Circular Economy — Jean Baptiste André Dumas

Jean Baptiste André Dumas described the cycles of materials and energy in the environment that are critical to producing the food we eat and assimilating wastes.

As a young man, Dumas moved to Paris from his native Switzerland at the urging of Alexander Humboldt. Dumas quickly gravitated to the center of the scientific community, obtaining positions of professor of chemistry at the Ecole Polytechnique, the Sorbonne, and the faculté de médecine in Paris. He was known for his clear, engaging style for presenting lectures.

Dumas served in various government positions, and he was appointed to the Senate of the French government during the Second Empire. Dumas served as Permanent Secretary of the Academy of Science, president of the Society for the Encouragement of National Industry, and honorary member of several foreign science academies. Dumas one of the co-founders of the Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, which was dedicated to training civil engineers for industry.

Dumas’ research in chemistry contributes to our fundamental understanding of the elements and the molecular structure of common chemical substances. Working with Jean Baptiste Boussingault, Dumas was one of the first to describe the chemistry that supports life on Earth. Dumas developed a laboratory method for measuring the nitrogen content in organic matter.
And, Boussingault created the world’s first agricultural research station where he used Dumas’ method to systematically map the pathways of the nitrogen cycle.

In 1864, Dumas and Boussingault published a booklet on “the grand features in the life of plants and animals considered in a chemical point of view.” In it they described the movement of carbon and nutrients between the earth, water and the air that support the growth of plants and the metabolism of animals. This was quite simply the first telling of the story of day-to-day life on Earth as ecologists now understand it. The story knit together evidence assembled from advances in chemistry, physics, medicine and agriculture.

Dumas and Boussingault’s research laid the foundation of what would be known as the “circular economy.” Dumas was concerned about the negative consequences of urbanization on agricultural productivity, which remained a significant source of national wealth for France throughout the 19th century. Dumas recognized that shipping food from the countryside to feed the growing urban centers represented a net removal of vital nutrients from farmland soils. Loss of agricultural productivity would be the inevitable result unless steps were taken to recover the nutrients from human waste in the cities and return them to the soil in farm fields. This realization led Dumas to advocate for using sewage from cities to create fertilizer, thus returning vital nutrients to farm land.

Jean Baptiste Dumas is one of the 72 scientists and engineers named on the Eiffel Tower.