> The notion of a circular economy has attracted increased attention in recent years.
The concept is characterised, more than defined, as an economy that is restorative
and regenerative by design and aims to keep products, components, and materials
at their highest utility and value at all times, distinguishing between technical and
biological cycles. It is conceived as a continuous positive development cycle that
preserves and enhances natural capital, optimises resource yields, and minimises
system risks by managing finite stocks and renewable flows. It works effectively at
every scale. This economic model seeks to ultimately decouple global economic
development from finite resource consumption.
How do we get there?
1. A key feature of a circular economy is to
be restorative and regenerative by design. The recovery of materials and products
is not only addressed at end of use, but is enabled at the design level (e.g., by the
choice of materials or a design for disassembly). Companies will need to build core
competencies in circular design to facilitate product reuse, recycling and cascading.
2. Business models that move from ownership to performancebased
payment models are instrumental in translating products designed for reuse
into attractive value propositions. By prioritising access over ownership, these
models drive a shift from consumers to users. Companies with significant market
share and capabilities along several vertical steps of the linear value chain could
play a major role in driving circularity into the mainstream by leveraging their scale
and vertical integration.
3. A value preserving materials backbone is a core requirement for
the transition to a circular economy. To create value from materials and products
after their use, they need to be collected and brought back.
The "circular economy" sounds like a buzzword for more aggressive recycling and eco-friendly materials use. Disposable goods are cheap. What incentives do companies/governments have to make their products more expensive?
Disposable goods are not cheap, they are in fact very expensive. They are perceived as cheap because a very large portion of the true cost is hidden, externalized. Creators have no incentive to create things that are easily recyclable because they are not responsable for what happens to it at the end of it's life. To close the loop one must integrate the economics of garbage management as an integral part of the product being designed on equal footing with production, distribution etc.
Taxing pro-rated to the recyclability of a product, tax break on repairs, second-hand markets and other means to give a product a longer life. Make practices like planned obsolencence illegal, criminal even. I'm no expert but there are a great many solutions, implementing them however might require a lot more political good-will than most of our leaders are ready to spend.
These moves are also a bet on the future: a bet that the future cost of disposal stays high, so that increased costs earlier in the lifetime are justified.
The future is discounted for a reason, however. The future is probably wealthier, has better technology, and can reap the reward from investment today. It takes not just political good will, but a leap of faith to make the bet on spending now instead of later.
For planned obsolescence: here's another way to look at it. For a designed lifetime, we can coordinate across all the inputs to a product and select the right tradeoff between cost, quality and longevity. If we don't have a designed lifetime, the actual lifetime will only be as long as the shortest-lived part that can't be economically replaced. Making everything economical to replace means compromising on design, and often quality: a phone that plugged together like Lego would be substantially worse than our current integrated devices in weight and size.
(The idea of building something without a designed lifetime seems a little bit crazy to me, from an engineering perspective. It frames a whole bunch of decisions and trade-offs. I think it's better to put stuff into more people's hands rather than keep things expensive and exclusionary, which would undoubtedly be a side-effect of outlawing designed lifetimes.)
> and select the right tradeoff between cost, quality and longevity
That's the crux of the matter. What's the "right" tradeoff?
With things like waste disposal an externality, often times the "right" tradeoff is one that encourages frequent replacement. At best, this encourages a materialistic (wasteful) culture. At it's most cynical, this is a way of padding corporate profits by encouraging recurring revenue.
Don't get me wrong -- this is the rational choice when all incentives are towards maximizing shareholder value. I think the question is what principles do we want guiding the choice of the right tradeoff?
- how do you prove planned obsolencence? That sounds like a witch hunt waiting to happen
- integrating garbage management as part of the product - so that entail would subsidies for biodegradable and taxes for unrecycleable materials? Lets say a coke bottle is recycleable. It is now up to the consumer to recycle it. A television has many parts, some unrecycleable, some recycleable. Its often more expensive for a consumer to recycle it than to just dump it.
We have to question whether it is feasible to implement a circular economy in our current old-fashioned system.
If you suppose this is the only system possible then you must assume so and fight within those constraints.
I propose, though, that new types of high-tech economic/political/social protocols/structures/systems can make it much more practical to achieve these types of goals, such as costing in externalities.
The problem as I see it is that we still run our society _manually_ like a big game of Dungeons & Dragons. New decentralization technologies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. show that it is possible to begin to automatically organize and regulate on a large scale.
