It should be clear that a circular economy (CE) will not happen by itself. It will require political intervention. And political intervention is underway.
In my two previous articles I have written about the two aspects of the CE – circularity and the economy:
In February 2019 the NSW Government released its Circular Economy Policy Statement Too Good To Waste, which was about minimising waste, reducing environmental impact and planning the transition to a CE.
At the Waste 2022 Conference in Coffs Harbour in May 2022, a representative of the NSW Government gave a presentation about the NSW Waste and Sustainable Materials Strategy 2041, stating that it was the NSW Government’s plan to transition to a CE over the next 20 years and that $356 million would be invested over five years starting 1 July 2022.
Then came the Australian Environment Ministers’ agreed communique on 21 October 2022, saying that ministers will “work with the private sector to design out waste and pollution, keep materials in use and foster markets to achieve a circular economy by 2030”.
How does that sound to you? We thought we might get there by 2041, but now it’s 2030.
Is the transition to a CE speeding up? Will we all be safe and secure by 2030? No more waste and pollution – just flowering gardens, sunshine and fabulous weather, rain for the farmers just when they need it? No more floods and bushfires? No more waste and pollution by 2030! Does that mean we can close down parts of the EPA in 2031?
I am afraid I will have to disappoint you. 2030 will go by and nothing much will have changed, except those ministers will have moved on to some other job, having been replaced by new ministers promising something else they cannot deliver.
Sorry about that!
In reality, we will have generated more waste, more pollution and so on.
So, what is this CE all about and can it ever happen? How long will it take?
All good questions. I don’t have all the answers, but I can tell you how another country that wrote a CE into law in 1996 is travelling. Just to compare. If you haven’t lost your mind yet.
Accenture and the Wuppertal Institute published Germany’s transition to a Circular Economy: How to unlock the potential of Cross-Industry Collaboration in 2019.
The report analysed the nature and scope of the transition required and then presented a guide for companies on how to integrate circularity into their business practices, answering questions like:
- How do you start your company on the path to circularity?
- How do you identify and adopt circular business models?
- How do you find the right partners for collaboration?
The report states that in “2019, only 10 per cent of production materials in Germany consisted of recovered resources. At a current annual circularity growth rate of 0.1 per cent, Germany will reach 50 per cent circularity by 2215.” Yes, you read that correctly – in 2215 – just under 200 years. 50 per cent circularity, not 100 per cent, just to make that clear again.
Take the Netherlands. The European Union reported in June 2020 that the Netherlands are the most circular country in the EU. The country had achieved a whopping 24.5 per cent circularity, while the global rate was 8.6 per cent. The government said that to achieve its ambition of full circularity by 2050, a major overhaul of its whole economy including jobs would be necessary.
Where is Australia at the moment? How many materials used in Australia consist of recovered resources? We wouldn’t have a clue. Yet we’ll get there by 2030, for sure!
Let’s take a deep breath.
Now let’s talk about trust.
What is trust and why is it important?
Trust is nothing tangible yet utterly important in day-to-day life.
Little story: I sat at a table at a wedding in April 2008. I didn’t know the other guests, so we introduced ourselves and chatted. One guest was working for a big Australian Bank. We chatted about what happened to Bear Stearns, the bank that nearly folded in 2007. He said that if something else of this nature happened, the world banking system would shut down.
I argued that couldn’t possibly be the case, he was exaggerating.
In September 2008 Lehman Brothers went broke and the world banking system did shut down. I was wrong. Why?
Banks lend each other money all across the world on a daily basis. They need to trust and rely on the system to keep operating. If something goes wrong can they rely on lawyers getting them their money from a different jurisdiction? Maybe or maybe not, but that would take years. The system could not rely on that.
If money is the currency of transactions, then trust is the currency of interactions. We are humans and our interactions with other humans rely on us trusting each other on a daily basis.
If the government is trying to convince or incentivise us to invest into something, we need to trust the government. Simple.
In NSW that is particularly simple. After the withdrawal of the exemption to apply composted MWOO (Mixed Waste Organic Outputs) to land (nearly rendering a few hundred million dollars of investment obsolete) and after the sudden exclusion of Sydney as a location for certain waste facilities, the industry has a lot of trust in the government, that it will make the right decisions in a reliable manner all the time. Just kidding.
Will we achieve a circular economy by 2030? No.
Will we be on the path to transitioning by 2030? Unlikely. Too many other problems to deal with first. We hopefully will be better at recycling, but to design out waste and pollution we need collaboration between governments and industries (not one industry, but many) on a global scale. That will take forever.
So what were ministers thinking when they agreed on the communique on 21 October 2022?
You could be forgiven for thinking that the more ministers in one room, the less intelligence is present, but it is clear that they were making promises they knew they couldn’t keep. Does that build trust? No.
It destroys trust.
What do we need? We need honesty. We need clarity of what we want to achieve and how- the path to achieving it and realistic timeframes. Forget “ambitious targets”. Try for real targets based on real data using real-world examples. Then we might just start listening and believing.