Circular Economy
Degrowth, Nature Magazine, Dec 2022
Enable sustainable development. This requires cancelling unfair and unpayable debts of low- and middle-income countries, curbing unequal exchange in international trade and creating conditions for productive capacity to be reoriented towards achieving social objectives.
Reduce working time. This could be achieved by lowering the retirement age, encouraging part-time working or adopting a four-day working week. These measures would lower carbon emissions and free people to engage in care and other welfare-improving activities. They would also stabilize employment as less-necessary production declines.
Improve public services. It is necessary to ensure universal access to high-quality health care, education, housing, transportation, Internet, renewable energy and nutritious food. Universal public services can deliver strong social outcomes without high levels of resource use.
Reduce less-necessary production. This means scaling down destructive sectors such as fossil fuels, mass-produced meat and dairy, fast fashion, advertising, cars and aviation, including private jets. At the same time, there is a need to end the planned obsolescence of products, lengthen their lifespans and reduce the purchasing power of the rich.
Introduce a green jobs guarantee. This would train and mobilize labour around urgent social and ecological objectives, such as installing renewables, insulating buildings, regenerating ecosystems and improving social care. A programme of this type would end unemployment and ensure a just transition out of jobs for workers in declining industries or ‘sunset sectors’, such as those contingent on fossil fuels. It could be paired with a universal income policy
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) suggest that degrowth policies should be considered in the fight against climate breakdown and biodiversity loss, respectively.
Wealthy economies should abandon growth of gross domestic product (GDP) as a goal, scale down destructive and unnecessary forms of production to reduce energy and material use, and focus economic activity around securing human needs and well-being.
Smart City Innovation Ventures
Epic Water Cleantec.
Epic Cleantec provides real estate developers and building owners with turnkey onsite greywater and blackwater reuse systems that recycle up to 95% of a building's wastewater for non-potable applications, reducing utility costs and showcasing sustainability efforts.
Our technology produces three sustainable outputs:
Recycled water for non-potable applications Recovered waste heat energy Repurposed organic solids
Streetbond Reflective Coating
n Pacoima, one of the hottest neighborhoods in Los Angeles, there are 10 square blocks where the pavement reflects sunlight instead of absorbing it. That asphalt—on streets, playgrounds, basketball courts, and parking lots—is covered with StreetBond. It’s part of a new urban heat island mitigation research project involving community groups and GAF, the roofing company that makes StreetBond. The water-based acrylic coating for asphalt contains a unique solar reflective additive that keeps pavement covered with the substance about 10 to 12 degrees cooler than uncoated surfaces, says Eliot Wall, StreetBond’s director of innovation. The nontoxic coating comes in 59 colors, extends the life of asphalt, and can be recycled. By the end of 2022, about 20 million square feet of pavement in the U.S. will be coated with solar reflective StreetBond.
Gradient Windows
As the planet warms, more people need air conditioners—but traditional ACs use a lot of energy and exacerbate global warming. The Gradient ($1,999, pre-order for 2023 delivery) aims to break this doom cycle with style. The system uses an electric heat pump for warming and an environmentally-friendlier refrigerant for cooling. This reduces heating- and cooling-related carbon emissions by 50% to 80%, says Gradient CEO Vince Romanin. Sleek and silent, Gradient sits below window sills, improving on loud, light-blocking window ACs without requiring any retrofitting. Users control temperature settings via a companion app.
Esper Bionics
Capitalizing on advances in artificial intelligence and digital signal processing, Esper Bionics’ prosthetic hand is the first AI-powered, cloud-based robotic prosthetic that gets smarter over time. The lightweight device has up to 24 wearable sensors that detect and process muscle activity and brain impulses; machine learning from Esper’s platform enables the hand to act more “intuitively” over time. Esper Bionics CEO and co-founder Dima Gazda, a medical doctor and engineer, sees the prosthetic market as ripe for disruption—and setting the stage for a bionic future.
Vicarious Surgical
Vicarious Surgical’s mission is to make surgery safer. The company created a robotic system featuring a camera and a 360-degree view. Surgeons wear a VR headset while controlling the robot’s two arms, each with 28 sensors for extreme precision. The starting point? A 1 .5 cm incision through which the robot enters the patient's body.
eZee
In India, home to 21 of the world's most polluted cities, many air pollutants come from the millions of auto-rickshaws that navigate congested streets. So power Global created the eZee subscription battery service for drivers who use cleaner electric rickshaws. Drivers receive a battery module with they can swap when depleted for charged one at a network of kiosks for roughly 2 to 3 hours a day that are saving of at least 30% per day compared with diesel or petrol costs.
