Circularity
The circular economy is based on three principles, driven by design:
Eliminate Waste and Pollution
Circulate Products and Materials (at highest value)
Regenerate Nature
The circular economy is a system where materials never become waste and nature is regenerated. In a circular economy, products and materials are kept in circulation through processes like maintenance, reuse, refurbishment, remanufacture, recycling, and composting. The circular economy tackles climate change and other global challenges, like biodiversity loss, waste, and pollution, by decoupling economic activity from the consumption of finite resources.
While Circularity is often characterized by the 3Rs (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle), the EU has identified 9Rs – Refuse, Rethink, Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Refurbish, Remanufacture, Repurpose, and Recycle as part of its Categorisation System for the Circular Economy.
This is different from a linear economy where resources are extracted to make products that eventually end up as waste and are thrown away (or Take, Make, Waste). Products and materials are generally not used to their full potential in a linear economy and, as the name suggests, always move in one direction – from raw material to waste. It is a polluting system, constantly consuming virgin materials, that degrades natural systems and is the driver of global challenges, including climate change and biodiversity loss.
There are two distinct cycles that constitute a circular economy – a technical cycle and a biological cycle, both of which together resemble a butterfly, hence the butterfly diagram.
In the spine of the butterfly, going top to bottom, the flow of materials from finite materials to users and consumers is similar to that in the linear economy, other than the need to design for circularity.
However, the technical cycle, the right wing of the butterfly includes multiple new loops, from smaller to larger, starting with sharing and ending in recycling, with intermediate steps of maintain/prolong (repair), reuse/redistribute (resale), and refurbish/remanufacture, with shorter loops maintaining the most of the product’s value (in materials, energy, labor) than the outer loops, each of which is yet better than the Waste outcome in the linear economy. The aim is to keep to the inner loops for as long as possible.
The biological cycle, the left wing of the butterfly, includes Cascades or loops where biological waste of one activity becomes inputs for another, e.g., upcycling food waste streams into ingredients for new food (gourmet2go). Once food is harvested and consumed, the nutrients in organic waste streams can be collected, and returned to the soil via processes such as composting and anaerobic digestion . If nutrients are not returned, the soil is depleted, and farmers are forced to rely increasingly on chemical fertilizers to keep farmland productive. According to the UN FAO, 33% of the Earth’s soils are already degraded and over 90% could become degraded by 2050, considering the slow rate at which soils are naturally formed (1000 years for 2-3cms) vs. the rate at which human practices are degrading them (a soccer pitch every 5 seconds).
Circularity is closely related to Sustainability. While Sustainability sets out the objective of “meeting needs, present and future”, or “realizing potential, improve quality of life”, and identifying participants “stakeholders – shareholders, employees, community, supply chain, regulators, etc.”, Circularity identifies an avenue to achieving that objective for participants. By redesigning systems to (a) eliminate waste (b) circulate products and materials and (c) regenerate nature, the circular economy avoids creating and/or reduces many of the externalities that would otherwise propagate in the linear economy such as emissions, biodiversity loss, waste and pollution.