What Is The Circular Economy?

Wha Is The Circ lar Econom

What Is The Circular Economy

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Sailing single handed around the world, Ellen MacArthur had with her the absolute minimum of resources in order to be as light, and therefore fast, as possible Stopping en route to restock was not an option, and careful resource management was a matter of life or death running out of energy to power the autopilot means the boat can turn upside down in seconds Having been constantly aware of the supply limits of her boat, after stepping back ashore she began to see that the world is no different In her TED talk Ellen takes you through her journey from record breaking yachtswoman to the founder of a charity with the mission to accelerate the transition towards a circular economy Listen to an extract from Ellen s TED talk The surprising thing I learned sailing solo around the world TED2015 TED Talk excerpt provided by permission of TED Listen to Ellen MacArthur

What Is The Circular Economy

What Is The Circular Economy

A circular economy is based on the principles of designing out waste and pollution, keeping products and materials in use, and regenerating natural systems The Industrial Revolution laid the foundation for how the economy of today operates

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A transformation in our ability to make things changed society We ve been at a turning point before In 1684 Thomas Savery invented the steam engine and it changed everything This invention kick started the industrial revolution, which transformed our ability to make things Raw materials and energy were seemingly in nite, and labour was readily available For the rst time in history, goods were mass produced

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We turn resources into an extraordinary number of products Since the industrial revolution, the rapid pace of technological progress has continued The resulting innovations mean that many now have access to products from all over the world at affordable prices These products have brought many of us levels of material comfort unimaginable to previous generations

What Is The Circular Economy

What Is The Circular Economy

We now have the knowledge and tools to build an economy that is t for the 21st Century Every second, the equivalent of one garbage truck of textiles is land lled or burned

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The current system is no longer working for businesses, people or the environment We take resources from the ground to make products, which we use, and, when we no longer want them, throw them away Take make waste We call this a linear economy WASTE When the products are no longer needed or wanted they are discarded TAKE Resources are taken from the ground MAKE

What Is The Circular Economy

What Is The Circular Economy

To make products which are used WASTE When the products are no longer needed or wanted they are discarded TAKE Resources are taken from the ground MAKE To make products which are used WASTE When the products are no longer needed or wanted they are discarded

What Is The Circular Economy

What Is The Circular Economy

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The linear economy has to change We must transform all the elements of the take make waste system: how we manage resources, how we make and use products, and what we do with the materials afterwards Only then can we create a thriving economy that can bene t everyone within the limits of our planet The next generation of pioneers are disrupting the current system f rom within

We re using mushrooms to create an entirely new class of materials which perform a lot like plastic during their use but are made from crop waste and are totally compostable at the end of their lives Ecovative produce packaging products that are fully compostable alternatives to synthetic materials They are made of mycelium the roots of mushrooms grown in and around agricultural by products with low economic value, acting thereby as a glue, and can take any shape needed At the end of use, the packaging can be composted at home Single use packaging, which includes expanded polystyrene EPS protective packaging, forms a signi cant portion of the 8 millions tonnes of plastic that enter our oceans every year Ecovative offer an alternative to expanded polystyrene packaging Their home compostable solution offers the same protective capabilities as EPS and is able to compete on cost

What Is The Circular Economy

What Is The Circular Economy

The raw material used is agricultural feedstock parts of plants that cannot be used for food or feed, therefore with low economic value These are cleaned and inoculated with mushroom tissue The mycelium grows in 5 7 days by digesting the agricultural by product and binding into the shape needed At the end of use, the packaging can be safely composted at home

What Is The Circular Economy

What Is The Circular Economy

The minimal processing required reduces the cost of the product and enables its economic viability Additionally, the technique can use multiple feedstocks, allowing Ecovative to use locally available crops Since commercially launching in 2010, Ecovative has opened a new production facility and is supplying their packaging to a growing number of Fortune 500 companies Find out more on the Ecovative website Close When our crop variations go up and down we have another outlet to manage the volume of sugar This makes the plant more resilient, and can cope with variations in weather, sunshine and rain Josh Hoopes, Bioethanol Lead There are plenty of hot startups with a new technology that can accelerate the transition to a circular economy Yet some of the best examples don t rely on new tech, but instead on the gradual evolution of processes and a precise understanding of energy and resource ows Continual improvement, collaboration and systems thinking are the name of the game At British Sugar s Factory in Norfolk, these are very much on display

What Is The Circular Economy

What Is The Circular Economy

The team at Wissington have continually evaluated their operation to create value from previously wasted energy and materials The result is a factory that doesn t just produce sugar, but 12 different saleable products, from valuable chemicals to food for animals and humans For example, The soil and stone removed during processing isn t seen as waste, but is instead sold at a volume of 150,000 tonnes a year Wissington is also home to the UK s rst bioethanol fuel plant, where British Sugar reacting to the supply and demand of their core product use some of the extracted beet sugar syrup to produce around 55,000 tonnes of renewable fuel each year