Extract Time Magazine Oct 2022
Smart Cities
According to United Nations 2019, the urban share of the world population has increased from less than 30 percent in 1950 to 55 percent in 2018. The share is higher in more developed regions: for example, 74 and 82 percent in Europe and North America. Major cities typically form at some naturally advantageous locations, such as the locations of natural ports. However, such cities often continue to prosper even after the original advantage of the location disappeared. That is, the agglomeration is locked in at its initial location due to the second nature advantage accruing from positive agglomeration externalities. Bleakley and Lin 2012, Michaels and Rauch 2018, and Redding, et al. 2011 show evidence for such “lock-in” effects in the United States, France, and Germany, respectively. Mori, 2020 Agglomination
Urban Design for Smart Cities
Waste
Access
Nutrition
Ecology
Equity
LIVABILITY
Circular economy linked to industrial symbiosis and automation.
A "regenerative City is powered by renewable energy and defined by a restorative and mutually beneficial relationship between cities and their hinterland. (Worlfuturecouncil 2016)
This will mean creating cities that not only deplete resources and damage ecosystems but that actively contribute to the regeneration of the natural resources they consume and the ecosystem services they rely on.
Regenerative cities mimic nature’s circular metabolism by operating in a closed-loop system that transforms waste outputs into inputs of value.
Urban-based economic activities account for 55% of Gross National Product (GNP) in the least developed countries, 73% in middle income countries and 85% in industrialised countries. (UN)
Smart Cities IOT
Ismagilova, 2019,Smart cities: Advances in research—An information systems perspective, Table One
Smart cities use an IS centric approach to the intelligent use of ICT within an interactive infrastructure to provide advanced and innovative services to its citizens, impacting quality of life and sustainable management of natural resources. Ismagilova, 2019
"Whilst Asia remains ahead of the curve, legacy cities in the West, are feeling the pressure to upgrade ageing infrastructure. The COVID-19 pandemic, mounting sustainability commitments, resource constraints and continued urban growth are making a new case for investment." Barclays
Smart Water Management using just in time waste water collection, circular waste management and waste to energy system.
Energy management and deployment of smart grids, microgrids and gamification apps to lower energy use.
Buildings and construction to mitigate climate change through automation.
Enabling technologies expedited shift to work from home is driving the need for reliable and secure high-speed connectivity.
It facilitates letting go of past experiences and moving beyond the path dependencies of the present and turn towards the future “ with a clean sheet of paper” . This being a participatory exercise, participants could freely frame their topics and as it turned out they opted to search for an image of their industry that serves ecological and social goals. This was accompanied by an in-depth reflection on how they perceive their own roles in current society. The surprising nature of these results led us to the question whether it is the methodological framework of backcasting that in itself drives the emergence of a more radical, responsible and sustainable future vision of an industry.
Most scenarios are forward looking; they extrapolate from the present towards the future. Three classes of scenarios or futures can be distinguished, [6,31,32], answering to the questions: what will happen (trend extrapolations; business as usual scenarios); what could happen (forecasting; foresighting; strategic scenarios) and what should happen (normative scenarios like those used in backcasting). Normative scenarios are also called desirable futures, visions, or future visions.
Smartcitiesshould focus on how technology can act as an enabler to improvethe life of citizens rather than expecting technology by itself to en-gender change. Solutions that empower people via the use of IS basedtechnologies are likely to provide the greatest benefits ( Schaffers et al.,)
Smart mobility
Volvo On Call app
enables you, the vehicle owner, to share your vehicle with family members, friends and acquaintances without having to meet up to hand over the vehicle and keys
Supply Chain Sustainability
example accelerator 100+
Forbes 20 IOT Start-ups
consumer connected networks
Smart City Technololoes
Asset Management
Examples from Built 34 IOT Companies including cloud based comuting, location trackers, real time promotion and point of sales, mass alert systems.
digital library of materials is sourced from connected buildings, which also provide information that allows predictive maintenance and effective sharing and utilization of space and energy consumption
Example Predictive modelling and maintenance
Maximising product lifetime and minimising new purchase through tracking an organisation’s assets, planning what can be re-used, repaired or redeployed at a different site.
