Can Circular Economies Save the Planet?
Saving the planet from the magnitude of our own destruction is a big task. It’s so big that it can feel too big, too impossible, too late. It’s not too late, but with one big asterisk: We have to start now.
One way to waste no time is to build and generate momentum around our best ideas and solutions. That roll-your-sleeves-up-and-start-somewhere (meaningful!) spirit is foundational to the idea of a circular economy: It’s a way of doing business that allows us to use all the best concepts of sustainability and adapt them to any transactional context. To be circular is to be thoughtful about everything. In a fully circular system, there’s an elegant and intentional destination for every material we create and use, and that destination is somewhere other than a landfill.
If that sounds lofty, hang in there. Barent Roth, a sustainable designer and educator based in Brooklyn, helps break down exactly what a circular economy is — and how any company, big or small, can adapt to become incrementally more circular.
A Q&A with Barent Roth
What’s a linear economy, and what are its negative impacts?
A linear economy is what we are in right now. But we weren’t calling it a linear economy until we started realizing the value in thinking about a circular economy.
A linear economy is essentially taking materials out of the ground, turning them into products as quickly and as cheaply as possible, distributing those products to users, and designing those products to break right after the warranty expires. You’ve got this line where you are extracting materials, tearing them out of the ground, and putting them into poorly made products that quickly go through the customer’s hands. At the end, they are either buried or burned. Neither of those are good solutions — and that’s before you even account for the fact that a great deal of those materials leak into our ecosystem along the way.
It’s a flawed system. But that’s the essence of the problem: We are taking stuff, using it up, and burying it or burning it. We can’t do that indefinitely because we are living on one finite planet.
“But that’s the essence of the problem: We are taking stuff, using it up, and burying it or burning it.”
What is a circular economy? And what was the genesis of that idea?
We have to start any circular economy discussion by recognizing the pioneering work of Ellen MacArthur and her foundation. She took her platform as a record-setting sailor and has been a force of nature: She uses the term “circular economy” to encapsulate all these different and wonderful sustainable strategies.
The overarching concept of a circular economy is to keep all of our materials flowing in a healthy cycle: If you separate any physical material into a technical or biological cycle — and at the end of the day you can put those products back into one of those two cycles — then you don’t have waste. The goal is to design everything so that we know how it can be taken apart and either recycled in a technical cycle or composted in a biological cycle.
How do you distinguish between a technical cycle and a biological cycle?
Technical materials are glass, metal, plastic, and anything that can’t safely be put back into the environment after use. It starts by thinking about the impact of getting glass and metal and plastic out of the ground: We scrape off the surface of the earth and then we either mine or drill for the minerals underneath. Once we have gone through all that effort to get them out of the ground, the last thing we want to do is put them back into the ground in the form of a landfill or burn them. We want to keep them in a continuous loop; we want all technical materials to stay out of the ground. Once we put all the time and energy and resources into getting them out, let’s keep using them over and over and over again. It’s also much more efficient in the long term to create a technical cycle than it is to continuously try to pull new resources out of the ground.
“Once we put all the time and energy and resources into getting them out [of the ground], let’s keep using them over and over and over again.”
The biological cycle approach is to take anything that we are growing and make sure to grow it in a healthy form that can safely go back into the ground. The key is not to combine food, wood, or any plant matter — anything that can contribute to the soil — with anything harmful. Then, instead of depleting the soil, we’re fertilizing it and maintaining it and taking advantage of the incredible work that nature does in providing us with those materials in the first place.
Why does the circular economy model distinguish between owning something and accessing it?
In a linear economy, we have this very short transactional period where we buy a product, and the business incentive is for businesses to design that product to break right after the warranty expires.
A key concept of a circular economy is the product-service system. The idea is that we pay for what we want, which is the service that that object provides, and we get less or zero of what we don’t want, which is usually the packaging and the garbage and the waste that come along with it. If you change the incentive structure within a product-service system so that the business owns the materials or owns the packaging or owns the item, then suddenly the business is incentivized to provide you with what you need, which is the use of that item or object or whatever it might be. The business is incentivized to make the item repairable and upgradable, because it owns that item. And if repairing or upgrading the product isn’t possible, then the incentive is to recycle it at the very minimum.
