Circular Economy Introduction

© www.know-your-waste.com

Circular Economy -

Introduction

By Božena Vučković

What is Circular Economy?• Remember how in the 80’s everything was repaired? • If your TV broke, you took it to a repair shop.• If your shoes wore out you took them to a shoemaker to see if they can be

fixed somehow.• The same was with clothes, furniture, washing machine, fridge…• Some things were repaired using parts from other broken items.


• What happened with the food scraps back in the days?• Nothing was wasted, people had their own gardens and were

composting food leftovers and later used the compost to improve the quality of the soil for new use.

• So basically, in the past, our economy was already circular in a way.


• But then, our habits changed, we became impatient, we didn’t want to wait for days for things to be repaired anymore.

• Buying a new thing was a quick fix and consequently repair became more and more expensive.

• This is how we created the:

LINEAR ECONOMY SYSTEM

TAKE MAKE USE DISPOSE


Nature does it differently - in a circular way

• Plants provide food for animals.

• When animals die their bodies provide food for decomposers.

• Animal tissue is decomposed into soil nutrients.

• Soil nutrients serve as food for plants and the circle (cycle) continues.


We want to do the same with our economy!

• Have a continuous flow of biological and technical materials.

• Reuse, repair and recycle as much as possible before using raw materials.


Waste is not waste, it is a resource!• Did you know that in 1 ton of old cell phones there is 324

times more gold than in 1 ton of ore from Yanacocha, one of the biggest gold mines in the world. [12]

• All that gold is goint to waste instead of being reused.

1t ore = 0.85 g (0.03 oz.) of gold 1t phones = 275 g (9.72 oz.) of gold


In Circular Economy we have two types of circles (cycles): Biological and Technical.


Biological cycle

• Biological materials of our products can increase agricultural value.

• They can also be reused several times in different products (cascades), before safely returning them to biosphere.

Example of cascading:

1. Cotton clothing first reused as a second-hand clothing.

2. Then it is reused in furniture industry as fibre-fill.

3. Fibre-fill can then be reused in construction industry as insulation in stone wool.


Technical cycle• 1st circle: we try to

repair/reuse the product.• 2nd circle: we try to

remanufacture and regenerate the product instead of throwing it away.

• 3rd circle: if repair/reuse or remanufacturing were not possible, we disassemble the reusable parts in order to use them again in the manufacturing of new products.

• The last option would be to recycle the separate parts/components so that they can be used again instead of raw materials.


Creation of jobs

• Incineration = 1 new job • Landfilling = 6 new jobs• Recycling = 36 new jobs• Reusing = 296 new jobs


The number of jobs that can be created for every 10,000 tonnes of waste:

The world generates about 1.3 billion tonnes of waste per year21 (2.9 trillion pounds22). Do you know how many jobs reusing could create?

38.5 million new jobs!!

What do we need?• Innovation in design - less components,

products designed to be easily disassembled, regenerated and recycled.

• Innovation in business approach - buying service instead of buying the product.

• Technological improvements in recycling.

• Collaboration between public and private sectors.


Let’s close the Loop!


Date post:	14-Apr-2017
Category:	Environment
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Circular Economy Introduction

Environment