Dame Ellen MacArthur, World Record-Breaking Sailor

Dame Ellen MacArthur discusses her world record-breaking sailing career and her current efforts to create a more “circular” economy, where resources and power recirculate and regenerate to eliminate plastic waste and pollution.  

On her passion for sailing: “I think that passion doesn’t need keeping alive in a way. It’s there. It’s just something that is triggered and it’s there. It’s like a chemical reaction. And, for me, perhaps being a long way away from the sea made me yearn for it more.”

On her thinking about the “circular” economy: “It was that feeling that you sailed around the world on a boat [and] you turned a half thousand miles away from the nearest town. What you have is all you have, you can’t stop and buy more, and you realize what finite is. And I made that parallel between the global economy, suddenly thinking … isn’t the world the same? We have finite resources available to us once in the history of humanity, and yet doesn’t our global economic model use them up?”