These more sophisticated high-tech systems, when integrated into society, will make it much more realistic to track and integrate external effects into a company's bottom line, for example.
This requires changing overall core social organization into a high-tech process.
> What incentives do companies/governments have to make their products more expensive?
Policy is one. A few weeks ago there were a few posts about the Swedes giving tax breaks on repair labor, the idea being to create an incentive that encourages reuse over waste:
You seem to be implying that a circular approach would necessarily be more expensive. I disagree. The large, expensive part already exists in terms of collection. The key principle from the article is valuing materials as resources. To a large degree what we do now is like collecting trash cans of gold and sending them to a landfill.
Technologies for depolymerization and carbon capture are scalable to realize fully circular economies. Our recycling rate, however, is only about 34%[0]. This is why educating towards a circular economy is so important. Plastics, among other materials, are fascinating and great, and their challenges are largely the result of consumers.
The current economy is surprisingly wasteful
in its model of value creation. In Europe, material recycling and waste-based energy
recovery captures only 5 percent of the original raw material value.
Is that 5% enough to cover the logistical costs of transporting/sorting etc. and energy costs of conversion? No, or else we would have private garbage trucks competing to collect our trash. Bringing the recycling rate up would only increase costs.
If recycling were more efficient (read: profitable), we could leave it to private enterprise to work out solutions. Companies would fight tooth and nail to collect our wasted "gold".
Things that are easy to recycle, like metal cans, plastic, and glass bottles, are indeed collected by less well-off people for money, sometimes in a competitive fashion. Some people even steal segments of working electric cables and sell them for scrap, because of high profit margins. So there are areas where recycling is commercially viable and prosperous.
These areas are few, though. Most of the time the cost of separating valuable materials from each other in a trashed item far exceeds the value of the materials recovered.
Responses of this form -- if X were worthwhile, X would already be happening; as X is not happening, it cannot be worthwhile -- are often proposed when talking about the economy. Is this not presuming the answer?
It reminds me of Leibniz's idea that we live in the best of all possible worlds [1], except the omniscience & efficiency of the market stand in for God.
If the way in which we hope the economy picks good outcomes involves people thinking of things that might be worth doing, trying them and then succeeding if they were right, we surely must allow that not all of the good ideas have already been had, and so we do not yet live in the best (most economic?) of all possible worlds?
> if X were worthwhile, X would already be happening; as X is not happening, it cannot be worthwhile
You misquote me. I make no such value judgment.
My original argument: If recycling were more efficient, it would be privately profitable, and a competitive recycling market would develop.
If we as a society believe recycling to be worthwhile, we should work to increase the efficiency of recycling to >5% to cover the costs associated with recycling. Alternatively we could continue to subsidize the logistical costs of recycling as we do now.
First, it is important to note that they are not criticizing material recycling as only capturing 5% of the value, but rather, the economy, i.e. linear vs circular.
I think you are missing the point that an historical, linear, consumptive model leaves behind 95% of the value.
A circular model seeks to capture as much of that value as possible, ideally 100%.
"The current economy is surprisingly wasteful in its model of value creation. In Europe, material recycling and waste-based energy recovery captures only 5 percent of the original raw material value.[2]"
"[2] This material value retention ratio is defined as the estimated material and energy output of the European waste management and recycling sector, divided by the output of the raw material sector (adjusted for net primary resource imports and 30 percent embedded resource value in net imported products)."
One key point of their analysis is that it includes waste management where material may be buried in a landfill. This highlights the inefficiency of the linear economy. Private companies are paid a fee to bury value.
The global recycling industry for materials is extremely competitive. Private companies are fighting tooth and nail for our gold.
Water bottles are a great, obvious example of extremely profitable recycling. Water bottles can be recycled easily and turned in to more water bottles, t-shirts, car parts, and on and on.
A less obvious, more complicated example is used carpeting. For decades, old discarded carpet has accumulated in landfills. In the linear, consumptive model, landfills were paid to bury the material and its value. It has become such a problem that governments[1] as well as industry trade organization[2] have pledged to tackle the problem. It's complicated because it is multiple materials that can't simply be ground up and remelted. A significant percentage of carpet is nylon, which is very valuable. Today, used carpet is turned in to resin[3], which ultimately becomes furniture, car parts and other useful products.