British Sugar are clearly motivated to develop a diverse business that can run all year round and is resilient from external shocks Producing such a wide variety of outputs provides multiple pro t creation opportunities Additionally, treating waste as a useful resource means costs such as land ll taxes are reduced Read more about British Sugar s Wissington plant on their website Close What Is The Circular Economy

What Is The Circular Economy

Regenerative agriculture, which is inspired by natural processes aims to return organic matter to the biosphere, thus enhancing soil and avoiding the need for costly chemicals The aim is to rebuild soil quality and natural capital, rather than deplete it

The farm has developed its own harvesting equipment with low pressure tyres to avoid harmful compaction, that simultaneously cuts cane and shreds by products returning them back to the soil Potentially harmful chemical fertilisers were replaced by a unique Integrated Organic Fertilisation Programme Pesticides were exchanged for a natural pest and disease management system, which uses naturally resistant crop varieties, a biological control programme, and cultural control methods to inhibit pests and weeds

What Is The Circular Economy

What Is The Circular Economy

The Hiut Denim Company was founded by husband and wife team, David and Clare Hieatt The name is a combination of the rst two letters of their surname and the rst two letters of utility, and their owl logo represents the family of owls who nest in the barn opposite the chicken shed in which they started the business They are based in Cardigan, Wales, on the Irish Sea coast and began after the closure of a local factory that had been producing 35,000 pairs of jeans a week

The New Textiles Economy cites more than half of fast fashion produced is estimated to be disposed of in under a year The fast nature of this type of industry places associated pressure on natural and social systems The economic costs of these negative externalities is dif cult to quantify, but thought to be in the region of USD 192 billion Hiut make approximately 120 pairs of jeans each week each pair is skillfully made by a highly trained Grand Master and takes about 1 hour 10 mins to make, compared to the 11 minutes of some bigger factories Hiut offer free repairs on the wear and tear of their jeans, keeping them in use for many years What Is The Circular Economy

What Is The Circular Economy

Gerrard Street headphones is a startup based in the Netherlands who have embraced two key building blocks of the circular economy The design of their products is modular and no glue is used so they are easy to disassemble, repair or add new hardware The components are durable and standardised, so that up to 85 of can be looped into new models The headphones are offered to customers as a subscription rather than a transactional purchase Globally we throw away 15 million kg of headphones every year either due to simple mechanical faults or because of technology advances How can we capture the value that is being lost in this discarded material Gerrard Street Customers get both an affordable high quality product and a high level of service and support Included in the monthly subscription fee, is a guarantee that if the product is damaged or an upgrade is available then the customer returns the old headphones and is sent a replacement Gerrard Street has designed beautiful, high sound quality headphones that are modular and easily disassemblable to facilitate easy repair, refurbishment or upgrade The use of a subscription business model allows them to recover headphones at the end of their use and 85 of components are ultimately reused Combining durable design with a subscription business model means that Gerrard Street can increase its revenue through maximising the use cycles for every pair of headphones produced The focus on standardised parts, repairability and reuse reduces costs as fewer virgin materials are required At the same time, the company can form a closer relationship with its customers, and has a more reliable and predictable material supply chain Close I told Philips, Listen, I need so many hours of light in my premises every year If you think you need a lamp, or electricity, or whatever that s ne But I want nothing to do with it I m not interested in the product, just the performance I want to buy light, and nothing else Thomas Rau

What Is The Circular Economy

What Is The Circular Economy

Philips designed a circular lighting service that provides guaranteed lighting performance with regard to energy, light level and uptime Philips retain ownership of the lights and take care of the reuse, refurbishing or recycling to ensure customers get maximum value from the lighting system The current linear economy operates on a take, make, dispose basis reliant on selling as many products as possible to consumers To shift to a circular economy, businesses need to explore new business models that allow products to be used again and again and again Philips offer a service option allowing you to pay for the light you use, rather than an upfront investment in the materials For customers this results in potential maintenance cost savings of 60 and 20 more cost effective upgradability

What Is The Circular Economy

What Is The Circular Economy

The principle of light as a service is simple: instead of buying the light tting, you buy the light When the contract period is over, the customer has the option to extend the contract, upgrading the existing lighting or opt for new lighting By retaining ownership of the ttings, Philips is incentivised to design long lasting ttings that allow for fast repair or replacement This light as a service business model began as a collaboration with architect Thomas Rau It has since been developed into a commercial offering from Philips that has been used in places such as Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam and the National Union of Students in the UK Find out more on the Philips website Close A balanced supply of nutrients is essential for healthy plant growth In the absence of human activities, natural processes such as biodegradation as well as symbiotic relationships with other species in the local ecosystem provide suf cient nutrition for the plant life cycle, albeit in an environment of healthy competition Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies, a Vancouver based company, has taken a systemic approach to managing nutrient ows The result is an innovative wastewater add on process and a pure fertiliser product that creates revenue for the business

