On Uncircular Circularities
Which option demonstrates a higher level of environmental conscientiousness: recycling waste or wasting recycling? What initially appears to be a straightforward inquiry evolves into a progressively intricate matter as explorations into the dynamics of infrastructure capacity, governmental supervision, and consumer behaviour unveil a surprisingly disjointed waste management landscape that appears to perpetuate more harm than good in its present state. The urgency for a shift in future trajectory and the implementation of actionable solutions has seldom been more pressing.
The Solution?
The fronts on which humanity is fighting for its existence on planet Earth have been manifold and steadily multiplying for decades — from rainforest conservation efforts and the preservation of biodiversity to alternative methods of energy production, the societal areas in dire need of a complete rethinking are near endless. In recent years, however, a paradigm that is said to fit onto many (if not all) of those battlegrounds and provide partial solutions to the problems at hand has made its way through boardrooms, consultancy firms and global media channels alike — enter the concept of the circular economy. The idea of introducing circularity in an economic context is simple: by “closing” production cycles, humanity can maximise resource yields, minimise or completely eliminate waste through re-cycling and re-using and ultimately promote economic growth with no downside for businesses whatsoever.
But as theories frequently differ from practice, so is the case for the circular economy. From the very first efforts promoting the concept, attempts at “circularising” global economic processes have largely resulted in failure, with the theory being cited as “oversimplified” for the often heavily complex problems which it should solve. A closer look at the approach’s shortcomings reveals a multi-layered network of self-inhibiting stakeholder dynamics, driven by short-sighted economic behaviour, and a landscape in which re-entering a resource into the production cycle costs almost three times as much as sending its end-of-life product or waste to a landfill. It is therefore not further surprising that a mere 8.6% of all natural resources re-enter global economic processes, despite consumer recycling behaviour requiring a multiple of that. Given that, for once, consumers are not (solely) at fault, what could possibly lead to such a detrimentally wasteful global dynamic?
The Lowdown
Further investigation into the dynamic’s origins initially uncovers a global waste management infrastructure that is so direly underdeveloped, it virtually and evidently “fails” to accommodate the little part of global waste that can and should be recycled. Europe, for instance, whose countries find themselves at the bottom of many global waste and pollution rankings, has historically avoided adequate investments into waste management infrastructure and dealt with the “circular” mandate by choosing a more cost-efficient alternative, sending recycling waste to countries all around Asia — only for those to eventually forward such waste to landfills. When this cohort of Asian countries decided to no longer accept Europe’s “out of sight, out of mind” waste in 2018, the continent’s obviously underdeveloped infrastructure saw itself confronted with an imminent need for onshore waste management capacity, for which it was all but prepared. As a consequence, a combined 2.5mn tonnes of recycling waste was shipped back and forth between European countries from 2018 to 2021, only to end up in landfills and incinerators. Instead of changing perspectives from lessons learnt and finally commencing the building out of the continent’s recycling infrastructure, the planning for the erection of dozensof new incinerators across Europe to deal with the imminent situation has been given the green light — and with it, the contribution to the emissions of toxins and fumes that are set to account for a combined 15% of global CO2 emissions by 2050. And whilst the incinerator capacity build-out is under construction, illegal landfills stand to make millions of untaxed profits at the cost of — once again — the environment. Poland, for instance, now termed the “waste dump of Europe”, has been found to accommodate unthinkable amounts of the continent’s “unrecyclable-turned-illegal” waste which, at €30 to €50 a ton, is far cheaper to be dealt with than pursuing to recycle at a staggering €300 a ton or directing towards existing “legal” Western European landfillsat €113 a ton.
Confronted with such an unbelievably disturbing picture of global waste management systems, the analysis leads further down a path towards the topic of governmental oversight and regulation, necessarily standing in question now, where a landscape of seemingly underfunded authorities lacking the power to deal with problems like the abovementioned illegal waste (Portugal, for instance, employs only 30 inspectors to deal with country-wide environmental crime), incentives driven towards linear production processes and producers influencing waste management schemes (in some cases even as brokers between recyclers, authorities and incineration operators), is uncovered. Even newly introduced programmes like the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), which would require producers to pay for the full lifecycle of a product (from production to recycling), lack mandatory targets and enforceable penalties, whilst the relative inexpensiveness of the base resource provides even lesser of a reason for product designs to move away from cheap, chemically-unrecyclable resource mixes.
