Change the system to change the patterns
When sports-brand Adidas introduced their sustainability-line, they announced: “This is bigger than sport, this is our future”. Their new line, however, consists of near-identical items as their regular, unsustainable line. This main difference is that this line consists of garments and footwear made from a humble amount of 50% ocean plastics. Through a story about saving our precious marine wildlife, they designed these products to sell more of them — now available with less guilt. At the end of use, these designs will still end up on the same landfills and in the same incinerators as so-called linear or unsustainable products and may even pollute the oceans once again. The scale (bigger than sport) that they identify in their tagline, is not reflected in a bold and brave design that aims to addressing the linear system in which it exists. They merely attempted to replace a “pattern” from within the linear system with another “pattern”; they replaced an undesirable behaviour (characteristic of the system structures that produce them) with a slightly more desirable one.
Circular economy challenges are complex
Even though the breadth of the circular economy agenda demonstrates the complex and interconnected nature of its challenges, some businesses still decide to only focus on a single behaviour change, product, or material flow. They decide to…