I noticed this in another response, "My original argument: If recycling were more efficient, it would be privately profitable, and a competitive recycling market would develop."
Recycling is very efficient and becoming more so. Incredibly profitable private enterprises that are solely recycling companies operate in a competitive global market.
The circular economy is the next evolution of these markets.
Not a buzzword. Has nothing to do with "aggressive recycling". It's a true paradigm shift. Much better explanation comes from Michael Braungart and William McDonough's Cradle to Cradle book explaining what the difference is.
A circular economy is an economical economy. The kind which existed prior to mass production in the late 1910s to 1920s.
As such, this idea would have much better traction in underdeveloped economies, the third world as it were, because it's a population used to economizing and recycling.
From there, the bigger economies would catch on to meet this new kind of demand and likely through osmosis bring it back home to developed economies.
Recycling is more prevalent in "third world" countries due to a relatively cheap supply of human labor. Recycling is an extremely labor-intensive process.
"YOU WON'T FIND a Chinese version of Alan Bachrach [US recycling entrepreneur], just as you won't find an Indian, Kenyan, Vietnamese, or Jordanian one, either. The reason is that most of the world remains poor enough to justify employing people to do what Alan does with star screens and air guns.
Consider what happens every night in the courtyard of the Shanghai high-rise where I live. Just past midnight you'll likely hear the clank of a bottle bouncing across concrete. If you follow that bounce back to its source, you'll come to a concrete hut, not much larger than a single-car garage, from which fragrant trash has been spilled several feet into the narrow asphalt road. It doesn't look like American trash: there are few boxes, cans, or bottles. Rather, it's mostly food waste — peels, husks, bones.
Move a little closer, and you might see two or three hunched shadows atop the oozing mess, canvas bags swung over their shoulders, scrounging through it with bare hands, searching for metal cans, plastic bottles, or perhaps something better yet — a stray coin. They're not Shanghainese but often families of poor migrants from farms in the less wealthy provinces, making the best living that they can.
Families that pick through trash in the middle of the night are just the last screen in a profit-driven process that, if you wait outside my building through the night, begins at the gate at first light. There you'll see a squat and brawny migrant woman wearing a fanny pack stuffed with small money, and carrying a small hand scale. If anyone is the Chinese equivalent of Alan Bachrach, presiding over a system that harvests recyclables from the trash, she is it. Her destination is the pile of cardboard tied with twine that's waited beneath the night watchman's gaze, and a waist-high balance scale of the sort that you might find in a doctor's office. As she pulls out the big scale, the early-rising old ladies in my building wander downstairs carrying a few plastic bottles, perhaps a small cardboard box or two, and maybe a small plastic bag filled with cans. The bottles and cans are priced individually; the boxes are attached to a small hook on the hand scale and weighed. Payment is equivalent to a few pennies, which the early risers take to the wet market, in search of the day's vegetables...
There's no need for single-stream schemes to raise the recycling rate in Chinese cities because, in the end, my Chinese neighbors have something that most Americans don't: a recognition that "the recycling" is worth more than virtue.
>Recycling is more prevalent in "third world" countries due to a relatively cheap supply of human labor
I think that captures part of it, but the other part is that used/refurbished/repurposed/upcycled, etc. are affordable to poorer people whereas a new item is not.
Consider the repurposed pick-up chassis which becomes an oxcart in some third world country. Or a paint bucket which becomes a tin to store things, etc.
However, point taken about the poor in China. Those people will work --they will work anywhich job without hesitation. People don't always recall that there isn't much social welfare other than family in China.
This sounds similar to the "Cradle to Cradle" design philosophy. Some companies might want to design in a "circular" way in order to appeal to a particular market of consumers. Here's a directory of products that are "Cradle to Cradle" certified:
I think people are focusing too much on the recycling and not enough on point #2: access over ownership. It doesn't matter if a good is more expensive because it is meant to be repairable/upgradable if it is shared over many people.
Access vs ownership is only going to become more prevalent over time - Uber and Lyft, tool shares and makerspaces, the move from products to services.
Access vs. ownership is great -- whats the stat on a typical owned car? 90% of the time it is idle and parked.
But access-over-ownership is kinda orthogonal to making things repairable and upgradable. You can still make progress on the latter. I read a comment from an engineer somewhere... he said you can take tons of classes on designing for manufacturability, but he's never seen one on designing for maintenance.
