Ken Alston | Founder, Circularity Edge
Forty-eight years watching credible sustainability work fail to change the decisions that matter.
That is the credential.
Kenneth Alston is an author, international keynote speaker, executive advisor, and host of the Circularity Catalyst podcast.
He is one of the earliest corporate sustainability practitioners in the world. He has spent nearly five decades working at the intersection of business, sustainability, circular economy, product stewardship, and organisational change.
In that time he has watched strategies that were technically sound fail to change capital allocation. Pilots that proved what was possible fail to scale. Circularity programmes that depended on partners who were never truly obligated. Business models that remained untouched beneath years of serious sustainability work.
That pattern, credible work hitting a ceiling produced by assumptions no one examined, is what Circularity Edge is built to diagnose.
The career behind the diagnostic
Three chapters. One consistent finding.
Chapter One — Inside a Global Business
Ken joined SC Johnson in 1979 and spent more than two decades with the company, ultimately serving as Director of Sustainable Product Innovation Worldwide.
SC Johnson was among the first multinational companies to take environmental responsibility seriously as a business matter rather than a compliance exercise. Ken’s work during that period included product reformulation, packaging redesign, supply-chain initiatives, and the early framing of what it would mean to build environmental thinking into the business model rather than layering it on top.
What that period revealed was consequential: even in an organisation with genuine commitment at the leadership level, the assumptions embedded in procurement logic, cost structures, and market dependencies governed what was actually possible. Strategy operated at one layer. The ceiling was being set at another.
Chapter Two — Cradle to Cradle and the Limits of Framework
Ken spent the following seventeen years working alongside William McDonough and Dr. Michael Braungart — co-authors of Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things — on some of the most influential circular design and product innovation work of the era.
During that period he helped create the Sustainable Packaging Coalition and led the development of the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute, including the co-development of the Cradle to Cradle certification methodology and its supporting intellectual property.
The work demonstrated what was possible when organisations began thinking differently about materials, products, and systems. It also revealed something harder.
Even the most sophisticated frameworks — applied by capable, committed practitioners in organisations with senior-level support — consistently ran into the same constraint: the assumptions governing how the business operated were upstream of everything the framework could reach.
The ceiling was not in the strategy. It was in the layer the strategy had never examined.
Chapter Three — The Diagnostic
The third chapter is Circularity Edge.
The question Ken had been accumulating for decades — why does serious sustainability work keep producing more activity than transformation? — had a structural answer that no existing framework was designed to surface.
The assumptions that govern what a business is actually trying to sustain, how long it intends to sustain it, who it holds responsible for what, and what the business model is built to do under pressure: these are not examined by strategies, roadmaps, certifications, or reporting frameworks. They are the layer upstream of all of those instruments. They are where the ceiling is set.
The Sustainability Ceiling Diagnostic™ is built to reach that layer — through conversation, close transcript analysis, and a Belief Gap Map that makes the assumptions visible, nameable, and available to work with.
Four decades of watching the ceiling from the inside. One instrument built to find it.
How Ken works
Every engagement is conducted personally by Ken Alston.
No junior consultants. No outsourced analysis. No generic sustainability playbook applied to a new client name.
The Sustainability Ceiling Diagnostic™ is a diagnostic conversation — structured in its preparation, unstructured in its conduct. You speak freely. The framework is in Ken’s listening, built from nearly five decades of pattern recognition across industries, geographies, and organisational types.
What Ken hears in a conversation is not only what is said. It is what the language reveals about the assumptions underneath — the taken-for-granted conditions, the untested responsibility boundaries, the market dependencies mistaken for strategy.
The Belief Gap Map that emerges from the Diagnostic is grounded in your own language and decision evidence, not imposed from a template. It becomes a working document you can use to think, decide, and lead differently.
Ken works directly with CEOs, founders, board members, and senior leaders — principals who are responsible for the long-term continuity of the enterprise and who need a diagnostician, not an advisor with a framework to sell.
Book a ceiling conversation with Ken →
Kevin de Cuba — Partner, Americas
Kevin de Cuba leads Circularity Edge’s work across Latin America and the Caribbean.
He is the founder of the Americas Sustainable Development Foundation (ASDF), the Circular Economy Platform of the Americas (CEPA), and its flagship event, the Circular Economy Forum of the Americas (CEFA) — among the most significant platforms for circular economy development across the region.
Kevin brings deep regional relationships, policy-level engagement, and Spanish-language delivery to engagements across South America, Central America, and the Caribbean. He has spent more than a decade contextualising circular economy thinking across diverse economic and cultural environments — work that complements and extends the diagnostic frameworks Ken has developed.
Together, Ken and Kevin bring complementary depth: Ken’s diagnostic and framework architecture; Kevin’s regional reach, institutional relationships, and implementation experience across the Americas.
Publishing in 2026
The thinking behind the diagnostic, in print
Ken is the author of the forthcoming books:
Our Common Future Now
Ken’s first solo book names the forty-year pattern at the centre of Circularity Edge’s work: why sustainability has produced an improving trend within an unchanged trajectory, and what it would actually take to change that.
The book develops the concept of the belief architecture — the assumptions, responsibility boundaries, and business-model limits that govern what every sustainability framework can achieve — and provides the diagnostic framework for addressing it.
Publishing autumn 2026, timed to the fortieth anniversary of Our Common Future, the Brundtland Commission report that helped define modern sustainability.
(Links to: /books/ or thekenalston.com)
Perfectly Wrong
Ken’s next book examines a specific and urgent dimension of the problem: how AI may accelerate sustainability answers built on assumptions no one has audited.
The book demonstrates — through a structured four-vendor comparison — how AI systems trained on the existing sustainability corpus reproduce the field’s operating consensus with fluency and authority, and what that means for organisations acting on AI-generated sustainability outputs.
Publishing late 2026.
For those who would make an introduction
Principals rarely find a diagnostician by searching. They are sent.
If you advise a founder, sit on a board, back a company, or lead a search — and you know a principal who has done serious sustainability work and suspects the ceiling has not yet been properly named — write to Ken directly.
This is not a referral programme. It is how serious diagnostic work finds the right table.
The work is confidential. The engagement is personal. And the map it produces belongs entirely to the client.
The ceiling is rarely where the work says it is.
Start with a private conversation.
Bring the place where the work is stuck — the strategy that is not changing decisions, the pilot that has not scaled, the restructure that may have reduced visibility rather than exposure, the commitment that is harder to defend than it was.
We will look together at whether the Diagnostic is the right instrument, what question it should examine, and what the map should be built to answer.
The conversation is complimentary and carries no obligation to proceed.
Book a ceiling conversation with Ken → (Links to: )