Intelligent Assets
Distributed Energy schemes
Examples include startups like Vandebron in the Netherlands and Brooklyn-based Transactive Grid
Circular Economy Themes
Digital Twins
Additive Manufacturing
Greening
Green Buildings
UK definition of a zero carbon home is where CO2 emissions from regulated energy use were limited or mitigated by a combination of three factors (the first two of which are known as ‘carbon compliance’ standards):
Where it is not possible to reduce the regulated CO2 emissions to zero using these on-site measures, the remaining carbon emissions could be mitigated through allowable off-site solutions.
Using low and zero carbon technologies and connected heat networks to limit on-site built emissions
Achieving minimum Fabric Energy Efficiency Standards (FEES) based on space heating and cooling:
Homes and architecture
Living Green Walls
Verticle growing
Hydroponics
Green Urban Spaces
Urban Greening
Example Scotscape
Interior Landscaping
Living Walls (exterior) and smart cladding
biophilic design and the ability of plants to improve air quality and a greater sense of well-being for city dwellers
Guirilla planting of public open spaces
Such an increase in the trees' presence over the city’s soil, about a 30% expansion, could absorb 5 million tons of carbon dioxide every year while reducing PM10 small particles by 3,000 tons in the next ten years.
Milan (2019) plans to plant 3 million trees by 2030, believing that the increase in greenery will have a positive effect on the quality of air, and consequently on the health of the people.
Transforming living environments, and also artifacts such as a space, a lifestyle or a brand image, into a more environmentally friendly version (i.e. 'greening your home' or 'greening your office'). The act of greening generally involves incorporating more environmentally friendly systems into one's environment, such as the home, work place, and general lifestyle.
Community Pods
Community Membership Pods
Community Based Living Spaces
Shared learning hubs. micro-schools and in-person support for disadvanatges children.
Community co-workspace
New Wave Of Co-Working Is Black-Owned, Inclusive And Serving The Underservedpic
members who work for a range of different companies, ventures, and projects. Because there is little direct competition or internal politics, they don’t feel they have to put on a work persona to fit in. Working amidst people doing different kinds of work can also make one’s own work identity stronger.
Marginalised communities who organise through mutual aid and collaborative consumption in response to cultural changes eg COVID
Zero Waste
Smart packaging, Berlin eg LivingPackage a reusable durable digitally locked and connected to tracking.
Industrial ecology (IE) tracks physical resource flows of industrial and consumer systems at a variety of spatial scales, drawing on environmental and social science, engineering, management, and policy analysis. Prescriptively, IE seeks to reduce environmental impacts and the pressure on natural resources while maintaining function for human well-being, by stressing the importance of production choices to extend the life of embedded materials and energy, emphasizing circular rather than linear flows, and decoupling economic growth from resource use
Bio-mimicry
Ogilvy Spirits, a company making vodka from potatoes that are not suitable for retail.
Argent Energy, a company using waste fats and oils to convert into biofuel
CelluComp, a company turning nano fibres from root vegetable by-products into an environmentally friendly thickener for paint
incentived return
Offering a financial or other incentive for the return of ‘used’ products. Products can be refurbished and re-sold.
Smart Tourist Destinations
Gretzel smart tourism as five layers:
a data layer (data storage, open data clearing houses and data-mining applications);
an experience layer (technology and data-enhanced experiences’ consumption).
a business layer (innovation based on the available technologies and data sources);
a smart technology layer (that links to the physical layer and provides business solutions and consumer applications);
a physical layer (natural and human-made touristic resources, transportation and service infras-tructures);
Smart Tourism Cities Europe
Helsinki
Gotenburg
Ljubljana Digitalisation
Brenda accessibility
Examples of smart tourism Masabi – Smart Ticketing, Bismart Information Kiosks, Quantela Crowd Solutions, and FlippArgo Augmented Reality
A smart destination has to be seen as part of a broader smart tourism ecosystem, in which there is the integration of different business and tourism stakeholders, sharing objectives and interconnected technologies used to overcome the division between the physical and digital spheres
A smart city is to be an icon of a sustainable and livable city [7]: an integrative framework can be adopted since it contemplates inner factors (management and organization; technology; policy context) and outer factors (governance; people and communities; economy; built infrastructure; natural environment) (Avalar 2020).
Regenerative Agriculture
Digital Agriculture
Conservation?
