Post No.: 0962
Furrywisepuppy says:
A ‘linear economy’ is one where products are manufactured from raw materials, sold, used, then discarded as waste – with pollution, destruction and depletion occurring at any stage, from greenhouse gas emissions, toxic spills, landfill leachate, biodiversity loss and more. It’s how our economic system largely presently operates and it’s considered linear because the flow of resources travels in one direction. Value is gradually stripped out during the process (e.g. soil and waterway health). We take, make and waste and this is unsustainable.
And it’s not as simple as making minor tweaks to this economic system. It needs change from a systems, design and policy perspective. We can clean up the waste accumulated on a beach, but more will just reappear again a few days later i.e. we need to address how this rubbish ended up there in the first place.
We can recycle, but some materials aren’t infinitely recyclable and many products consist of a mixture of numerous types of different materials that cannot be easily separated without requiring lots of energy and thus money (e.g. electronic devices).
We can increase resource efficiency, but anything less than 100% efficiency is still going to deplete a limited resource to zero eventually. ‘Jevons Paradox’ also states that as you make things more efficient, stuff becomes cheaper, thus consumers will consume more of it, thus negating any of the environmental benefits.
We can make stuff last longer, but in some cases, newer products can be environmentally friendlier to use thus using an old product mightn’t be good. Recyclability and making products last needs to be considered from the start of the product design process.
We can all simply buy less stuff, but there are economic ramifications of this, and the planet’s population is still growing anyway, even if we could instil behaviour change.
All these approaches have value and can buy us time but they won’t be enough. We ultimately need to be more like nature in how there’s essentially zero waste or pollution because what’s considered as waste for, or the corpse of, one organism is 100% a safe and productive resource for other organisms; and everything in the natural ecosystem works within sustainable cycles and feedback loops. Energy is ultimately provided by the Sun. There’s no landfill. It’s a cradle-to-cradle system.
That’s why we need to completely transition to a new economic model – a ‘circular economy’. Woof!
This circular model ought to make long-term sense for governments and businesses because zero waste and 100% productive resources is about keeping monetary value re-circulating within the economic system.
The linear economy has undeniably worked so far. But we must consider what conditions made this system a profitable enterprise – cheap energy, cheap materials, permissive legislation, and enough customers with disposable incomes. Problems will arise when any of these factors change, especially finite materials becoming more expensive as their supply diminishes.
The linear economy has brought billions of people out of poverty but we’ve got to understand that we cannot ‘dominate’ nature because the health of our lives and livelihoods depend on nature being healthy too.
Many think humans are triumphant because they see their cities, technologies and ‘command of nature’, but it’s all currently an unsustainable existence – living off an ever-rising debt to nature that eventually future generations of people, and other life, will bear the brunt of, if they’re not already. Humans only currently look glorious as a species because they take far more than return to the ecosystem. Resources aren’t limitless. Pollution causes lasting damage.
A new phone comes out, so we ditch the old one – and each time we do this, we eat into a finite supply of resources and often leave toxic waste behind. Instead of today’s ‘throwaway and replace’ culture, we need to adopt a ‘return and renew’ one where products and components are designed to be disassembled so that their materials can be utilised to make new, equally high-quality products. We might have to consider a model of rental over ownership too – closer to how life works in nature?
A circular economy would continually work to regenerate or even strengthen the ecosystem, instead of degrade it. All resources, such as materials and energy, would be treated as valuable capital – either kept within the system or safely returned to it to generate further economic, social and/or environmental value. Everything would be designed to fit this circular system, including the design of a product itself, the packaging and distribution, the business models, and the policies that incentivise a circular economy approach.
We need to move the thinking upstream, rather than try to solve problems downstream when it’s often too late. It needs the interconnected collaboration of governments, businesses, designers and consumers to make the most of the opportunities that a circular economy offers, just like how all species in an ecosystem are ultimately interconnected. The circular economy cannot be achieved by one entity or really country alone – we need all stakeholders and fundamentally the entire world at every level to work together, just as nature essentially does things. It’ll require a multi-angle approach that includes lifestyle changes, targets, laws, incentives, taxes, greener product and building standards, technologies, conservation, infrastructure, international cooperation and more.
The circular economy relies on 3 principles – eliminate waste and pollution, keep products and materials in use (designing for durability, modularity, repair, reuse, remanufacturing and, as a last resort, recycling), and regenerate natural systems (having an overall positive effect on the biosphere by giving more than we take). Each principle must be underpinned by thoughtfulness right from the beginning at the design stages.
Compared to making goods from raw extracted materials – goods are made to be made again, and the whole furry circular system is powered by renewable energy. If we design out waste from the start then we won’t have a clean-up problem at the end. We keep materials and energy circulating within the system and provide value and entrepreneurial opportunities along the way.
