MANY of us, at least in richer parts of the world, are familiar with the feeling of buying, owning and discarding too much stuff. We probably feel a bit guilty about it. We may even have tried to do something about it, ditching the plastic straws, keeping a tote bag for the shopping and diligently separating out the recycling.
We might also be aware that this isn’t enough. To fulfil our material wants, humanity now uses some 100 billion tonnes of stuff every year. More than 90 per cent of it is virgin material that is mined, drilled and hacked from the planet’s surface. Only 30 billion tonnes of it makes anything of permanence. The rest is burned as fuel or used fleetingly and discarded – at each stage polluting land, water and air and creating climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions.
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Can we do better? Ideas of “circular” economies, in which pretty much everything is reused and waste doesn’t really exist, have been around for a while. They are usually dismissed as woolly utopianism, but just lately the tone has been changing. That isn’t just because of our late-dawning realisation of the scale of our impact on the planet and the trouble it is storing up for us. It is also because we increasingly have the ideas and the technologies to make ourselves and our consumption patterns not just less bad for the planet, but perhaps even beneficial for it. A more circular, sustainable way of satisfying our material wants is certainly possible. But it will require nothing less than a complete reimagining of the way we live our lives.
Our current “linear” economy is actually a relatively recent innovation. For most of human history, simple, mainly natural substances supplied our material needs: wood, stone, metals and other things we could gather, dig up or cut down. Fashioning them into useful items required toil and sweat, so goods were mainly built to last, and repaired many times throughout their lifetimes. When they did finally crumble, many of their components would either rot away, replenishing the soil, or be reused elsewhere.
Over the past century or so, however, rising population, increasing affluence and technological progress has led us to use a lot more stuff, much of it more complex. Plastics, materials knitted together at the molecular level from chemicals extracted from oil, are the headline-grabbers. But in construction, stone and wood have largely been replaced by concrete and steel, materials that are far less easy to reuse or recycle. Magnets, ubiquitous in modern electronic gadgets, are a less obvious example. They are often made from a witch’s brew of rare and exotic elements that are fiddly to separate out again.
All these materials must be extracted and processed, requiring energy that typically comes from burning fossil fuels. That should change over the coming decades as we seek to replace these fuels with renewable energy. But mining raw materials still has a huge impact on the environment, while even drilling for hydrocarbons to make plastics releases huge amounts of methane and other greenhouse gases. Then we have to consider what happens to our goods when their useful life is over. Many materials degrade only slowly, leaching polluting chemicals in landfill, or forming huge, swirling gyres of waste in Earth’s oceans.
Circular alternatives are mainly based around four key principles: using less stuff; using it for longer; recycling it; and where possible generating waste products that regenerate nature (see “Four keystones to circularity“). Recycling and reusing things more is where most efforts to get the circular economy turning start. Two separate numbers are key here: the end-of-life recycling rate, which quantifies how much of a defunct product ends up being used in something else; and the recycled content rate – how much of a new product is made from recycled materials.
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In 2017, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a UK charity that promotes circular economy principles, applied this to clothing, which has a vast global impact (see “Clothing“). It found that about 12 per cent of this industry’s resources are recycled into some other lower value product, but only 3 per cent of its feedstocks of cotton, plastic and other materials are themselves the products of recycling. Few new clothes are made from recycled materials, and when clothes themselves are recycled, which isn’t often, they are usually made into things like insulation or mattress stuffing. With clothes, as with many other products, recycling should often be read as “downcycling”.
Even extracting numbers about what we use and how we use it is rarely easy. In 2011, Thomas Graedel at Yale University helped produce what remains . “Our approach was to get about two dozen people together who we thought might be in a position to make good estimates,” says Graedel. This included scrapyard managers, recycling technologists and materials experts, who spent three days wrestling with data and each other’s opinions. “The result probably cannot be improved upon unless legislation is enacted requiring recyclers to report data under audit threat,” says Graedel.
The purer the better
Graedel’s study put most metals into two groups: those with fairly high recycling rates of more than 50 per cent, and those with very low rates of less than 1 per cent. The first group includes copper, found in wiring and plumbing pipes, and aluminium, used in many things such as food and drinks cans. These tend to be in nearly pure form, making it easy to melt them down to fashion into new goods.