Back to cars, I think the example he used was there's some makes and models known to mechanics as being complete shitjobs when it comes to regular maintenance... you need to take half the engine apart to get to some regularly-serviceable component like a clutch or whatever. I'm sure it was designed to be put together easily in the factory, but when the maintenance is an externality, you just don't optimize for that. Access over ownership doesn't address that.
It does if the original designer & manufacturer is the one renting it out - and is therefore on the hook for the maintenance costs. This is currently the case with Mercedes/Smart and their car2go service - and is probably going to become more prevalent in the car space.
Garbage Tax. There should be a Garbage Tax on all manufacturers, distributors and resellers of non-recyclable/non-bio-degradable/non-bio-consumable products. We're all paying for the externalized cost of waste management but the ones who should be paying for it (and penalized for it) are the one who are profiting from it (all those who manufacture, distribute and sell non-reusable products that externalize the waste management cost to the rest of us)
This artical seemed to be more biographical than subject information. That aside, the problem that is worth discussing is how to incentivize more individuals to recycle every chance they get rather than throw everything away.
This however, presents a different problem.
- can tie inflation to how much is recycled - if a government is willing to pay more money than a peice pf plastic is worth. It can provide insentive for individuals to recycle a lot more. However, it also opens up opportunities to take advantage of the system when done in massive bulk.
- can add a tax to plastics - this already exists but the taxes can just be passed on to the consumer. Taxes at an extremety can be offset by High recycleable value. Though this can be considered rediculous overreach by the gov.
- limit plastics use to only large quantities - boats, cars, etc. If plastics are not allowed to br used for plastic bags and soaps, controlling the recycling becomes mich easier
A related topic is bioplastic, i.e. plastic from biofuels or biogeneration (on the short term rather than millions of years like plastic derived from petroleum). Maybe educate on that too and the importance in general of replacing petroleum-dependent industrial materials and processes.
It's an admirable goal, but it would seem to violate the second law of thermodynamics. There is almost always waste. Even if we could create some reversible processes, adhering to these would require a lot of behavioral enforcement since there would be consumptive alternatives that were easier or cheaper. Our current regime is hardly panglossian, but there are always costs to idealistic schemes that the designers of such fail to anticipate.
I think the idea is to use energy input collected from the sun to push our material resources in a circle instead of the way we do it now, which is to use previously stored sun energy to push our natural resources in a line from a more useful place/form to a less useful place/form. This linear method leaves us with both less useful material and less easily collected energy when we're done.
We will have to change over sooner or later and it gets harder if we wait until later. The thermodynamics of it is simple. The energy input of a nearby star means its not a "closed system". There's plenty of energy input to keep it all going. How to use it is the choice. Eventually the costs of idealistic schemes will balance out, probably with interest, at the point where there is no longer a choice; the stored energy collected and spent, and our material wealth buried in landfills after being reduced to its least useful form.
> The notion of a circular economy has attracted increased attention in recent years. The concept is characterised, more than defined, as an economy that is restorative and regenerative by design and aims to keep products, components, and materials at their highest utility and value at all times, distinguishing between technical and biological cycles. It is conceived as a continuous positive development cycle that preserves and enhances natural capital, optimises resource yields, and minimises system risks by managing finite stocks and renewable flows. It works effectively at every scale. This economic model seeks to ultimately decouple global economic development from finite resource consumption.
How do we get there?
1. A key feature of a circular economy is to be restorative and regenerative by design. The recovery of materials and products is not only addressed at end of use, but is enabled at the design level (e.g., by the choice of materials or a design for disassembly). Companies will need to build core competencies in circular design to facilitate product reuse, recycling and cascading.
2. Business models that move from ownership to performancebased payment models are instrumental in translating products designed for reuse into attractive value propositions. By prioritising access over ownership, these models drive a shift from consumers to users. Companies with significant market share and capabilities along several vertical steps of the linear value chain could play a major role in driving circularity into the mainstream by leveraging their scale and vertical integration.
3. A value preserving materials backbone is a core requirement for the transition to a circular economy. To create value from materials and products after their use, they need to be collected and brought back.
The "circular economy" sounds like a buzzword for more aggressive recycling and eco-friendly materials use. Disposable goods are cheap. What incentives do companies/governments have to make their products more expensive?