There is some overlap between product-service systems and the idea of shared economies, if that helps you conceptualize or think about it.
How do you design a business to be 100 percent circular?
One hundred percent circular is a great goal; we are a long way from anybody being there. But we certainly aspire to it. We ought to be thinking: How can we get all our power from renewable resources? How can we keep materials in their cycles?
When you start to understand the real impacts of exploitive labor practices or waste or pollution, you begin to see that there are opportunities to do things differently. It’s more than just the materials: It’s thinking holistically about the whole operation. That’s why it’s a goal right now to be 100 percent circular, because we are not capable of putting it all together just yet. But we see where the pieces are possible. And we can get there if we are all working toward the same goal.
Can existing businesses take steps to become more circular? Or does it have to be a fundamental part of the company from the outset?
Well, we need everybody to be doing it. We need existing businesses to be doing it. We need new businesses to be doing it. What’s important to understand is that this cannot be optional; this has to be essential. We have delayed acting in an environmentally responsible manner for too long. We have known about the problems for too long. It’s now at the point where this is mandatory. However we need to get there, we need to make it happen.
It is easier if you start a business that has a lot of these principles ingrained in the company’s founding DNA. It’s certainly a lot easier than trying to convince an entire workforce that you want to change. But we need both. We need the start-ups doing it, and we need the big established corporations doing it.
We need more examples like what Ray Anderson did at Interface, one of the world’s largest producers of carpet and commercial fabrics: He realized there were big environmental challenges — without knowing much about the issue at all — and he made a commitment to turn his company into a sustainable business. He did it even before the term “circular economy” became popular. His example shows that no matter what stage you are in as a business, whether you are an established business or a start-up, you can make the transition.
Who do you think is doing it? What are examples of businesses that you think are doing it well currently?
I mentioned Interface — it is doing an amazing job on a very big scale. But I love also the smaller projects that it’s started, like its Networks program, where it pays people who survive on the fishing industry in island countries to go and retrieve discarded fishing nets that, for decades, have been piling up and choking out life in those communities. Network pays them to collect that material and bring it to a community bank, keeping the money within the community. That material then gets sent to a manufacturing facility and turned into beautiful new carpet that can be used in any office environment. That’s an example of one company taking a chance and creating a smaller example of a well-done ecosystem.
Another example that I like is Fairphone. It built its business on the idea that labor has to be part of building a circular business, and how people are treated has to be part of it, too. It’s not just about the materials themselves. Fairphone uses only minerals that come from mines where the workers are treated fairly. It all started with a campaign to fight for the fair treatment of miners and the workers in the Congo and other parts of the world where a lot of our electronics come from. And then Fairphone’s founders realized: We can keep pushing to try to get other electronics companies to use this model, or we can start our own company that creates a phone that uses these fair-trade minerals and designs the phone in a way that allows it to be upgraded, repaired, and modular. You can fix the screen on a Fairphone by yourself in under five minutes.
A new start-up I love is called Genusee in Flint, Michigan. People had to resort to using single-use plastic during the water crisis there — it was necessary. There was an enormous amount of plastic pollution that resulted from the water bottles that were trucked in. Genusee is an eyeglass company created to use all that plastic water bottle waste.
Barent Roth is a sustainable designer and educator based in Brooklyn. He’s an expert advisor to Ace of Air, the founder of Anthropocene. Design NGO and LLC, and a cofounder of CircularEconomyMfg.com. Roth’s career has been dedicated to designing and, now, manufacturing sustainable products and services for the circular economy in an effort to draw down greenhouse gas emissions and repair ecosystems. He’s a professor at the New School, where he teaches sustainable systems materials and manufacturing processes, life cycle analysis and engineering, and computer-aided industrial design.
