Catharina bening

Dr. Catharina Bening a tenured senior-scientist and group leader at the the Chair for Sustainability and Technology. Further, she is a steering committee member of sus.lab, the sustainability-in-business lab at ETH Zurich. Catharina is responsible for the group’s research and practice activities in the area of sustainable circular economy and is especially interested in investigating the implications of different circular strategies and policies for nature conservation. In her current projects, she explores the transformative potential of sustainable technological innovations and the essential shifts in institutional frameworks and regulations needed to reduce resource consumption and foster the regeneration of nature. 

Catharina’s research spans the entire value chain, encompassing production, product usage, and end-of-life considerations. She examines these aspects from both corporate and policy standpoints and applies them to industries like packaging, retail, building and construction, textiles and the bio-economy. In particular, she has long-standing expertise on environmental policy towards circular plastics in the chemical and the retail industry, a topic for which she is frequently called upon as advisor to governmental and non-governmental organizations. 

Catharina’s past and present research includes projects on the institutional foundations of a sustainable circular economy (funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation), on plastics packaging in retail (funded by the Swiss Innovation Agency), on plastic waste reduction in developing countries (Alliance to End Plastics Waste), on industry restructuring in plastics packaging (funded by an industry consortium and the EU), on the potential of circular business models and digitalization in the construction industry (funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation), on the need for data transparency to monitor and eliminate food waste (funded by the MTEC Foundation), and on drafting a framework to assess the role of microplastic and additives in a circular economy (funded by NCCR Catalysis: sustainable chemistry for a carbon-neutral society). 

Catharina has broad teaching experience in ETH Zurich’s Departments of Environmental System Science D-USYS, Humanities, Social and Political Sciences D-GESS and Management, Technology and Economics D-MTEC. Her current teaching focuses on “Business Models for a Circular Economy”, a course she also teaches at Sciences Po Paris School of International Affairs. She has been honored to serve as main convenor and content partner for ETH Week 2023 “Circular Realities”, the main cross-departmental teaching activity on project-based learning at ETH Zurich. 

Catharina holds a Lic. oec. (MSc level) and PhD in economics from the University of St. Gallen (HSG). Before joining ETH Zurich, she was an exchange student in Singapore (DownloadNUS) and Rotterdam (DownloadErasmus University) and spent one year at the Department of Comparative Human Development and at the Economics Department of  the University of Chicago with a personal research grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation. In 2022-23 she was a visiting researcher at the Material Sciences and Metallurgy Department of the University of Cambridge, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and DownloadUKRI.