Low Carbon Farming
carbon sequestration, biomass, heat pumps, energy storage, hydrogen, biofuels
Examples using waste treatment and greenhouses.
Will the World Run out of Food?
Example: Project Drawdown claims that “regenerative agriculture enhances and sustains the health of the soil by restoring its carbon content, which in turn improves productivity—just the opposite of conventional agriculture,” and estimates that regenerative annual cropping could reduce or sequester 14.5–22 gigatons of CO2 by 2050 (Project Drawdown, 2020)
Building on conservation agriculture with additional practices, regenerative annual cropping can include compost application, green manure, and organic production. It reduces emissions, increases soil organic matter, and sequesters carbon.
Rhodes (2017) “regenerative agriculture has at its core the intention to improve the health of soil or to restore highly degraded soil, which symbiotically enhances the quality of water, vegetation and land-productivity.”
Regenerative agriculture is an alternative means of producing food that, its advocates claim, may have lower—or even net positive—environmental and/or social impacts. Regenerative agriculture has recently received significant attention from producers, retailers, researchers, and consumers, as well as politicians and the mainstream media. Despite widespread interest in regenerative agriculture, no legal or regulatory definition of the term “regenerative agriculture” exists nor has a widely accepted definition emerged in common usage. Newton (2020)
Circular food
World Economic Forum (PACE)
Plant based diets
The ‘linear’ nature of modern food production, which extracts finite resources, is wasteful and polluting, and harms natural systems.
The linear food system is ripe for disruption.
Since 80% of food will be consumed in cities by 2050, cities can significantly influence the way food is grown, particularly by interacting with producers in their peri-urban and rural surroundings. Regenerative approaches to food production will ensure the food that enters cities is cultivated in a way that enhances rather than degrades the environment, as well as creating many other systemic benefits.
Read this Report (Ellen MACARTHUR Foundation
Circular fashion
More sustainable fashion can be defined as clothing, shoes and accessories that are manufactured, marketed and used in the most sustainable manner possible, taking into account both environmental and socio-economic aspects. In practice, this implies continuous work to improve all stages of the product’s life cycle, from design, raw material production, manufacturing, transport, storage, marketing and final sale, to use, reuse, repair, remake and recycling of the product and its components. From an environmental perspective, the aim should be to minimize any undesirable environmental effect of the product’s life cycle by: (a) ensuring efficient and careful use of natural resources (water, energy, land, soil, animals, plants, biodiversity, ecosystems, etc); (b) selecting renewable energy sources (wind, solar, etc) at every stage, and (c) maximizing repair, remake, reuse, and recycling of the product and its components. From a socio-economic perspective, all stakeholders should work to improve present working conditions for workers on the field, in the factories, transportation chain, and stores, by aligning with good ethics, best practice and international codes of conduct. In addition, fashion companies should contribute to encourage more sustainable consumption patterns, caring and washing practices, and overall attitudes to fashion. (Green Strategy, June 2014)
http://www.greenstrategy.se/sustainable-fashion/what-is-sustainable-fashion/
Consumers do view fashion consumption from an internal egoistical perspective (Lundblad and Davies 2016), it is suggested to view ‘sustainable fashion’ as a ‘sustainable style’ as recommended by (Bly et al. 2015) as it is referenced that ‘style’ is internally dictated (Mikkonen et al. 2014). This could help the disjuncture with a production perspective of sustainable clothing rather than as a lifecycle (Bly et al. 2015).
Sustainable fashion consumers are motivated by wanting to help support the environment, knowing that their
actions are helping to reduce these risks socially and environmentally (Lundblad and Davies 2016).
Examples - Recycling of trainers Thousand Fells
Examples of Brands Bazaar
‘Circular fashion’ can be defined as clothes, shoes or accessories that are designed, sourced, produced and provided with the intention to be used and circulate responsibly and effectively in society for as long as possible in their most valuable form, and hereafter return safely to the biosphere when no longer of human use. (Dr. Anna Brismar, 2017, circularfashion.com)
Stacey Dooley BBC
Ellen MacArthurs on Circular Fasion
Make a CE for Fashion
Term encompasses Fast Fashion and Compassion Fashion
Opportunity or Threat?
Biomicracy
Biomimicry is the practice of looking to nature for inspiration to solve design problems in a regenerative way.
example portfolio
Green Valley Awards
Consider alternative materials and material reuse;
Repag is the only plastic free printed film packaging throughout Europe which is verifiably 100% biodegradable.
