Apparently Australia is transitioning to a circular economy (CE). The rest of the world? Not so sure.
So what exactly is a CE? Let’s start with defining it. Why? Because without defining what a CE is, we are unlikely to be able to agree on what to do next.
What is a circular economy?
The best known definition, as far as I am aware (happy to be corrected) is from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. You can check it out on their website. It starts with describing what’s wrong with the world by saying “in our current economy, we take materials from the Earth, make products with them, and eventually throw them away as waste – the process is linear. In a circular economy, by contrast, we stop waste being produced in the first place”.
The CE is based on three principles, driven by design:
- Eliminate waste and pollution
- Circulate products and materials (at their highest value)
- Regenerate nature.
It finishes by saying that “the circular economy is a systems solution framework that tackles global challenges like climate change, biodiversity loss, waste and pollution”.
They are good goals to have.
When the definition says that the CE is a systems solution framework, that means it is complex and complicated
That in turn means that the devil is in the detail and there are no quick fixes. That in turn means it will take time to achieve.
The framework needs to tackle global challenges, because the economy operates on a global scale. Yet we have to start on a small scale, as that is where the rules are made.
The NSW Government put out a circular economy policy statement, Too Good To Waste, in February 2019. It defines a CE as follows: “A circular economy values resources by keeping products and resources in use for as long as possible. Maximising the use and value of resources brings major economic, social and environmental benefits. It contributes to innovation, growth and job creation, while reducing our impact on the environment.”
Sounds a bit ambiguous, right?
Whilst the first sentence – keep using things as long as possible – makes good sense to me, it seems to contradict the second and third sentence. How does using things for longer bring major economic benefits or contribute to growth? Our GDP would measure less consumption or negative growth if we keep using things longer, unless we buy or consume more at the same time, which is obviously not the purpose of the CE.
Has this been thought through?
Let’s try to understand what circular economy actually means.
CE has two components, circularity and the economy.
Circularity means getting away from a linear economic model where things are used and then thrown out.
Is circularity really possible?
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s so-called Butterfly Model takes into account so-called leakage of materials out of the CE. To me that looks like an acknowledgement that there will be waste, although the CE is supposed to eliminate waste. Maybe “elimination” of waste is a bit ambitious and the target should be minimisation? Seems not quite clear, right?
There are a couple of other problems with circularity as well.
One problem is that we keep creating hazardous materials and justifiably, we don’t want to re-use or recycle them. Not to create or manufacture hazardous materials would have to start even before the design of products.
Take PFAS for example. PFAS stands for per- and poly-flouroalkyl substances, which are used in Teflon. There are more than 6000 of them and they are ubiquitous in the environment, because we put them there. Apparently they are dangerous to humans and probably other life forms too. The EPAs of the world are now trying to regulate them out of the recycling sector, meaning that PFAS in recycled products render these products unusable. The problem is we keep producing products with PFAS in them. Makes no sense? Yep, welcome to the world of recycling.
Why did we make them in the first place? Because we can. Teflon was once developed because it was considered useful.
We know that halogens (molecules containing chemicals like fluorine and chlorine) are very reactive and basically all substances listed on the Stockholm list of Persistent Organic Pollutants contain halogens. Yet we keep making products using them. So, to get to a CE we need to eliminate all hazardous substances because they end up being waste. Might take a while.
Something else bothers me with this.
We have elaborate approval and testing processes for anything that is supposed to become a medicine because we know they are made to be ingested by humans. Yet we have no processes in place stopping companies making products that we know have a track record of being problematic to us and the environment. Makes no sense? Yep, agreed.
Another problem is physics. Take the second law of thermodynamics. It states the principle that entropy always increases over time. In layman terms it means that you put more material and energy into a process than you get out. It’s also called “waste”.
The laws of physics tell us this: there will always be waste
Maybe we should rephrase the “waste elimination” bit in the CE definition.
Let’s go back to the Butterfly Model of the circular economy for a moment. It shows various loops in the technical cycle of the model on how materials can loop back into the economy and not get wasted.
The outermost loop is recycling because, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, recycling “is the last resort in a circular economy because it means losing the embedded value of a product by reducing it to its basic materials”. What we have just learned though is due to entropy, recycling is actually also creating waste. We are not only losing the value of previous products but also losing matter and/or energy. Okay, you could argue that I am looking at this too narrowly and the good thing about recycling is that it keeps things within a system and out of landfill. I can agree with that. We should maybe just rephrase the above definition and be a bit more “honest” with our wording.
I apologise upfront for being a bit pedantic, but take a look at Einstein’s famous formula E = mc2 meaning that energy and mass are basically the same thing in different forms.
When looking at the waste hierarchy, energy recovery is lower in the hierarchy than recycling, meaning that energy recovery is not part of the CE according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. However, we know from what was discussed above that recycling, and logically also re-manufacturing, lose energy (and matter) due to entropy, whereas energy recovery at least uses matter, otherwise destined for landfill, to extract the embedded energy, ideally used for industrial purposes to replace fossil fuels. Why then draw the line for circularity at recycling?
Only if a material is landfilled is it really wasted. I think the definition of circular in the context of a circular economy needs to be extended. The whole idea of the waste hierarchy is to create an order of preference. We should prefer recycling over energy recovery, but we know that there will always be waste so let’s try to minimise landfill. To exclude energy recovery from the CE means to put landfilling and energy recovery onto the same level and that is clearly wrong.
Circularity isn’t as straightforward as one might have thought
I hope I haven’t confused you too much. Nevertheless, the concept of a CE immediately makes sense to most people. It is appealing to us, as we understand that throwing things away at the end of their use is not a good system.
So much about “circularity”. How about the “economics” in circular economy? More about that in the next article.