Circular Economy or die
The relation between the economy and our ecological footprint
I recently heard people talking about the Earth’s Overshoot Day, which was on the 1st of August in 2018. This date “is calculated by comparing humanity’s total yearly consumption (Ecological Footprint) with Earth’s capacity to regenerate renewable natural resources in that year (biocapacity)”. This means we are taking more than nature can provide in one year. There are also country-specific calculations, assuming every person in the world would have the same consumption habits as the country concerned. For example, if every person on earth consumed like we do in Denmark, the critical date is the 28th of March! Looking at my personal ecological footprint, I was even more shocked. Although I consider myself a bike-riding environmentalist on a plant-based diet, my personally calculated Overshoot Day is the 5th of October [find out yours here]. Even though, this calculator might not be 100% accurate, it is still a good indicator for your consumption habits and the associated impact on the environment.
So what can we do to push the date and reduce our ecological footprint, on a personal as well as on a national level? Diving into this topic, I found that one of the biggest obstacles today is the current economy. It isn’t easy to live sustainably when nearly everything you can buy includes plastic or toxins. What kind of economy is offering us this?
Linear Economy — cradle-to-grave
Currently our economy is primarily linear. This means raw materials are taken from nature and brought to manufacturers for processing, and later bought. Most products in this system ends up as waste in landfills, or incinerated. The resources are not recycled, which means new materials need to be extracted to produce new products.
To illustrate this, think about the lifecycle of a plastic bottle. To produce plastic, fossil fuels are mixed with other materials and all of them are lost when the bottle gets thrown into the ocean or dumped into the landscape. It will keep on existing for at least 450 years before the materials start to biodegrade. Wouldn’t it be more clever to reuse this robust material instead of taking more resources for every new bottle?
It seems like this system is still dreaming about the infinite existence of resources and a planet that can regenerate itself at an unrealistic pace — all the while producing a mind-boggling amount of waste in the process.. The Sustainable Europe Research Institute (SERI) estimates that over 21 billion tonnes of natural resources end up as sidestream each year; materials which don’t even enter the economic system but appear as waste during the production. Examples are the by-catch in the fishing industry or redundant fabrics which are discarded when making a shirt. From the 2.7 billion tonnes of Europe’s waste generated in 2010 only around 40% was recycled — the rest is believed to end up in “nowhere”. So the focus of a linear economy lies on cheap production and ongoing consumption.
Though the invisible costs for nature are not included in the calculation. Just imagine, recycling one ton of office paper can save 17 trees, ~26.500l water, 1750l of oil and 3000 to 4000 kilowatt hours during the production (compared to using virgin materials). What is the point in wasting these resources?
Circular Systems — cradle-to-cradle
Luckily there are people who have realised the urgent need to stop wasting resources. The European Union has also begun promoting a new way of handling and producing goods — an approach which is inspired by the everlasting circularity of nature. The solution to our waste-problem is called Circular Economy.
In the circular economy model, used products and materials aren’t disposed, but fully reused. With these resources, companies and industries can produce new goods by using the material of the old ones. The main elements are therefore ‘production-consumption-recycling’. We can relieve the pressure on the planet by reusing the resources we have already collected, instead of collecting new raw materials.
To achieve this way of production, the design of products has to be fundamentally adjusted — the thought of recycling has to stand at the beginning of the design process and not at the end. E.g. electronic devices should be created in a way that makes a repair or replacement of individual elements possible instead of replacing the whole device, because the components are glued together. We have to shift the focus from quick and dirty production towards developing products that can be fully reused or recycled. The founders of the thought school ‘Cradle to Cradle’, Michael Braungart and William McDonough, introduce the concept of eco-effectiveness, which emphasises “working on the right things — on the right products and services and systems — instead of making the wrong things less bad” — because how can it be that we will run out of natural materials when the Earth has been reusing them for millions of years?
In their opinion there are two systems where a product design needs to fit in: it has to be created for consumption (circulating in a biological cycle) or for services (flowing in the technical loop).
The biological cycle only involves biodegradable materials; products, like some types of paper or food, which can be composted and used to grow new plants. The nutrition is given back to nature and won’t be lost.
The technical loop is also a closed one in the sense, that every product gets disassembled and the materials are salvaged by only melting together the same kinds of resources. This ensures that e.g. metals, used in laptops or cars, aren’t mixed up with other materials, so they can keep their virgin quality and be reused to manufacture new products.
Products meeting the ‘Cradle-to-Cradle’ standards don’t include problematic substances which can’t be recycled in one of these two systems. We still need a solution to deal with all the existing mixed-material products: for example a juice carton is a combination of carton with plastic and aluminium. It can’t be recycled in the biological nor in the technical loop. But all in all, the ‘Cradle to Cradle’ design approach seems to be a perfect foundation for a circular economy and is therefore a big step into the future.
So what does this means for us, the people who want to minimize our impact on our planet? Some of us might be designers, who can start using the ‘Cradle-to-Cradle’ approach for everything they design. Others are the business people, who can take the decision of implementing this production-way in their company. And all of us have a great power which we use nearly everyday: we can vote for what we want by carefully choosing what we buy.