Such shortcomings are not rooted in a governmental lack of creativity or determination but in a historical focus on post-production challenges (i.e., recycling) rather than reducing waste production (e.g., through economic incentives) in the first place. Pre-production considerations remained, to the comfort of producers, largely absent, opening up the opportunity for them to own the narrative around incentive schemes and other initiatives in the post-production and recycling discipline. Producer Responsibility Organisations (PROs) for instance, envisioned and set up to encourage the implementation of the abovementioned EPR schemes, have long remained absent from governmental intervention and are now often controlled by industry members themselves, turning them into lobby groups for the interests of producers and their margins. The fees supposedly collected by PRO members (i.e., the producers themselves), meant to be used to fund progressive local waste collection and recycling efforts, usually indirectly end up in the producers’ pockets again, contributing to the initial problem of underfunded authorities and increased tax burdens on the population. In France, for instance, Citeo, the country’s main PRO, reimburses a mere 40% of waste disposal costs, instead of the obliged 80%, creating a €1 bn shortfall that undermines the country’s infrastructure buildout efforts.
Admittedly, resourcefulness has been rarely seen as a major trait of humanity throughout the last centuries — industrialisation gave birth to modern exponential global economic growth, where unprecedented scales of production saw the commencement of the continuous depletion of natural resources that has since only gained in magnitude and brought about such complete misalignment of stakeholder interests. Even more so, the deliberation on how humanity can break a circle of vicious overconsumption and -production whilst enforcing its global economic systems to accommodate and embrace the notion of circularity becomes crucial. Where to start?
The Expectations
Such patterns of consumption and depletion of natural resources, having been set in motion throughout more than two centuries, are challenging to change and overcome, which is why a return to the foundations of the concept of a circular economy is essential. The rapid proliferation in the presence of the concept across media and industry resulted in an utmost diffuse definition of what a circular economy actually entails, let alone ways to measure its impact. This consequently led to the expected shift towards of a circularity-enabled, socially sustainable future (the “solution to everything”) being reduced to a discussion on resource consumption, depoliticising environmental and governmental efforts and leaving it to business and markets to find a solution. And as the past has taught, markets are blatantly inept when it comes to considerations of the immediacy of challenges ahead (think of fossil-free finance, for example).
To start anew, the expectations and the scope of a circular economy ought to be reduced and become more modest — rather than pinning a plethora of unrealistic hopes on it, seeing the concept as one of many contributors employed to solve humanity’s most considerable problems (without losing focus of others) is a requirement to re-commence the build-out of actionable, measurable and clear ways for all stakeholders to engage with its notion whilst limiting the risk of exploitation or monopolisation from any one party involved. Despite evidence of short-term hurdles — for instance, the rebound effect suggesting that, similar to the case of energy efficiency efforts, an effective circular approach to global economies may actually increase the amount of resource waste in absolute terms, rather than decreasing it — the emphasis on the importance and need of a holistic overhaul of the global economic philosophy towards a post-neoliberalist paradigm of de-growth, as is applied elsewhere already, has never been stronger.
Architect Walter Stahel famously went as far as proposing to stop taxing labour and taxing non-renewable resources instead, limiting the likelihood of the abovementioned rebound effect, whilst others suggested that a peer-to-peer-based, community-led economy, as was omnipresent many centuries ago, would reduce power concentration in industries, redistribute control towards society and governments and therewith supporting a notion of sustainable economic growth.
Whichever path the circular narrative will take as part of our global economies, it has the potential to remarkably shape the way in which we interact with our planet and ourselves beyond the limitations of its immediate applications — and with both governments and consumers incentivised to bring about major change, there exist only very few factors with a realistic potential to stop such transformation from happening beyond the short-run.
