Circular Economy For Dummies. Eric Corey Freed

when compared to the natural environment. Mother Nature has had much more time to fine-tune the process and reach a waste-free status. So rather than spend billions of dollars a year on research-and-development efforts, why are businesses not instead spending that same amount of money by studying how the natural world functions? Imagine if there were a way to design our world like Mother Nature has designed her own.

It turns out that there is a way to design our world so that it functions more like our natural world. It’s called biomimicry, a scientific approach to extracting the ideas and design concepts from the natural world to adapt and apply them to human systems. (We mention biomimicry here, but there's more on the subject in Chapter 3.)

      

The intent of this section is not to convince you to toss aside the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle mantra and begin ignoring altogether the impact you have. By all means, reducing, reusing, and recycling are all critical components of the circular economy. But you also need to focus on the other actions that will be required in order to shift the linear ways of the world to a circular method. Check out Chapter 12 for more details on how this would work.

      

Not sure how to fix a problem? That’s okay — you probably don’t need to come up with the solution all on your own. There’s a good chance something else in nature has dealt with the same issue and has come up with a solution. So, the next time you’re trying to figure out how best to capture water in the desert, look up the darkling beetle. If you need to design a building that utilizes natural ventilation, check out how termites build their mounds. If you need an answer to a problem, see how others in nature have solved the same problem. This is biomimicry at its best.

Waste = Food: Redefining Disposal

      We have only one planet to work with. Despite its being a relatively big planet compared to the size of human beings, we still have only one planet — and just one set of resources. In this world of limited resources, it’s becoming more and more apparent that the way we manage these resources needs to change in order for us to continue to support the demands of the global population. As populations continue to rise, so does the negative impact we humans have on the world around us. Although we have gotten better at increasing our efficiency in many sectors — energy, for example — the reality is that the global economy is still extremely inefficient and has an end date if a transformation doesn’t occur soon. For us to continue to sustain our lives, our waste needs to be seen as a valuable resource rather than a discarded item.

The global economy has done a decent job of developing more efficient methods, but within specific areas, not across different areas. Take a production of a bottle of Coke and the shipping materials required to deliver that bottle of Coke to retailers. The manufacturers of Coca-Cola have surely scaled their production processes efficiently to maximize their returns while minimizing their losses. As for shipping these products, they have surely determined the optimal level of packaging required to deliver these bottles unscathed to their retailers. However, the right questions haven’t been asked about the connection between these two elements of the lifecycle. Is there a kill-two-birds-with-one-stone opportunity here? Of course there is! A large percentage of Coca-Cola is composed of water. Water is readily available in every household, in private buildings as well as public ones. So why not eliminate water from the recipe initially and simply have the consumer add it themselves? Doing so would reduce the costs of producing Coca-Cola and would greatly reduce the amount of packaging required to deliver the product to the customer.

      Once waste is eliminated by transitioning from a linear economy to a circular economy, the demand for raw materials will drop dramatically and the value of materials existing within the circular lifecycle will increase because of the lack of replacement costs required. For example, Desso, a company that produces an array of carpets and artificial turfs, is already discovering the waste reduction and value associated with alternative business strategies. Through a combination of designing materials to be fully recyclable and managing to lease out certain products, it has invested in generating longer-lasting products and harvesting the resulting value.

      

It’s critical for the concept of waste to be reconsidered within our global operations. Waste as an idea is flawed from the beginning, by assuming that it needs to exist. Every piece of packaging can be reused. Every amount of water can be utilized for another purpose. Every piece of organic waste that stems from agriculture can be returned to the fields to act as a fuel source for next year’s harvest. Ultimately, harnessing the power of the circular economy isn’t about using as little of a resource as possible. Instead, it’s about developing efficient systems that don’t care how much of something you use, because, at the end of the day, it won’t go to waste. Creating this reality will require that we humans change the way we view and manage what we consider waste and adjust our processes to identify and utilize its potential value.

      Accepting this idea that waste doesn’t exist isn’t just a concept that should be limited to business operations. To account for the complexity of the global economy, this type of circular thinking should be addressed in every sector of a product’s lifecycle. Customers, governments, suppliers, and communities should all be included. If customers demand that a product be made with 100 percent recycled materials, then the suppliers, manufacturers, and business entities involved will be forced to address their demand within their operations. This future idea of all companies operating within a circular fashion (by the way, check out Chapter 18 — our chapter on the fashion industry) isn’t so far off into the future. Companies that are tackling this task early on will be better positioned to compete against other companies that take on this initiative when the circular economy is no longer optional, but mandatory.

      All materials have another use

      The take-make-waste philosophy suggests that once a material or product is used, it no longer serves a purpose. That is so unbelievably far from the truth, and it’s one of the main misunderstandings that has caused the global economy to produce so much waste and pollution to begin with. The recycling and reuse (or repurposing) of materials, which is one key principle of the circular economy framework, is a prevalent standard of the natural world.

      Within the circular economy framework, materials are kept in flow by the continued repurposing or reuse of materials. In addition, these materials have the potential to transfer between organic and inorganic states via a particular biogeochemical cycle.

      

The biogeochemical cycle may sound complex, but it is essentially the range of vehicles used to circulate the nutrients of our planet! Organic matter can then be transferred between their various human uses and these natural storage compartments. But, for this management of materials to work properly, the way our global products are engineered and designed must be built to facilitate this material recycling to eliminate waste and provide a quality service to mankind.

      Two standard practices of engineering can help design the world: traditional (or human) engineering and ecological engineering. Traditional engineering often results in the production and collection of various waste materials that not only offer no value to other systems but also hold the potential to damage the value of adjacent systems. The design’s priority is to provide humans with a service, and it doesn’t acknowledge the externalized costs associated with its implementation. Ecological engineering — or the design of sustainable ecosystems that integrate human society with its natural environment for the benefit of both — does just the opposite. Ecological engineering aims to minimize the externalized costs associated with the design and to discover creative ways to redirect its waste