Making Sense of the "Circular Economy"

From - http://www.triplepundit.com/2013/01/make-sense-circular-economy/

If the name Ellen MacArthur rings a bell, you’re probably thinking of the person who set a record for circumnavigating the world in a high tech sailboat, solo no less, but that’s not the only circle for which she is known. Ms. MacArthur, through the charitable organization that bears her name, has formulated an economic concept called the circular economy, which is quickly becoming a buzzword around sustainability circles.

As far as buzzwords go, “circular economy” is a fairly pedestrian combination (as opposed to, say, Sex Pistols) and perhaps that’s just as well. Rather than getting distracted by the words, it’s far more interesting to pick through the concept itself and see how MacArthur’s vision of economic growth meets the challenges of a world of shrinking resources.

The Circular Economy

MacArthur was profiled and interviewed just last week on the Harvard Business Review blog by Eric Hellweg, and for those of you who don’t have time to read the whole thing (though you really should, it’s fascinating), the circular economy concept basically boils down to managing resource scarcity in the context of consumer demand for environmental responsibility.

As described by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, it comes out like this:

“The circular economy is a generic term for an industrial economy that is, by design or intention, restorative and in which materials flows are of two types, biological nutrients, designed to reenter the biosphere safely, and technical nutrients, which are designed to circulate at high quality without entering the biosphere.”

Why the Circular Economy is more than mere recycling

While the emphasis on reentering and circulating call recycling to mind, MacArthur’s concept of a circular economy is on a different plane entirely. The Foundation’s website is careful to note the difference by referencing Heather Rogers, journalist and author of Here Today, Garbage Tomorrow:

“One of the biggest confusions around a circular economy framework is that sparked by the word ‘recycling’…’The vast majority of wastes are created during the manufacturing process, and that is where we should focus.’”

Recycling puts the onus on consumers to use goods more carefully and to dispose of the leftovers responsibly. The circular economy asks that manufacturers produce goods that involve less waste in the first place, and that enable consumers to integrate recycling into their daily habits more intensively.

Case studies for the Circular Economy

When you look at the Foundation’s case studies, the potentials for economic growth become clear. That’s especially true when you consider that “consumers” doesn’t just mean individual householders, it also means companies that consume products through their supply chains.

The waste oil sector in England, for example, was historically focused on animal feed until new legislation targeted biofuels. The Yorkshire waste oil processor Brockelsby Ltd. adapted not only by pivoting to the biofuel market, but also by double-purposing its operations as a research and development platform to find new values for low-grade waste products, which normally would be discarded.

Another Foundation case study is Massachusetts-based Digital Lumens, which aims to help industrial customers transition out of the “criminally inefficient” incandescent light bulb into high-efficiency LEDs integrated with an energy management system. The company is transitioning, too, from an equipment sales model to a service-based model that could enable it to reclaim spent or damaged components more efficiently.

One final example is New York’s Ecovative, which produces fully compostable bio-based packaging products that stand in for petroleum-based plastics. Ecovative’s unique approach is to literally custom-grow its packages using fungi, which has caught the eye of green-transitioning companies like 3M and Dell among others.

Where the rubber hits the circular road

The sustainability foundation of the circular economy is interesting enough in itself, but real proof of the concept’s viability is the potential for economic growth.

To buttress the case for the circular economy, the Foundation has begun to issue detailed reports on the economic benefits of transitioning out of “an increasingly resource constrained ‘take-make-dispose’ model,” both in the short term and over the long run.

The first report, in 2011, took a look at the stimulating effect on European Union manufacturing sectorfrom economic activity related to product development, remanufacturing and refurbishment.

The second report just came out in 2013, and it focuses on applying the principles of the circular economyto “fast-moving” consumer goods, namely food, beverages, textiles and packaging, which also happen to account for a good deal of municipal waste while absorbing – and wasting – a significant amount of agricultural output.

Food-share database to end supermarket waste: Stores boost links with charities to help the hungry

From Daily Mail - Supermarkets and sandwich chains could soon share surplus food with families struggling in the economic downturn.

Under a proposal backed by the Government, retailers would log details of products approaching the end of their shelf-life on a database.

Charities, who are increasingly working with families who cannot afford to feed themselves, would use the information to arrange pick-ups of food and other unsold products set aside during the week by stores.

Charities would then put together parcels or cook meals using the surplus food and distribute it to the needy.

Tackling food poverty: The scheme would help families who cannot afford to feed themselves as well as cutting down on food wastage

Britain has seen an explosion in demand for food banks and food parcels amid the biggest squeeze on living standards in 60 years. 

The Government is putting pressure on food giants to back the scheme, which is designed to both cut food waste and help those in need. ...

‘Charities and retailers are already working together to make great use of surplus food and I’m hosting the roundtable today to look at new ways to make the system work even better.’ 

FareShare collects surplus from the food and drink industry and redistributes it to around 700 charities including the Salvation Army and homeless shelters.The nation’s biggest stores, including Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s Morrisons, the Co-op, M&S and Boots, will take part. Charities FareShare and FoodCycle, which were set up to tackle food poverty, will also be present.

The charities it supplies are also increasingly working with families living in food poverty.

The group wants supermarkets to provide food at each of its 18 outlets which would be picked up on a rota basis by local charities.

FoodCycle has called for the creation of a database so that food can be shared more effectively. 

