Using blockchain to make circular economy as easy as buying online
Team Buffalo wants to connect society in a web 3.0 framework of smart and shared use of stuff. In their hack, the circular economy becomes an ownerless and distributed service.
Ask team captain Nathalie Drost of team Buffalo what crisis they want to solve, and her answer is straight-forward: “The way we make use of the planets resources is ridiculous”. Nearly our entire economy is part of a take-make-waste logic. In the dominant regime of our industry, every product — no matter how exclusive — is a deferred piece of junk. Chased by planned obsolescence and consumerism, we dig earth for raw materials, while the stuff we need is all around us.
Waste is a characteristic of bad design
Families who own a drilling machine drill 1,8 holes per year on average. So these are expensive holes…
Others argue a drilling machine is used 15 minutes on average during its lifespan. From that perspective, ownership of drilling machines is totally weird. But that counts for many products. Do you have a hammer at home? How many mobile phones do you have in a drawer? How many chargers in a cardboard box? And how many hours a day is your car not in use? Circular economy is not the same as a recycling economy.
As the smart drawing of Vlaanderen Circulair shows, circular economy is about valorising products and materials as high as possible in a network of material cycles. Preferably endlessly. In this economy, products are as much as possible shared, re-used, repaired, up-cycled, … and only recycled if no other application is possible.
A cow doesn’t always want to reincarnate as a cow
Michael Braungart, co-author of ‘Cradle-to-cradle’ uses the metaphor of reincarnation to frame circular economy as an interconnected network of material loops that maintain and increase value, and so make the destinction with recycling.
Many exciting design strategies come at play here: design for assembly, modular design, product-service design, experience design, subscription economy, design for longlevity, regenerative design, biodesign, …
McKinsey calculated in 2017 that if we accelerate the transition in order to have a nearly circular economy in 2030, that would add 1800 billion euros the economy of the European Union. It shows that the potential of the circular economy is astronomical. Many pioneers such as Bundles and The Circular Service Platform in the Netherlands come up with platform concepts, manufacturers as Veldeman Bedding come up with circular ‘smart beds’ and intelligent service models like ‘sleep as a service’.
Another of my personal darlings is ‘Rent the Runway’, a retailer in NY that offers Haute Couture fashion as a service. They rent fashion instead of selling it. Their market proposition is extraordinary and crispy: More fashion, with less clothes for more people. Yep, fashion becomes abundant.
How we’ll turn sharing stuff into ‘the new normal’
But team Buffalo is a Nature 2.0 hackathon participant. That means: no ownership, no money, no business model… The challenge is to commonize the circular economy and constructing it as an always-on service. “We are inspired and encouraged by Spotify”, argues Nathalie. Who buys CD’s these days? Like Spotify connects users with an abundant well of music, we want to connect society with a circle of materials and products.
Logistics and convenience are still the Achilles heel of both circular and sharing economy. We want to make it as easy as buying online
How could that work? It is all about access. With an Ethereum account for instance, users could access the framework. A debit card which has multiple mediums of exchange, like a multi coin wallet would be very useful. That’s why we collaborate with a team of another track to make that happen. We use bigchain to organize all assets in one database. Blockchain is perfect to weave closed loops into a peer-to-peer model. Users could be incentified to contribute to the commons by increasing access to the commons.
We aim for a world where our kids look at us and question why the heck we once owned stuff
Clicking stuff, adds the stuff to your garage in order to use them. When autonomous and distributed technology comes to the rescue to help us out with the toughest of challenges “distribution”, sharing becomes as easy as buying online. Materials that are truly worn-out lacking quality for re-use can be backed into building blocks (think Lego) to have new applications