Aeropower - the world's first thermal packaging material made from surplus feathers.
Prolong asset life;
Superseven, which has designed a 100 per cent biodegradable type of packaging made from cellulose. This prize includes a one-day workshop with the Seedmatch team, teaching the start-up how to create their own crowd campaign, whilst also offering a crowdfunding campaign on Seedmatch or Econeer (its sister platform).
Develop new technologies and business models that can advance modularisation;
Ecoplasteam uses their solution ‘EcoAllene’ to overcome the difficulty of separating material mixes, such as waste products like sweet wrappers, which consist of a metal and a plastic layer. This patented production process creates a versatile new ecological plastic material which can be used in clothing, paving stones or household items.
Dow Jones Sustainability Indices
Design for disassembly and re-use;
Refurb offers an online marketplace where high-quality refurbished products from smartphones to computer monitors can be sold on, as brand new, reducing the amount of new products that need to be manufactured.
Sustainable investement creates long-term shareholder value in an resource-constrained world
Seeks to measure "Corporate Sustainability"
Scottish Edge
Businesses with innovative circular economy business ideas could be in the running for up to £100k support from Scottish EDGE thanks to a new funding award supported by Zero Waste Scotland. Circular Economy EDGE is a special award category introduced with Zero Waste Scotland funding to encourage and back entrepreneurs who are exploring circular ways of doing business.
Backcasting: a View of 2035? Koves 2021
Working in Industry
In 2035 technology enables individuals to measure their well-being through their well-being index. The system accounts for the fact that “ different things make different people happy” according to their personality, circumstances, relationships, physical and mental needs. If someone decides to share some aspects of these traits, they can receive personal assistance in what may have the highest impact on their well-beingwith the lowest impact on the environment. This system is created in such a way that it then monitors and reports back on the rate of satisfaction iterating towards a routine whereby those products that have high impact on the environment, or low impact on personal well-being or an unacceptable ratio of the two are automatically driven out of the system by not appearing in the recommendations.
Marketing communications as the value-broker
Such conscious individuals carefully pick their sustainable consumption based on values. They buy from producers that share their values and it is marketing communication that is a matchmaker for consumer and product based on individual and social well-being and the matching values. To be able to do that for those who knowingly and voluntarily opt into their services (i.e., share their personal data and preferences with them) they also act as “ quality assurances” for the products they advertise.
The upgrading of the homo oeconomicus
In 2035 humans are no longer just the rational, utility-maximising, self-interested homo oeconomicus. They are considered conscious decision-makers who are capable of prioritising environmental sustainability and the “ common good” above their own wealth. “ Getting rich easily, unfairness and excessive financial wealth are no longer status symbols, let alone ideals.” Consumption is restricted to serving well-being that is being fulfilled also by other means to material consumption. Shopping just for the fun of it without careful consideration of its impact is a thing of the past. Being useful to society and the ecosystem gives humans “ tremendous amounts of energy” . (It is interesting to note how this suggests that they are now tired of being just a hindrance to both.) Competition (deemed inherent to human progress) still exists but it is “ based on real values, social utility and well-being”
Well-being maximalisation as the new profit maximalisation
In line with the previous vignette, economic actors no longer seek only profits even if money is still an indicator. However, it is an indicator of the produced social value rather than mere shareholder value. The overarching goal of seeking well-being rather than material wealth is the leading concept throughout the backcasting process. Well-being maximisation is the new profit maximalisation. Even though at first it may seem just as anthropocentric, all along the participants handled the awareness (and constant measurement via technological advances) of individual and collective human environmental impact and the respect for the limiting factors of ecological boundaries as default.
The vision reflects a highly techno-optimistic scenario where technology is developed to support human goals. However, the adversities and inherent controversies of technological development in terms of sustainability and equity were not reflected on at all.
Backcasting
Koves 2021
As opposed to forecasting, backcasting does not try to extrapolate current trends to come up with possible scenarios of the future but envisions a normative future in order to identify what can be done today in order to move trends and tendencies towards a more desirable outcome (Robinson, 2003; Vergragt and Quist, 2011; Robinson et al., 2011; Svenfelt et al., 2019; V ̈ah ̈akari et al., 2020). The future date of the vision must lie far enough in the future in order to get rid of the path dependencies and lock-in effects of the present to enable participants to leave them behind in their envisioning but close enough for the participants to feel that it matters to them or their children (K ̈oves, 2014). The year 2035 was chosen as a time span for the vision considered that in the life of a company 17 years already feels implausibly far, while in the life of their employees this is still a tangible distance.