The charity uses professional kitchens to produce free meals in 14 locations across the country and is currently in partnership with Sainsbury’s and  Waitrose, as well as smaller grocers and markets. 

Other retailers have been reluctant to back its work because they are worried about being sued if people fall ill as a result of eating surplus food.

The charities are supporting the introduction of a so-called Good Samaritan law which exists in the US, and ensures firms providing food in good faith are exempt from legal action.

The British Retail Consortium said its members already give excess food to charities but said discussions on improving communication between charities and retailers will be held.

It said the scheme should apply to all food retailers and could involve sandwich chains.

It comes as Waitrose announced  a commitment to donate surplus food from all branches to charities by the end of this year.

In the future, making donations to charities will be its preferred option for any unsold food that is still fit for consumption.

Turning Point?

From New Scientist - http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21886-peak-planet-are-we-starting-to-consume-less.html 


"Some say humanity's ever-rising environmental impact is about to go into reverse. Fact or just fantasy?

HUMANITY is doomed. Or it was in 1798, when English scholar Robert Malthus published his influential An Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus predicted that unchecked growth in human numbers would condemn our species to a "perpetual struggle for room and food" and an unbreakable cycle of squalor, famine and disease. Nearly two centuries later, biologistPaul Ehrlich was no less pessimistic. We had exceeded the planet's "carrying capacity", he declared in his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb. "The battle to feed humanity is over. Sometime between 1970 and 1985, the world will undergo vast famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death."

In 2012, our mood has hardly improved. The focus has shifted from how to feed ourselves to our rapacious appetite for energy and raw materials, and the greenhouse gases we pump into the atmosphere to satisfy it. Sooner or later, the argument goes, we must send our planet's climate and ourselves past the point of no return - if we haven't done so already.

Might these reports of our imminent demise also be exaggerated? That is the reasoning of those who see a pattern in recent statistics from the industrialised world. People in the US are driving less. Europeans are using less energy. Water use is down in countries such as the US and UK; so is calorie consumption in the UK.

The talk is of "peak stuff": that beyond a certain level of economic development, people simply stop consuming so much. Technology and the course of economic evolution allow prosperity to keep rising without a linked increase in our use of energy and materials. Our demands on planetary resources stabilise - and ultimately begin to fall.

Others are unconvinced, seeing in peak stuff a dangerous myth and a thinly veiled excuse to abandon efforts to limit our planetary impact. Without large-scale intervention to curb our excesses now, they argue, peak stuff, if it exists, will be too little, too late. So who is right? Is humanity really about to lose its appetite for stuff - and if so, will it help?

Predictions such as those of Malthus and Ehrlich fell down on a simple point: they failed to see what came next. Malthus missed the industrial revolution and its ways of mass production, which ultimately allowed more people to live longer and more comfortably. Ehrlich failed to factor in the "green revolution", the widespread use of more productive crop strains and chemical fertilisers and pesticides that has kept food production ahead of the population curve since the 1960s. Perhaps we are missing a similar trend now.

Although Ehrlich arrived at the wrong conclusion, his analysis provides a useful framework for assessing arguments about peak stuff. Ehrlich described our planetary footprint as the product of three factors: how many of us there are, how much each of us consumes and how we produce what we consume - that is, the prevailing technology.

 ... 

Will we grasp the nettle? The Danish agricultural economist Ester Boserup argued that throughout history, population growth and the pressure of shortages have been necessary spurs to technological developments, which seem to arrive just in time to avert the sort of disasters that exercised the likes of Malthus and Ehrlich. The signs are that we already have the know-how to live long and prosper without demanding ever more from a finite planet. The question is whether we will make the decisions to realise that promise before "just in time" becomes "just too late"."

You and I are not blameless

In earlier blogs, I blamed the state of the world economy on governments, banks and big business. Sadly, you and I are not blameless.

I did an inventory recently. I have 5 watches, 
innumerable clocks apart from those embedded on PCs, phones, TV sets etc; although retired I still have 6 serviceable suits and who knows how many shirts and ties; I have a dozen pairs of shoes, including trainers and golf shoes; 
and I could go on. I am sure if you did an inventory you too may find yourself surprised at how much you possess that are surplus to requirements. I am told women accumulate even more than men and I can believe it given the number of newspaper/magazine articles, Webpages and TV programmes on it - shelves full of handbags 
and shoes, racks and racks of clothes, some which have never been worn.

Similar excess applies to food. We are now more careful. but even so each week we are throwing away food that has gone past the due date. At least, a minor consolation is that the waste food no longer goes into the general rubbish bin but into a food recycling bin for the council to re-compost.

My point is that if you and I wasted less, then the retailers would sell less and the manufacturers would produce less, and the earth's resources would deplete slower.

Marks & Spencer clothes swap

from: http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/2170547/-introduces-swap-shop-tackle-waste-clothing

"Retailer Marks & Spencer is aiming to prevent over 350 million pieces of clothing going to landfill by encouraging customers to hand in an unwanted item when buying new clothes.

The new "Shwopping" initiative was launched in London this morning in a street made from almost 10,000 items of clothing – the amount Marks & Spencer estimates is thrown away every five minutes in the UK alone.

Overall, that comes to over two billion clothes a year – one in every four purchased – which adds around 500,000 tonnes to the UK's landfill sites.

Over 1,200 cardboard boxes – dubbed Shwop Drops – are expected to be rolled out across the UK alongside till points. ..."