What Comes Around: Accessing the Benefits of a Circular Economy. | June 15th, 2021
Since the inception of bartering, goods and services have been exchanged and produced in wasteful means. The trend is common to agrarian and industrialized societies alike. Some have involved differing degrees of waste, but all of them share the common trait of consuming a good and then discarding its byproducts.
This system is known as a linear economy. The global scale on which it now takes place has resulted in such massive collateral damage that it can no longer be sustained without severely harmful effects. Thankfully, there is a better way.
Unlike its linear counterpart, a circular economy considers every biological and technological input involved in the production of a good or service to be a valuable resource that is not to be wasted. Through multiple feedback loops, a circular economy seeks to eliminate waste, improve durability, and deliver a systemic overhaul of how goods and services are consumed.
While some have criticized the approach as idealistic rather than practical, circular economies have successfully been implemented on multiple levels in the past. The results have proven to be positive on every level.
Where circular economies are employed, environmental damage lessens, standards of living and sustainable business growth flourishes, and innovation thrives. This article explores this process. It defines a circular economy in more detail, examines what it entails, and sheds light on what officials and organizations can do to bring circular economies to life.
What Is a Circular Economy?
The Ellen Macarthur Foundation gives the following definition of a circular economy:
A circular economy is a systemic approach to economic development designed to benefit businesses, society, and the environment. In contrast to the “take-make-waste” linear model, a circular economy is regenerative by design and aims to gradually decouple growth from the consumption of finite resources.
This definition clarifies that the primary aim of a circular economy is to design a system of goods and services in which products pass through multiple feedback loops to reduce all possible waste without sacrificing financial prosperity. This is done by relying on three foundational principles:
- Design out waste and inefficiency
- Maximize product durability
- Regenerate natural resources wherever possible
Accordingly, circular economies categorize the types of resources used as either biological or technological. They also implement multiple conversion mechanisms to keep all resources in circulation.
The Circular Economy: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle at Scale
Category 1: Biological Materials
In a circular economy, biological resources are any natural resources that go into the production of a good or service. This may include electrical energy, fuel sources, timber, water, agricultural byproducts, and many more.
These products are consumed (or preserved) instead of used, so circular economies distinguish them from technological resources that cannot be fed back into the environment.
The primary mechanisms used to conserve biological materials are:
- Cascades: repurposing used materials for different applications until their energy sources are placed back into the environment
- Harvesting biological feedstock
- Anaerobic digestion and composting
- Repurposing through natural processes: allowing nutrients from recycled waste to re-enter the soil
Through this consistent feedback of biological materials, the value of each resource is not only reintroduced and maximized but also is preserved as long as possible, minimizing unnecessary consumption.
Category 2: Technological Materials
Unlike biological materials, technological materials cannot be reintroduced into the environment in their current state without a wasteful effect. Some examples include semiconductors, electronics, mechanical devices, etc.
In order to adhere to the three pillars of circular economies listed above, technological materials are utilized through the following mechanisms.
Prolonging and Sharing
In a circular economy, products must be designed to last as long as possible. Extending a product’s lifetime prevents it from becoming obsolete. This enables customers to share their products with others, decreasing total consumption.
Reusing
This is slightly different from sharing in that the former involves the collective use of a product at the same stage in its lifecycle. Reusing entails passing a product to another consumer after the first owner no longer wants it. It should be noted that this practice is already widely in place, and is the foundation of many digital marketplaces and stores.
Refurbishing
Here, a product’s utility is restored — either in form or in function — so that its life cycle continues. It may involve component repair, but the nature of the product remains the same.
By capitalizing on refurbishing, organizations avoid all the expenses associated with manufacturing an entirely new product (raw material, production, labor, returns, inventory, etc.). Additional worker opportunities also become available as new repair skills are acquired.
Repurposing/Remanufacturing
At this stage of a product’s lifecycle, it begins to lose functionality for its original purpose and is converted into a similar product with a different use. This may involve some component replacement or redesign. The final product is still functional, retaining value without inputting major additional resources.
Recycling
No longer able to provide value as a standalone good, here a product is finally stripped down to the material level to create an entirely different good. This phase sends technological materials back to the top of the production cycle and prevents wasteful disposal.
Why Is Upcycling Better Than Biotechnology Solutions for Plastics?
How Can I Implement a Circular Economy?
A circular economy offers the benefits of environmental preservation, supply chain resilience, product innovation, and an improved standard of living, just to name a few. As desirable as these benefits are, accessing them requires the will to initiate systemic change in long-established institutions where waste was and is considered part of the process.
The World Resource Institute provides several steps that organizations and businesses and policymakers can take to move towards a circular economy. Here are a few of them.
Incentivize Conservation, Not Consumption
Wasteful consumption is valued over circularity at nearly every level of a linear economy — from electricity policies that base their pricing on usage rather than savings to recycled and organic materials that are more costly than their disposable counterparts.
If the benefits of a circular economy are to be realized, the first shift must be a transition towards a circular hierarchy and away from a linear one.
Incorporate Circularity into Climate Change Agreements
One of the key benefits of circular economies is the preservation of biological materials and the subsequent reductions in harmful greenhouse gas emissions. Emissions reductions are a goal of current climate change agreements, but these often fail to consider the circular use of resources as a means to reaching that goal.
For circular economies to thrive, their usefulness for combating climate change must be factored into international agreements.
Reform Cross-Border Regulations
Important regulatory steps have been taken to ensure that discarded goods like electronics and hardware are not passed from one nation to others less able to properly dispose of them. But more must be done.
Though effective when they were enacted, some of these regulations prohibit the exchange of discarded products where they could otherwise be processed and circularity could be achieved.
For a circular economy to thrive, insightful legislation must be passed that not only prohibits user nations from passing their discarded goods onto others unable to process them but also fosters responsible cross-border handling.
Incentivize Durable Production and Comprehensive Recycling
Even in cases where recycling is performed, a lot of waste still occurs. When products aren’t manufactured to be durable, the waste from inadequate recycling is compounded.
To remedy this cycle, regulators must incentivize total recycling measures that strive for zero-waste production. Product durability should be included as a metric of overall quality.
Waste Nothing
These are just a few steps that regulators can take to initiate a shift away from a wasteful linear economy toward a sustainable, equitable circular economy. There are many more that must be taken.
Reaping the benefits of a circular economy will require a paradigm shift in how governments, organizations, and people conceive of the inputs and outputs that make the production of goods and services flow. In essence, it requires that nothing be wasted.
Miniwiz’s sustainability experts understand what it takes to shift a product’s design and manufacture away from wasteful linearity toward a sustainable, resilient, circular system that benefits all parties involved. Contact Miniwiz today to see how your organization can become part of the transition towards a more equitable, prosperous future for all.