The second group includes metals such as the lanthanides, or rare earth elements, many of which are mixed to make things like magnets and laser diodes in electronic devices. Recycling these would involve chemically separating the metals, a difficult and energy-intensive process. This is why many advocates of a circular economy say that, if we are serious about ending the throwaway culture, we will need to use simpler materials and redesign processes so that these separation problems are made more tractable (see “Electronics“).
But if we really want to create a circular economy, we need to look at flows of materials not just at the end of their life, but throughout their use. That is the aim of Mark de Wit at , a not-for-profit group in Amsterdam in the Netherlands advising companies. “We thought: let’s just think about all the materials we use as humankind and get an understanding of where that all flows,” he says. “On that basis, we can get an idea of where are the big levers for change.”
Drawing on work by researchers such as Willi Haas at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, Austria, and on international databases, de Wit and his colleagues produced a diagram in 2020 (reproduced on the previous pages) showing what materials we use, how we process them and the broad societal needs they help satisfy. It shows that each year we use some 100 billion tonnes. Only 8.6 per cent of this is recycled. When looked at this way, it becomes clear that by far the biggest driver of material use is construction. De Wit says that Circle Economy is now partly focusing its efforts on this industry, helping to develop more efficient designs (see “Buildings“).
Fulfilling the broader vision of a circular economy will mean huge behavioural and societal change. It is early days, but there are signs that this is happening in some places. For instance, genuinely bold legislation is being implemented that could give the circular economy a big boost, says Amelia Kuch at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. France is leading the way. By 2019, new, unsold products worth some €630 million were being thrown away in the country each year. Brune Poirson, then an environment minister, spearheaded the introduction of a law banning the destruction of these unsold products, a world first.
That has since been built on with wide-reaching legislation, which came into force last year, called an . It sets a target of recycling all plastics by 2025 and phasing out single-use plastic entirely by 2040. Disposable plastic tea bags, cutlery and other everyday items have already been banned. It also introduces a “repairability index”, which gives products a ranking from 1 to 10 according to how easy they are to repair. As of January 2021, this , including TVs, washing machines and smartphones.
Perhaps the boldest part of the law involves a principle called extended producer responsibility, which says that makers of goods should be responsible for dealing with their wares when they are thrown away, in an effort to encourage them to reuse waste. This kind of policy isn’t new, but it hasn’t been made law before, or applied comprehensively, including to material-intensive sectors like construction. “The steps are being implemented incrementally, but this is a huge, huge change,” says Kuch. “We’re seeing a lot of developments like this and some countries are raising their ambitions; it’s really exciting.” The European Union also plans to promote a circular economy. The UK government says it will act against planned obsolescence of electrical products, for instance by requiring companies to make spare parts available.
Firms are increasingly on board, says , Germany. In 2002, together with US architect William McDonough, he published Cradle to Cradle, a book that sets out how to design products with their “future life foremost in mind, rather than as an awkward afterthought”. The two later set up the , which helps companies design products for the circular economy.
The growth in commercial interest is in large part driven by self-interest, says Braungart: if companies can make the same products from streams of waste materials that are cheaper instead of from virgin materials, profits go up. The vision extends even to complex products such as cars. BMW, for instance, recently unveiled a concept car called the and can be built from 100 per cent recycled materials. Among other things, the car’s metal body is given a “brushed” finish instead of being painted, which avoids use of some chemicals and allows easier recycling.
Similar visions are being implemented, on small scales for now, in many parts of the world. In the port city of Kalundborg, Denmark, the is a set of industrial plants that use waste from each other to make useful things. For instance, a biological slurry by-product from a factory that makes insulin is ferried to a nearby plant that converts it into fertiliser and enough biogas to power 6000 homes. In Esholt, UK, the company Yorkshire Water is aiming to apply circular principles to the treatment of sewage, for example by piping waste water through an on-site computer server farm to cool it, rather than using the more conventional electric fans and air conditioning.
But if the wheels of a more circular economy that uses less virgin stuff are slowly starting to turn, and can be accelerated with the right incentives and regulatory frameworks, there is a different, far more fundamental shift that people have only just begun to talk about seriously: making and using less stuff entirely.