A backcasting research normally consists of four main stages: 1) framing the topic; 2) building a normative future scenario; 3) identifying intervention steps (backcasting them from the future to the present); and 4) finding synergies and controversies between the intervensions.
Backcasting is a scenario-building research method that uses the envisioned normative future to identify potential intervention steps that lead current trends towards that desired future (Robinson, 2003). Working its way back from the ideal future to the present, it enables scarcely surfacing thoughts, concepts and logics to the-matise the road to such an outcome. It can be used on the levels of organisations, geographical regions, industries and whole societies. Our presented case indicates that not only is backcasting a good tool to discuss sustainability issues, but it also works the other way round: when applying backcasting, sustainability issues start dominating the discussions even in environments where it is least expected.
Backcasting can be defined as “ generating a desirable future, and then looking backwards from that future to the present in order to strategize and to plan how it could be achieved” Vergragt 2011
The third class of future studies is normative scenarios including backcasting scenarios (what should happen). Backcasting scenarios are also different because they better recognize the systemic nature of the challenges ahead, and often assume that systemic societal transitions are necessary in order to achieve desirable futures. In this sense they have some similarities with the more recent developments in “transition studies”[45–48]. Transition management with its underlying multi-level perspective seeks to develop a methodology, an approach, a toolkit, as well as policies and governance structures for purposeful societal transitions towards sustainability.
The second class of future studies (what could happen?) finds its origin in the Shell scenarios of the 1970s and beyond. Shell has been the frontrunner in this type of scenario development [37–39]. It created a special unit of highly skilled and innovative scenario builders, and consulted around the globe to sample trends, expectations, cultural shifts, and other context variables. The strategic relevance of developing such context scenarios showing uncertainty by developing a range of possible futures was confirmed when Shell was much better prepared for the oil crisis in the 1970s than their competitors, which led to competitive advantage [40]. Shell's aim was to anticipate all kinds of unexpected developments; ranging from natural disasters to government interventions and economic crises. However, it did not always help: when the crisis around the Brent Spar took place in the 1990s [41], and around oil winning in Nigeria in the 2000s [42] Shell was highly surprised and unprepared. It had not foreseen these crises and the societal responses to them.
The first class of trend extrapolating scenarios (what will happen?) is often called business as usual (BAU); in those scenarios it is assumed that no major changes occur, and that societies, technologies, and cultures develop according to a continuous path from the past towards the future. BAU scenarios do not take into account uncertainty and complexity, whereas the future is inherently uncertain, and society is inherently complex and ambiguous. Consequently, it is widely acknowledged that relevance of BAU scenarios is mostly for the short-term and for well-defined and rather stable systems. T
Backcasting allows a business manager to focus on desirable system conditions, meaning the input into strategies are targeted explicitly on outcomes such as what material to use or the market being targeted (Alange & Mats, 2014).
Final “visioning packages” combining the visualizations, narratives, and supporting information were presented to Delta community members in order to determine (among other issues) which scenario they preferred and the perceptions of which scenario most accurately reflected the current state of their community. Robinson 2011
Backcasting is part of a larger category of approaches called normative scenarios that advocate the idea that when one attempts to create a vision of the future, there are certain values and basic value-laden assumptions determining what a desirable future would look like. Ogilvy, 1996
As backcasting is a form of scenario planning, organisations on their route to the desired outcome can also identify critical factors and trends that may later become continuity risks. An example of this would be the pre-empting of legislation that shall impact the organisation in the future. If the organisation voluntarily conforms to emerging norms it becomes well positioned to innovate and experiment in areas outside of compliance (Nidumolu, et al., 2009).
Used to identify future trends in sustainability and create a busines case in aticipation of the changes.
Defining Circularity
Winans, 2017, the CE concept is interwoven with various other concepts, some of which predate it. This includes, Industrial symbiosis, Eco-city and Industrial ecology and systems theory.
Water eycling within a closed-loop system if the materials added to the water throughout its use (and reuse) consider the long-term potential applications and quality of the water.
