by default. Switching to wood cost the same, looked and felt better, and even though it's just three grams of plastic per die, the volume adds up significantly across a global retail chain.
These weren't complex innovations, they were thoughtful questions about necessity, backed by data showing cumulative impact.
Perhaps the most critical success factor: sustainability KPIs now flow alongside commercial KPIs with the same cadence. Initially, the team could only measure eco-conscious performance once annually. Now they report per campaign.
At every commercial kickoff meeting, the sustainability team presents:
Easy wins are products requiring just one or two material changes to become eco-conscious. The team creates ranked lists showing where buyers get "the most bang for the buck", which product categories, when changed, deliver maximum impact based on volume and ease of modification.
Buyers can visibly see in the data that their actions make a difference. This feedback loop, combined with the fact that eco-conscious targets sit alongside sales targets, makes sustainability a normal part of business operations, not a separate initiative.
From 2019 to 2024, Flying Tiger removed 63% of plastic from packaging through clear targets and consistent execution. What remains is primarily food packaging, a notoriously difficult challenge where material science still needs innovation.
This dramatic reduction didn't require revolutionary technology. It required:
Trine offers a sobering perspective on consumer behavior: "When I was young in sustainability, I used to think consumers will change the world. I have absolutely not seen that happening."
Consumer research revealed that buyers don't focus heavily on sustainability when purchasing beds or household items. They assume manufacturers meet regulatory standards and instead prioritize aesthetics, comfort, and whether products fit their needs and budgets.
However, this doesn't mean sustainability doesn't matter. Flying Tiger's power lies in changing what's on shelves. Consumers may talk about sustainability, but they don't necessarily change purchasing behavior based on it. Yet if you put better products on shelves at good value, they'll buy them.
The strategy: make products more sustainable without requiring consumers to compromise on what they actually care about. Don't communicate sustainability as the primary selling point, embed it as a given while delivering on core value propositions.
Flying Tiger's approach includes anticipating regulatory changes before they arrive. When the team started removing plastic packaging in 2019, they couldn't make a complete business case, but they understood circular economy policy trends and predicted Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) legislation would eventually come.
By acting early, they future-proofed the company. When EPR finally arrived, Flying Tiger was ready. What started as "this might happen" became "this is now saving us money."
However, EPR implementation varies dramatically by country, different priorities, different charges, different recycled content requirements. Some frameworks even seem to prioritize plastic over paper in ways that contradict circular economy principles. This fragmentation creates administrative burden, requiring companies to navigate wildly different compliance requirements across markets.
Trine is emphatic: "Frameworks and regulations are what's going to push the agenda forward. There's nothing else that's going to do it."
She advocates strongly for:
CO2 taxation: Pricing carbon emissions would change business cases overnight, making sustainable choices economically obvious rather than requiring future-proofing arguments. Flying Tiger is implementing shadow CO2 pricing internally to prepare for this eventuality and demonstrate business case impacts.
Small electronics regulation: A huge waste problem with virtually no regulatory attention. Trine sees nothing coming despite clear need.
Corporate political activity: Sustainability expertise needs lobbying power equivalent to fossil fuel industries. Corporate voices, including C-suite leaders, must engage more actively in pushing for faster regulatory change.
"Climate change, what's going on with biodiversity, it is not normal. We cannot treat it as normal. It's far more, it's harder. It's bigger."
Looking ahead 12 months, Flying Tiger is focusing on data consolidation, merging commercial and sustainability data even more tightly, potentially into a quota-like system: "If we want these plastic reductions and we're planning to buy this, what do we need to take out?"
The goal is making plastic and CO2-heavy materials "more expensive somehow or more visible" in product-level decision-making through shadow pricing and integrated analytics.
Trine's bold experiment if given budget: Take one category (like toys) and go all-in on sustainability targets for X campaigns, only eco-conscious products, decent communication without sugar-coating, facilitation of the creative process, and measurement of what happens to creativity, purchasing behavior, and commercial viability.
For peers looking to start similar journeys, Trine offers this framework:
When asked about circular products that resonate with her, Trine expresses preference for solid wood, versatile, long-lasting, and ultimately compostable. She advocates for looking backward: what did grandparents and great-grandparents use? Ceramics, wood, materials that stood the test of time.
She also calls for more refill solutions, challenging the convenience culture: "We're so focused on convenience and I think we shouldn't be that. We should spend more time on these smaller things."
However, she's clear-eyed about current reality: "I think that we're so far away from having actual circular products anywhere in any company really." True circularity remains systemic work, not just product-level optimization.
For more details on Flying Tiger Copenhagen's sustainability journey, metrics, and targets, visit their annual sustainability report.
As sustainability leaders navigate organizational change, the lesson from Flying Tiger is clear: progress beats perfection every time. Start where you are, understand your stakeholders, make change measurable and achievable, and build momentum through consistent small wins that compound into major transformation.
To learn more about embedding sustainability across organizations, creating effective training programs, and measuring circular performance, check out our latest resources. And if you have a sustainability transformation story to share, we invite you to connect with us and join the conversation in a future episode.
Do you have something to add to the conversation? Cool! Get in contact with Roy by scheduling a meeting.
