#circulareconomy #sustainability #globalwarming #recycling #greeneconomy #learning

Sustainability: Circular Economy Explained video talks about the possible solution to removing waste completely and save resources as a core part of sustainability.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the global CO2 emission is going up every year. The fault lies of course in our current system, called the Linear Economy system, which depends on the environmentally unfriendly method of sorting out the waste, i.e landfill and incineration. This causes the major two problems. The first one, since we are not reusing or recycling waste, we have to use virgin materials every time we run the process. The second one, waste generation contributes to greenhouse gas emission. This means we are losing all the energies, materials and values from the product into the waste.

This huge drawback of linear economy attracted the new fundamental shift in our current economic system that creates value. The 4 magic 'Rs', i.e. Re-think, Reduce, Reuse and Recycle were popularised. The first R, ‘Re-think’ urges people to re-think twice, thrice or how many times it's necessary about the processes or the materials they need. The second R ‘Reduce’ follows the principle of reducing the use of virgin material as much as possible. The third R ‘Reuse’ promotes reusing of the materials in the same value chain and the fourth ‘R’, Recycling of materials in a different system to make different products. With this idea, the principles of the Circular Economy can be summarized into three main points: (i) Design out the waste and pollution, (ii) Keep materials and resources in the value chain, (iii) Regenerating natural system.

The Butterfly Diagram, taken from the website of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMF) summarizes the practicality of the Circular Economy. The circularity is introduced into the value chain based on different types of materials, whether they are technical materials, such as metal, plastics, synthetic materials, etc or Biological, such as Food or wood, etc. The products with technical materials are anything that doesn’t biodegrade and can be designed to be shared, maintained for as long as possible, redistributed, remanufactured or recycled. On the other hand, the products with biological materials can be designed in a way that the extraction of biochemical feedstock can happen and can be reused serially at different stages for different purposes or the waste can be broken down to produce biofertiliser.

References:
IEA: www.iea.org/data-and-statistics?country=WORLD&fuel=CO2%20emissions&indicator=TotCO2
EMF: www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/circular-economy/concept/infographic


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