This is what’s known as a “performance economy”, a term introduced by architect Walter Stahel in the 1990s to express a way of doing things that prioritises not making ever more stuff, but meeting societal needs. It often means replacing ownership of goods with renting or sharing. Braungart sees it as a way forward. Imagine a carpet maker, he says, that switches to becoming more like a “flooring insurance” company. Customers pay a small regular fee, and companies lease them flooring with a guarantee that they will keep it in good repair. It becomes in companies’ interests to create products that last – and if they can do that from cheap waste materials, so much the better.
It is a principle already embodied in car-sharing companies such as Zipcar. These can be thought of as a shift from selling cars to selling a service that meets the need for mobility. Electrical goods company Philips now service to hotels and office blocks. The managers of a property pay a fixed price and Philips makes sure it always has light bulbs and repairs them when they go wrong. Tyre company Michelin similarly “rents” tyres as a service to military customers and other organisations with large vehicle fleets, .
A wholesale switch to this model implies a huge shift of jobs from manufacturing to maintenance and repair, an upheaval that would need careful management. That may be one reason why conversations about the performance economy aren’t yet being fully embraced by political leaders (see “Janez Potočnik interview: How a circular economy can help us go green”). But some people aren’t entirely convinced by the underlying principle. in London points out that although providing a “service” sounds intangible, it still requires physical stuff: the offices, phones and vehicles needed to support the people who would repair washing machines, for example.
Fixing things yourself or perhaps using local repair services might be a better option than renting goods, says Charter, especially when it comes to household goods, which many people feel they still want to own outright (see “Four things we can all do“). Repair Cafés, where volunteers fix goods that members of the public bring in, are one innovation that aims to satisfy that need. Since the first was established in 2007 in the Netherlands by sustainability enthusiast Martine Postma, they have , with more than 100 in the UK alone.
However hard it may be to achieve behavioural change, there is no longer much doubt that moving to a more circular economy is what the planet needs – and it will take more than just switching to a different bag or eschewing plastic straws. In 2019, the UN’s International Resource Panel, which monitors the world’s use of materials, produced its , which assessed the probable impact of moving to a resource-efficient material economy. It compared two scenarios: one in which material use trends continue in the manner as in the decades up to 2015, and the other in which comprehensive policies are enacted to reduce our use of virgin resources.
“By far the biggest driver of material use is construction”
In the business-as-usual scenario, global resource extraction roughly doubles to 190 billion tonnes per year by 2060 and the world’s carbon dioxide emissions also double to 70 billion tonnes per year. In the more circular scenario, global resource extraction is kept to 143 billion tonnes by 2060 and global CO2 emissions drop to just under 5 billion tonnes. Crucially, the report also concludes that people’s standard of living can continue to rise in a circular economy. That is perhaps the vicious circle that most needs to be broken on our way to a more sustainable future: the idea that we can prosper only by using ever more stuff.
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FOUR KEYSTONES TO CIRCULARITY
Moving to a circular economy that produces little or no waste requires four main things to be done.
NARROW THE FLOW: use less material to make things.
SLOW THE FLOW: use products for as long as possible.
RECYCLE: design products with their end of life in mind, so they can be refurbished or the materials within them reused when their time comes.
REGENERATE: where possible, use bio-based materials that break down to nourish soils when we are done with them, rather than creating long-lived, polluting waste.
FOUR THINGS WE CAN ALL DO
There are various ways that we as individuals can contribute to a more sustainable material economy.
GET STUFF FIXED
If appliances and other things around the home break down, see if you can get them fixed instead of throwing them away. Check the instruction manual for tips. Or consider taking them to a Repair Café, where volunteers will do their best to help. Look up your local branch at
ESCHEW FAST FASHION
Clothing uses vast amounts of resources in our take, make, dispose economy – so try to limit the number of garments you buy. You can set whatever goals make sense for you, like banning new purchases for a month or only buying second-hand.
RENT, DON’T BUY
Consider whether it makes more sense to rent goods when you need them rather than buying them outright. This can apply to anything from a car to expensive wedding get-ups. If multiple people can share items that they don’t need to use all the time, the overall amount of resources required is lower.
BUILD SMART
Construction projects are a massive driver of material extraction, particularly the cement, concrete and bricks. So consider if you really need that extension, say. If you do, think about using more sustainable materials, such as wood and alternatives to cement.
