The circular economy owes a debt of gratitude to some philosophical pillars of sustainability. Let’s look at some of these schools of thought.
Regenerative design
Conceived by California landscape architect and professor, regenerative design is an approach that grew out of an assignment that John T. Lyle gave his landscape architecture graduate design class in 1976. Lyle challenged his students to design a community where daily activities were based on the value of living within the limits of the available renewable resources. Today, the Lyle Center for Regenerative Studies, part of the College of Environmental Design at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (https://env.cpp.edu/rs/rs) offers courses on how to design without degrading the natural environment.
Industrial ecology
Industrial ecology, popularized in 1989 by the article “Strategies for manufacturing,” which was written by Robert Frosch and Nicholas E. Gallopoulos and appeared in Scientific American, is the study of the material and energy that flow through an industrial system. It brings science to manufacturing by focusing on the connections between the manufacturers and their supply chains. Industrial ecology seeks to create closed loop processes where any waste is recaptured and returned to the system.
The goal of industrial ecology is to design all the manufacturing and production processes so that they mimic and perform as close to living systems as possible. The framework is often referred to as the science of sustainability because of the way it connects various disciplines.
Biomimicry
Biomimicry exploded on the environmental scene with the 1997 book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, by biologist Janine Benyus. She advocated for designing the way nature designs and not seeing nature for what we can extract or harvest from it but rather for what we can learn from it. She described nature as the ultimate designer that has already solved most of the problems humans are now grappling with.
https://biomimicry.net.
Natural capitalism
Natural capitalism was popularized in a 1999 book by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and Hunter Lovins. The book, Natural Capitalism: The Next Industrial Revolution, describes how the next industrial revolution will be one that relies not on natural resources in order to succeed but rather living in harmony with nature. It promoted the idea that the economy is linked to the environment and that the two aren’t adversaries but rather go hand-in-hand. The book encourages readers to recognize the importance and the value that the natural ecosystem provides as a service (such as fresh air, clean water, and healthy food).
Someone looking to ensure a sustainable and secure economy for the future could start by following these natural capitalism guidelines:
Increase the productivity and ecologically sound use of the world’s natural resources.
Keep waste out of the system through reuse and remanufacture.
Follow a service-based business model.
For more on the natural capitalism model, see www.natcap.org.
Cradle to cradle
If most products follow a simple linear process where they’re born, they’re used, and then they die (they’re discarded), then that’s what you would call a cradle-to-grave approach to manufacturing. Cradle-to-cradle advocates for a truly closed loop system where a product is born, is used, and then gets reborn as the same or better product. It’s a process of birth and rebirth, or cradle to cradle.
This concept was put forth in Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, a 2002 book by William McDonough (an architect) and Michael Braungart (a chemist). McDonough and Braungart radically questioned (with great success) how we view waste— in fact, Chapter 4 of the book, “Waste Equals Food,” is one of the core pillars of the circular economy. It shows how nature has no concept of waste because everything in nature eventually becomes food or nutrients for something else.
If you view the earth as a closed system (which it is) and waste as missed allocations of valuable resources that need to be redesigned, then the vision of cradle-to-cradle consists of healthy products that can be infinitely recycled.
To achieve this goal, cradle-to-cradle follows these three core principles:
Eliminate the concept of waste. Collect and recover value for any materials put into the system.
Use renewable energy. The sun provides more than we need.
Celebrate diversity. Both social and technological diversity is the key to innovation, and it supports the biodiversity and health of ecosystems.
https://www.c2ccertified.org) has produced a certification for products that meet its rigorous standards.
The performance economy
The performance economy model calls for a shift from offering products to offering Products as a Service (PaaS). The idea is that, rather than buy a product you'll eventually throw away, you buy the service that the product provides. Rather than buy disposable lightbulbs, for example, you would buy the service of lighting.
The result is a push toward reuse and remanufacturing, which is less labor-, resource-, and capital-intensive than producing new products all the time. It shifts the paradigm from “products have value” to “products provide a service that’s valuable.”
Walter Stahel, who wrote the book The Performance Economy in 2006, offers a new business model that’s driven by values, gains knowledge and insight into its customers, and relies on circular systems based on biology.
The blue economy systems approach
Proposed in 2009 by the former CEO of Belgian cleaning product company Ecover, Gunter Pauli, the blue economy approach takes advantage of the rise of the open-source movement. Based on a set of 21 principles, the blue economy stresses business solutions determined by their local environment that could potentially create “100 innovations that can create 100 million jobs within the next 10 years.”
For more on the blue economy approach, see www.gunterpauli.com.
Looking to the future
The concept of a circular economy offers a way to overcome the wasteful, energy-and-resource-intensive approach of the last 200 years. The strain