What Is The Circular Economy

What Is The Circular Economy

The current linear approach to agriculture removes important nutrients from the soil, passes them through a value chain and discards them in a way that can lead to unproductive soil and negative environmental impacts There are nite reserves of many key resources and in some cases, such as phosphorus, there is no synthetic alternative Ostara has developed technology that can be incorporated into wastewater treatment plants allowing phosphorus and other nutrients to be recovered from industrial and municipal What Is wastewater The Circularstreams Economy The product can then be

What Is The Circular Economy

In the foothills of the Alps, spread out on the southern bank of Lake Geneva is a very important 35 sq km area of land The Plateau de Gavot is the water catchment for Danone s Evian brand A core concern for Danone is preserving the purity of the natural water supply, but this needs to be balanced against the other activities on the plateau The land uses over the catchment are predominantly natural: grasslands, wetlands and forests but there are also a number of villages and farms

One of the biggest potential risks to water quality relates to dairy farming To provide winter feed for their livestock, farmers on the Plateau cultivate grass using raw manure as fertiliser It was observed that one method of manure application entailed concentrated manure being applied on speci c grasslands or during bad weather conditions, which through accidental spills and runoff poses both a risk to surface streams as well as, through soil percolation, to Evian water s purity Danone initiated the Terragr eau project: a collection scheme and an anaerobic digestion plant that produces biogas and converts hazardous raw manure to benign but regenerating bio solids At the heart of the project is the methanisation unit that produces energy and digestate out of local agricultural ef uents

What Is The Circular Economy

What Is The Circular Economy

A small scale, organic farming system in Japan is currently providing a rice yield that exceeds industrial rice systems harvests by 20 50 The higher yield combined with the production of a variety of other food stuffs, grown synergistically with the rice, means that with just six acres, Japanese farmer Takao Furuno sometimes eclipses the gross income of a typical 600 acre rice farm in Texas

Small margins on agricultural produce, means making a decent living from farming often requires large scale production However most farmers around the world only have access to a small plot Can these farms still make healthy pro ts Using none of the fossil fuel fertilisers and pesticides traditionally required to grow high yield monoculture crops the farm, which has been modelled on complex dynamic living systems, produces an impressive range of food products, including rice, duck eggs, sh, duck meat, vegetables, wheat and gs The complex multi species farm, which is completely independent of any outside farm inputs, rst requires rice seedlings to be set into ooded rice paddies, before introducing a raft of ducklings Insects that normally feed on the young rice plants, provide food for the ducklings Mr Furuno then introduces loaches, which are a variety of easily cultivated sh, and Azolla, a What Is The Circular Economy water fern, which xes nitrogen from the air providing a natural substitute

What Is The Circular Economy

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PRINCIPLE /1

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Did you know that waste and pollution are largely a result of the way we design things Waste and pollution are not accidents, but the consequences of decisions made at the design stage, where around 80 of environmental impacts are determined By changing our mindset to view waste as a design aw and harnessing new materials and technologies, we can ensure that waste and pollution are not created in the rst place

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PRINCIPLE /2

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What if we could build an economy that uses things, rather than uses them up We can t keep wasting resources Products and materials must be kept in the economy We can design some products and components so they can be reused, repaired, and remanufactured But making things last forever is not the only solution When it comes to products like food or packaging, we should be able to get the materials back so they don t end up in land ll

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PRINCIPLE /3

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What if we could not only protect, but actively improve the environment

What Is The Circular Economy

What Is The Circular Economy

In nature, there is no concept of waste Everything is food for something else a leaf that falls from a tree feeds the forest Instead of simply trying to do less harm, we should aim to do good By returning valuable nutrients to the soil and other ecosystems, we can enhance our natural resources

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The circular economy vision and approach gives endless possibilities to create a thriving economy

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What Is The Circular Economy

What Is The Circular Economy

It s a new way to design, make, and use things within planetary boundaries Shifting the system involves everyone and everything: businesses, governments, and individuals our cities, our products, and our jobs By designing out waste and pollution, keeping products and materials in use, and regenerating natural systems we can reinvent everything

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With new ways of thinking we can redesign the system Continue learning about the circular economy and the role that you can play in accelerating the shift

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What Is The Circular Economy

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What Is The Circular Economy