
Educating towards a circular economy - endswapper
http://blogs.ibo.org/blog/2016/10/16/educating-towards-a-circular-economy
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roymurdock
What is a circular economy?

> The notion of a circular economy has attracted increased attention in recent
> years. The concept is characterised, more than defined, as an economy that
> is restorative and regenerative by design and aims to keep products,
> components, and materials at their highest utility and value at all times,
> distinguishing between technical and biological cycles. It is conceived as a
> continuous positive development cycle that preserves and enhances natural
> capital, optimises resource yields, and minimises system risks by managing
> finite stocks and renewable flows. It works effectively at every scale. This
> economic model seeks to ultimately decouple global economic development from
> finite resource consumption.

How do we get there?

1\. A key feature of a circular economy is to be restorative and regenerative
by design. The recovery of materials and products is not only addressed at end
of use, but is enabled at the design level (e.g., by the choice of materials
or a design for disassembly). Companies will need to build core competencies
in circular design to facilitate product reuse, recycling and cascading.

2\. Business models that move from ownership to performancebased payment
models are instrumental in translating products designed for reuse into
attractive value propositions. By prioritising access over ownership, these
models drive a shift from consumers to users. Companies with significant
market share and capabilities along several vertical steps of the linear value
chain could play a major role in driving circularity into the mainstream by
leveraging their scale and vertical integration.

3\. A value preserving materials backbone is a core requirement for the
transition to a circular economy. To create value from materials and products
after their use, they need to be collected and brought back.

The "circular economy" sounds like a buzzword for more aggressive recycling
and eco-friendly materials use. Disposable goods are cheap. What incentives do
companies/governments have to make their products more expensive?

~~~
Newtopian
Disposable goods are not cheap, they are in fact very expensive. They are
perceived as cheap because a very large portion of the true cost is hidden,
externalized. Creators have no incentive to create things that are easily
recyclable because they are not responsable for what happens to it at the end
of it's life. To close the loop one must integrate the economics of garbage
management as an integral part of the product being designed on equal footing
with production, distribution etc. Taxing pro-rated to the recyclability of a
product, tax break on repairs, second-hand markets and other means to give a
product a longer life. Make practices like planned obsolencence illegal,
criminal even. I'm no expert but there are a great many solutions,
implementing them however might require a lot more political good-will than
most of our leaders are ready to spend.

~~~
barrkel
These moves are also a bet on the future: a bet that the future cost of
disposal stays high, so that increased costs earlier in the lifetime are
justified.

The future is discounted for a reason, however. The future is probably
wealthier, has better technology, and can reap the reward from investment
today. It takes not just political good will, but a leap of faith to make the
bet on spending now instead of later.

For planned obsolescence: here's another way to look at it. For a designed
lifetime, we can coordinate across all the inputs to a product and select the
right tradeoff between cost, quality and longevity. If we don't have a
designed lifetime, the actual lifetime will only be as long as the shortest-
lived part that can't be economically replaced. Making everything economical
to replace means compromising on design, and often quality: a phone that
plugged together like Lego would be substantially worse than our current
integrated devices in weight and size.

(The idea of building something without a designed lifetime seems a little bit
crazy to me, from an engineering perspective. It frames a whole bunch of
decisions and trade-offs. I think it's better to put stuff into more people's
hands rather than keep things expensive and exclusionary, which would
undoubtedly be a side-effect of outlawing designed lifetimes.)

~~~
paulryanrogers
"The future is probably wealthier, has better technology, and can reap the
reward..."

For how long can this be true when there are finite-easily-accessible
resources?

~~~
barrkel
Don't underestimate how many resources there are. There's a lot of stuff in
the Earth's crust, and the sun is going to be shining for a while yet.

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ilostmykeys
Garbage Tax. There should be a Garbage Tax on all manufacturers, distributors
and resellers of non-recyclable/non-bio-degradable/non-bio-consumable
products. We're all paying for the externalized cost of waste management but
the ones who should be paying for it (and penalized for it) are the one who
are profiting from it (all those who manufacture, distribute and sell non-
reusable products that externalize the waste management cost to the rest of
us)

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BatFastard
Good step toward a circular economy, require that the vast majority of things
be repairable.

 __The disposable economy is the enemy of the circular economy. __

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formula1
This artical seemed to be more biographical than subject information. That
aside, the problem that is worth discussing is how to incentivize more
individuals to recycle every chance they get rather than throw everything
away.

This however, presents a different problem.

\- can tie inflation to how much is recycled - if a government is willing to
pay more money than a peice pf plastic is worth. It can provide insentive for
individuals to recycle a lot more. However, it also opens up opportunities to
take advantage of the system when done in massive bulk.

\- can add a tax to plastics - this already exists but the taxes can just be
passed on to the consumer. Taxes at an extremety can be offset by High
recycleable value. Though this can be considered rediculous overreach by the
gov.

\- limit plastics use to only large quantities - boats, cars, etc. If plastics
are not allowed to br used for plastic bags and soaps, controlling the
recycling becomes mich easier

I would love to hear more insights about this

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jsingleton
If you want to get involved in Open Source Circular Economy stuff then
OSCEdays is a good community - [https://oscedays.org](https://oscedays.org)

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ilaksh
A related topic is bioplastic, i.e. plastic from biofuels or biogeneration (on
the short term rather than millions of years like plastic derived from
petroleum). Maybe educate on that too and the importance in general of
replacing petroleum-dependent industrial materials and processes.

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jackcosgrove
It's an admirable goal, but it would seem to violate the second law of
thermodynamics. There is almost always waste. Even if we could create some
reversible processes, adhering to these would require a lot of behavioral
enforcement since there would be consumptive alternatives that were easier or
cheaper. Our current regime is hardly panglossian, but there are always costs
to idealistic schemes that the designers of such fail to anticipate.

~~~
noonespecial
I think the idea is to use energy input collected from the sun to push our
material resources in a circle instead of the way we do it now, which is to
use previously stored sun energy to push our natural resources in a line from
a more useful place/form to a less useful place/form. This linear method
leaves us with both less useful material and less easily collected energy when
we're done.

We will have to change over sooner or later and it gets harder if we wait
until later. The thermodynamics of it is simple. The energy input of a nearby
star means its not a "closed system". There's plenty of energy input to keep
it all going. How to use it is the choice. Eventually the costs of idealistic
schemes will balance out, probably with interest, at the point where there is
no longer a choice; the stored energy collected and spent, and our material
wealth buried in landfills after being reduced to its least useful form.

~~~
marcosdumay
If that is indeed the idea, isn't it much better to push for renewable energy
instead of focusing on the use of carbon polymers?

Eventually we can just burn all that trash down, and reassemble the carbon the
way we want. It's is not the bottleneck for decades already.