Agricultural waste animal-husbandry includes pharmaceutical, fertilizer, and agricultural industry in material reuse and recycling to reduce and manage waste streams and increase annual income
Metals circularity of steel and iron and related industrial symbiosis networks including excess waste material and management in secondary vs. primary production steel that changes its quality or grade.
Plastics -Lee et al. material flows of phthalates (chemicals used to make plastics) to address “upcycling” or maintained quality, “downcycling” or decreased quality, and “risk cycling” for presence of contaminants in waste streams.
Phorosous and Chemicals
Wood and paper waste management eg industrial symbiosis with a power plant, a water purification plant, waste water treatment plant, and a landfill.
Bocken et al. (2016: 309) categorise the characteristics of the Circular Economy by defining it as “design and business model strategies [that are] slowing, closing, and narrowing resource loops”.
Geissdoerfer et al.2017 define the Circular Economy as a “regenerative system in which resource input and waste, emission, and energy leakage are minimised by slowing, closing, and narrowing material and energy loops. This can be achieved through long-lasting design, maintenance, repair, reuse, remanufacturing, refurbishing, and recycling”.
The economic growth in an economy with a circular logic is no longer achieved by producing more products, but by keeping them available for a longer time, for example by maintaining instead of replacing them Ami, 2017
The power of the inner circle refers to minimizing comparative materials use vis-à-vis the linear production system. The tighter the circle, i.e. the less a product has to be changed in reuse, refurbishment and remanufacturing and the faster it returns to use, the higher the potential savings on the shares of material, labour, energy and capital still embedded in the product, and the associated externalities (such as greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, water and toxicity).
“The transition is “a disruptive nature, requiring new Solutions where current ways of working need to change.” They define “Innovation as a collective process of creating and realizing new values for customers; it is people who recognize opportunities and who develop and implement new ideas by engaging in transactions with others.” And they suggest “The organizational perspective on circular economy is not well explored, which is why a qualitative research method is found most suitable.” Ritzen, 2017
Similar to sustainable development, circular economy is a fluid concept that is still evolving. Both literatures are rooted in the systems ecology literature of the 1960–70s and herein it will be argued that their shared history has led to their interrelation being assumed rather than made explicit. Velenturf, 2021
In order to move into a more sustainable economic system, a recently more frequently discussed approach for overcoming the current linearity of product lifecycles is the concept of circular economy (CE). CE suggests keeping materials available instead of disposing them, and thus closing the loop of materials within the product lifecycle, in order to reduce resource usage and energy demand. Ritzén, 2017
Drivers and concepts
Complex System Theory van Der Leeuw
Problem solving increases information processing capacity.
Information can be shared and shaped to evolve new ideas.
Energy and matter cannot be shared but are necessary for survival.
Humans cannot share energy and matter but are able to harness it by transforming the organization of their environment. By transforming the environment, there is a need to innovate new ideas to adapt into a new environment thus broadening humans’ availability to information by sharing and evolving new ideas together.
“Natural capital" refers to the world’s stocks of natural assets including soil, air, water and all living things. In their book “Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution”, Hawken et al describe a global economy in which business and environmental interests overlap, recognising the interdependencies that exist between the production and use of human-made capital and flows of natural capital.
John T. Lyle started developing ideas on regenerative design that could be applied to all systems, i.e., beyond agriculture, for which the concept of regeneration had already been formulated earlier. Arguably, he laid the foundations of the circular economy framework,
Janine Benyus, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, defines her approach as ‘a new discipline that studies nature’s best ideas and then imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems’. Studying a leaf to invent a better solar cell is an example. She thinks of it as ‘innovation inspired by nature’. Biomimicry relies on three key principles:
Nature as mentor: View and value nature not based on what we can extract from the natural world, but what we can learn from it.
Nature as measure: Use an ecological standard to judge the sustainability of our innovations.
Nature as model: Study nature’s models and emulate these forms, process, systems, and strategies to solve human problems.
“Industrial ecology" is the study of material and energy flows through industrial systems”. Focusing on connections between operators within the ‘industrial ecosystem’, this approach aims at creating closed-loop processes in which waste serves as an input, thus eliminating the notion of an undesirable by-product. Industrial ecology adopts a systemic point of view, designing production processes in accordance with local ecological constraints whilst looking at their global impact from the outset, and attempting to shape them so they perform as close to living systems as possible.
