Circular Economy and new year’s resolutions: 6 Things to Start Today

Over the past year, I’ve picked up a sudden and intense interest with what is called “Circular Economy” (in a broad sense, that is including its link to Social and Solidarity Economy, as well as its connections to our well-being and health.)

As part of our mission in Bpifrance Le Hub — where we focus on fostering the French start-up economy — we have released a mapping of 200+ start-ups that form the backbone of the start-up activity in this area. The mapping itself as well as a few explaining notions can be found here.

This article is a supplement to this work, where I share a more personal perspective on this matter, and my suggested short list of pragmatic actions a relative beginner such as me could initiate today.

N.B.: most of the material I’m referring to is written in French, however I have no doubt that a live translation service will do the trick.

Stop buying new things for a while — Take on the “Rien de neuf” challenge

If you read the above-mentioned article or a similar one, you are familiar with the macro-drivers of the circular economy, such as use of second-hand products, more systematic approach to repairing used goods, sorting and recycling of trash, etc.

The “rien de neuf[Nothing New]” challenge is based on the idea that, if you need a bike for instance, there are probably millions of them you can use (sitting in a garage, basement, dumpster) — with maybe a little repair or dust off needed, before you get into the trouble of extracting a few more kilograms of aluminium, copper, rubber, plastic, etc., plus the associated manufacturing and transportation effort, to eventually create a brand-new bike.

Thus, the challenge motivates you to put circular levers to action and provides a platform to track and calculate your impact (leveraging the work of the ADEME national agency for input on how much resources a Tee-shirt costs).

Maybe this year, on top of the traditional quit-smoking and exercise-more resolutions, the “Rien de neuf” challenge can bring a refreshing perspective!

Dig up and recycle that one box full of old Electronic devices and wires

Electronic and Wires are so prevalent and so cheap in our modern world that we forget that you need to move 10+ tons of land to extract 1 kilogram of copper. Same goes for aluminum or rare-earth elements that make up large portions of our electronic devices. At the same time the networks and facilities that allow an almost complete recycling (95%+) of these materials are already up and running. So, there is really no reason to hold on to these obsolete devices. If you suspect that some (cameras, phones) might still be usable by someone, visit one of the many reconditioning websites to see if they are eligible — you might even make a revenue out of it.

Apart from that, go to your nearest collection point (most likely a retailing store) and drop off the whole box — remember that every charger that you recycle is another 1t of land that a Caterpillar truck will not need to shake up.

Streamline your closet — Save a cotton bulb

So now we know that the cotton industry is among the most polluting and damaging activity there is (ecologically, ethically in particular — here is a quick and powerful explanation why). Unfortunately, our society has grown into believing that clothes such as tee-shirts are the ultimate commoditized products that you can wipe your feet on: it is ok to have a bunch of them sitting at the bottom of your closet, and ultimately ok to use this ugly shaped commercial tee-shirts to mop the floor and dump it in the trash. It is also ok to print out 200 tee-shirts for literally any commercial event or occasion (those are the one sitting at the bottom of your closet). Secondly, we are somehow convinced that we must update our wardrobe every year, if not every quarter. While I don’t subscribe to this imperative, I understand that this may be part of the pleasure of life to experiment new looks and so on. In any case there is a simple way to combine these opposing imperatives: make sure that for every new piece of clothing you buy, you release one back into the world — for someone else to wear if appropriate, or at least to give its fabric a second life. Remembering also, if you need a repair, that tailors have been around for 200+ thousand years .

Get your animal-based protein consumption straight (No one said: “stop eating meat”)

Somewhere along my process I’ve come across one of these apps that asks you a bunch of questions on your life and gives you a quantitative picture on your impact to the planet (here if you want to try)

On the food section particularly, my survey brought up something I didn’t expect, namely how the dairy products put a burden on my footprint. I was already expecting that meat (and red meat in particular) would be very resource-intensive; however, it is relatively easy to identify when you’re having a big juicy steak, and maybe decide to cut back.

What is more difficult is to recognize all the dairy and egg-based ingredients in our food, as they are literally everywhere (also works with ground beef, chicken shred or pork cuts that are being incorporated on a regular basis to industrial and packaged food). Add to that a steady diet of camembert, beurre and creme fraiche, and you find out that in my case those animal-derived proteins constitute the larger share of my footprint.

A recent report estimates that all animal proteins together (meat and non-meat) account for 10–15% of our total Green Gas Emissions, so obviously a drastic cut back would have a huge impact on air and water pollution, land utilization, not to mention the living conditions of most of the livestock on earth. That said, my point is not that we should remove immediately every bit of animal protein from our plate, but rather that we should work on consuming animal proteins less often (typically not every day — see for example “Lundi Veggie” movement), and in “pure forms” as much as possible (I.e. steak, filets, cheese, yogurts…), which essentially means less industrial and packaged food

Think “local and high value” rather than “cheap and disposable”

Nowadays, the cost of living is rather high in developed societies, and so are wages. Therefore, “cheap and disposable” is often equivalent to “sourced in low cost countries, half way around the globe”. The fact that products come from a long way and need to be replaced often (because they are low quality and non-reparable) has a double negative effect on their footprint: in particular on mineral and fossil resources, water and air pollution.

Conversely, locally crafted/ high value products can mitigate this impact for the same reasons. Incidentely, this is also a good play to support local labor markets and tax collection, thus creating another form of virtuous “circular economy”

Switzerland is an example of a country that has set-up the required environment that allows this locally-sourced companies equilibrium, leveraging strong independence vs. other countries, independent currency, high import taxes. This allows Switzerland to pay its workforce higher wage (relative to cost of life) than any European countries across its borders. It is worth noting however that, while Switzerland has very little tolerance for imports, it exports massively to other countries — which is why not every country in the world could simply replicate that recipe

A conclusion to this analysis is that the same basic principles (favoring labor over material, favoring short loops circuits…) play a similar virtuous role for both the planet and our economic well being

Can you be frugal?

So far, we have been discussing cases where you typically need to do something differently than before: start sorting and recycling, repair your old jeans instead of buying new ones, replace your animal proteins with vegetal ones etc.

The more powerful lever there is, but also sadly the hardest, remains to simply not do things. For example, don’t buy a new phone or camera if the previous one is still working — even though it is cheap and the next-day delivery is free. Or don’t consume chicken or beef every meal, just because the modern agro industry has managed to render meat as cheap as vegetables

Now that the world economy allows us to afford almost anything, it is everybody’s responsibility to draw their line and progress back toward sustainability.

In Summary

The 6 notions discussed above are in my view the key drivers of a rescue plan we should launch immediately and at global scale. At the same time, these notions all need to be dust off and “re-implanted” into most of us as they have been buried under powerful inventions of the industrial age — such as consumerism — that we now know will lead us to an impasse

To end up on an optimistic note: the rapid increase in awareness around the circular economy (this article being an illustration), should make it all the easier for anybody to take an active role. Keeping in mind that the imperatives we face to sustain our environment are nicely aligned with some of our toughest social and economic imperatives — not that we needed a better reason than to “save the planet”, but it doesn’t hurt to have two :)

P.S.: This list is not exhaustive of course — tell us in the comment section what is your first and most important action step!