We can break materials into 2 broad cycles. The ‘biological cycle’ contains biodegradable materials, like food and cotton, that can be safely returned to the biosphere to regenerate or even enhance it, in order to replenish stocks for future cycles. The ‘technical cycle’ contains non-biodegradable materials, like metals and plastics, and the aim here is to keep products, components and materials at their highest possible value at all times through reuse, repair, remanufacture and recycling. These 2 cycles must be kept separate because contamination can make them either unable to be returned to the environment safely or be recycled.
The idea of ‘cascading’ is turning products into different uses to keep them at their highest value for as long as possible, like how cotton can be used to make a shirt, then once that shirt is no longer repairable and usable as a shirt, it could be used as wadding or insulation elsewhere, then finally biodegraded to feed back into the biosphere if it has been carefully designed from the start to be non-toxic to the biosphere.
More value can be kept from ‘inner loops’ or keeping goods as close to how they already are too, like repairing a car engine is better than recycling one, because repairing uses less energy and thus costs less than recycling the engine.
In Europe, material recycling and waste-based energy recovery captures only ~5% of the original raw material value at present. ~33% of all food produced is wasted along the value chain and much of this never makes its way back to regenerating the soil. A lot of space is also under-utilised. For instance, up to 50% of urban public space is dedicated to vehicles in the form of roads, parking spaces and garages, despite the average European car being parked 92% of the time! The average European office is only used 35-50% of the time, even during working hours.
The ‘green economy’ aims to satisfy economic, environmental as well as social issues. Governments need to reconcile the conflict of interest between promoting consumption to maintain the economy and constraining it to conserve the environment.
Putting a price on nature is arguably critical from a governmental perspective in order to protect the commons as part of the overall economic calculus. But from an individualistic perspective, knowing that a tree costs perhaps a few hundred dollars may mean that one will be incentivised to cut that tree down and sell it for that monetary value, which is precisely the problem of commoditisation and capitalism. Monetising nature and putting natural resources more in the private hands and responsibility of corporate power is thus problematic.
If humans want to treat nature and other life as mere commodities then maybe it’d be fair game for a powerful extraterrestrial species, or AI, to do the same thing to humans too?! Maybe it’d be worth the few dollars to extract the minerals within each human body, or a bit more to use humans as slaves?
For local governments, if incinerating waste is cheaper than recycling it (even after each household has sorted out which rubbish should go into which bin) then they’ll choose to incinerate. Incinerating waste can produce energy but it’s not an efficient source of it. The economic market – free or controlled – needs to find a way to recycle 100% of all human-generated waste if it is to emulate the efficiency of nature.
It’s terrible when consumers chuck away things that can be fixed, or modified to better suit their needs, with just a bit of effort and skill (e.g. headphones that are uncomfortable on the headband can be padded up with some foam and tape). If people are able to waste things then it’s a sign that life must be cosy for them (or alternatively they’re witless!) hence they should have nothing to complain about – at least about money. Yet they still might complain! We might therefore claim that genuinely wealthy people are fine to waste things then since they can afford to. However, any wasteful behaviour passes negative externalities onto others. So we must all live within the Earth’s means, not merely our own personal financial means. Just because you can personally afford to waste or consume a lot, it doesn’t mean the planet can.
Humans are technically the most disgusting creatures in the world (ever) based objectively on the kind and amount of waste produced!
Manufacturers will obviously tend to advise that their own products should be replaced regularly – they want repeat business. But repeatedly buying new stuff because stuff doesn’t last, and gets dumped in landfill, doesn’t incentivise manufacturers to design and make more durable and lasting products. Reusing is bad for their bottom line, even though it’s better for the environment, as well as for your wallet (hence the interests of manufacturers and the interests of consumers aren’t always aligned – indeed, their profit-maximisation interests conflict with so many of our long-term interests).
Businesses often exaggerate a problem, then sell you the supposed ‘solution’ for it (e.g. pharmaceutical companies and ‘medicalising’ every social, behavioural or psychosocial problem).
A lot of new product models barely meaningfully evolve, never mind revolutionise, upon their previous models. Some companies deliberately withhold the technologies in their patents or delay the release of the very best products they can produce so that they don’t cannibalise their own, relatively inferior, products before they’ve sold as many of these as they can first.
Apple admitted to slowing down the speeds of their older devices after software updates. This forced users to buy newer models, although the company claimed that this was to prevent ageing batteries from randomly shutting down older devices (but why not prompt users to replace just the batteries instead if so?) Laws against built-in or planned obsolescence, plus ‘right to repair’ legislation, can come at a government policy level.
Woof. A conscientious form of capitalism looks after financial, ecological, intellectual, social, mental, emotional, physical, cultural and spiritual needs – in a sustainable circular economy.
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