It proposed selling services rather than products, an idea referred to as the ‘functional service economy’, now more widely subsumed into the notion of ‘performance economy’. Stahel argues that the circular economy should be considered a framework: as a generic notion, the circular economy draws on several more specific approaches that gravitate around a set of basic principles
Stahl's extenstion to cradle to grave proposes a "closed loop” approach to production processes with four goals: product-life extension, long-life goods, reconditioning activities, and waste prevention. .
"Cradle to Cradle" design perceives the safe and productive processes of nature’s ‘biological metabolism’ as a model for developing a ‘technical metabolism’ flow of industrial materials. Product components can be designed for continuous recovery and reutilisation as biological and technical nutrients within these metabolisms.
Subtopic
Ellen McArthur Foundation Value Creation
9R Framwork
TED.com
The doughnot
A Circular Economy should be designed to thrive not grow!
4 sources of value creation
Value Creation is the Circular Economy
Power of pure, non-toxic, or at least easier-to-separate inputs and designs: The power of this fourth major lever is a further enhancement to the above-mentioned value creation potential and offers an additional host of benefits. To generate maximum value, each of the above levers requires a certain purity of material and quality of products and components. Currently, many post-consumption material streams become available as mixtures of materials, either because of the way these materials were selected and combined in a previous single product or because they are collected and handled without segmentation and without regard for preserving purity and qualit
The power of cascaded use refers to diversifying reuse across the value chain, as when cotton clothing is reused first as second-hand apparel, then crosses to the furniture industry as fibre-fill in upholstery, and the fibre-fill is later reused in stone wool insulation for construction—substituting for an inflow of virgin materials into the economy in each case—before the cotton fibres are safely returned to the biosphere.
The power of pure inputs, finally, lies in the fact that uncontaminated material streams increase collection and redistribution efficiency while maintaining quality, particularly of technical materials, which in turn extends product longevity and thus increases material productivity.
The power of circling longer refers to maximizing the number of consecutive cycles (be it repair, reuse, or full remanufacturing) and/or the time in each cycle. Each prolonged cycle avoids the material, energy and labour of creating a new product or component.
Eco-effectiveness (transformative) proposes the transformation of products and their associated material flows such that they form a supportive relationship with ecological systems and future economic growth. The goal is not to minimise the cradle-to-grave flow of materials, but to generate cyclical, cradle-to-cradle ‘metabolisms’ that enable materials to maintain their status as resources and accumulate intelligence over time (upcycling).
Eco-efficiency (traditional) begins with the assumption of a one-way, linear flow of materials through industrial systems: raw materials are extracted from the environment, transformed into products, and eventually disposed of. In this system, eco-efficient techniques seek only to minimise the volume, velocity, and toxicity of the material flow system, but are incapable of altering its linear progression. Some materials are recycled, but often as an end-of-pipe solution, since these materials are not designed to be recycled. Instead of true recycling, this process is actually downcycling, a downgrade in material quality, which limits usability and maintains the linear, cradle-to-grave dynamic of the material flow system.
The circular economy replaces the concept of a consumer with a user. This calls for a new contract between businesses and their customers based on product performance. (World Economic Forum)
In the circular economy growth and prosperity are decoupled from natural resource consumption and ecosystem degradation. By not from throwing away used products, components and materials, instead re-routing them into the right value chains, we can create a society with a healthy economy, inspired on and in balance with nature.
The energy required to fuel this cycle should be renewable by nature, again to decrease resource dependence and increase systems resilience.
Circularity introduces a differentiation between consumable and durable components of a product. Consumables in the circular economy are made of biological ingredients or ‘nutrients’ that are non-toxic and may be beneficial, and can safely be returned to the biosphere, either directly or in a cascade of consecutive uses. Durables such as engines or computers, are made of technical nutrients unsuitable for the biosphere, such as metals and most plastics. These are designed from the start for reuse, and products subject to rapid technological advance are designed for upgrade
A circular economy aims to design out waste. Waste does not exist: products are designed and optimized for a cycle of disassembly and reuse. These component and product cycles define the circular economy and set it apart from disposal and even recycling, where large amounts of embedded energy and labour are lost.
"The WCED (1987) report Our Common Future, better known as "the Brundtland report", set out the values and principles that still frame the sustainable development debate. It was a positive response to the grave concerns raised in the 1960–70s by authors such as Meadows et al. (1972) for the Club of Rome, stating that “Humanity has the ability to make development sustainable to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” Cited in Venenturf, 2021
