Design out waste
Last year, as the world started getting immune to COVID-19, they turned to coal to compensate for the degraded economy. According to an IEA, this resulted in increased carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 6% (36.3 billion tonnes) in 2021, compared to 2020.
Sustainability— quite often reminds me of one of my lecturers at the University, who was practically paperless. That was 10 years ago, and a lot has changed since then. People are more informed and cautious about the term. Nowadays, it has been one of the ‘must-have’ ingredients in the industry, whether you are working in the field or not.
Whichever field we are working in, the best we can do is not leave everything to someone else to deal with the net-zero target. Definitely, not telling you to go paperless right away, but start with a small but consistent contribution to decreasing emissions.
Use energy delicately because higher energy means, higher CO2 emissions. But how does circular economy come into this? To answer this, first, let’s look at our current economic system.
Our current economy system
Figure 1 shows a simple process flow diagram of our current economic system. We start with taking raw materials that proceed forward into the production stage to produce desired products.
The finished products are then distributed to consumers, who use them and discard them in landfill or incineration. This simple economic system, called Linear Economy, works towards producing waste.
We have two major problems here.
We are not reusing or recycling any waste from the system, and this means we need new material every time we run the process. The feedstock material has to be supplied fresh from somewhere.
Waste generation contributes to greenhouse gas emissions. It also means that all the energies, materials, and values that go into this product also become waste now. We throw away resources while they are still valuable. This is a huge drawback of our current economic system.
The circular economy
The circular economy is a sustainable business model that designs out waste by keeping the product in the value chain for as long as possible. To understand the principles of the circular economy, we have to understand the 4R system— Re-think, Reduce, Reuse and Recycle.
Re-Think twice or multiple times at the design stage, the processes, or the amount of materials that are needed.
Reduce the use of virgin material as much as possible.
Reuse of the materials in the same value chain.
Recycle materials in a different system to make different products.
The first two Rs (Re-think and Reduce) carry the heavier weight because we should work on reducing waste production, if not eliminating completely. If we follow this principle, our simplest form of the value chain is going to look like Figure 2.
We have raw materials, production, distribution, and use, like a linear economy, but after that, instead of going to waste, the used materials are going to follow back to become new raw materials. Materials from different stages are reused where appropriate along the value chain.
Three principles of circular economy
The principles of the circular economy can be summarized into three main points:
Design out the waste and pollution: which means stop producing waste in the first place.
Keep materials and resources in the value chain: a design for durability, reuse, remanufacturing, and recycling so that the products and materials keep circulating within the value chain.
Regenerating natural system: Use renewable energies, and design the system in a way that the end product goes back to the soil to support regeneration.
The butterfly diagram
According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, the principles of the circular economy can be summarized with a butterfly diagram.
The middle vertical black line in Figure 3 represents our current linear economy— starting with raw material that goes to production, distribution, and use. If we add circularity into this diagram, it’s divided into two parts, based on raw materials → Technical, represented by a blue line, and Biological, represented by a green line.
Technical materials are metal, plastics, synthetic materials, etc, whereas Biological represents Food or wood, etc. In the circular economy, we don’t produce waste, so we collect it after the end of life and reintroduce them into the value chain, wherever appropriate.
The technical materials do not biodegrade or compost. Therefore, they can be designed to be shared, maintained, redistribute, re-manufacture or recycle. With cascading loops in the biological cycle, one can reuse products and materials already in the value chain by designing new products using ingredients from the waste.
When these products or materials are no longer useful, they move to the outer loops of the biological cycle, to be returned to the soil as a bio-fertilizer or used as feedstock in bio-refineries to produce high-value chemical products. If you prefer a visual explanation, here is a nice video about the Circular Economy.
Circular economy is NOT recycling
One of the common misconceptions that are going around is that the circular economy is recycling, but it’s far from being true. The circular economy urges us to avoid reaching the recycling stage at any cost by avoiding waste generation.
If there is no waste, we don’t have to think about recycling them. Following the principles of the circular economy allows us to think before we start and avoid unnecessary production.
Think of the Circular Economy as the solution to the ongoing environmental problem related to the Linear Economy, and its principle believes that recycling is the last resort— which means we only opt for the recycling option when there is no other option available. However, of course, the recycling option is more attractive than landfilling and incineration.
