What is a circular economy?

 

Here is an idea. What if you never had to buy a lightbulb? Instead, you lease the light, just as you lease a car or apartment. It is only an idea that is part of the circular economy. Well, before we can understand the circular economy, it helps to define the linear economy.

 

So we have a linear economy model at the moment and it starts to take natural materials from different scenarios, for example, fossil fuels or wood outside the forest, and they are delivered to factories where the products we make Huh. We are buying it and if we are, we just waste the product and all its natural substances. It gets landfilled or dumped, so natural materials cannot be used.

 But there is also a new approach, a more eco-efficient and waste-free approach, namely a circular economy. The circular economy taps right after product consumption, where they are not wasted, rather they are recycled and become new materials for new products. So while the linear economy processes materials in a cradle-to-grave manner, the circular economy requires a cradle-to-cradle design for each product.

These standards were established by Michael Braungart and William McDonough and can be distinguished in two different systems, namely a biological and a technical cycle.

•  One is working with biodegradable products. They are recycled in a way where they provide land for new plants to grow, which can be used again in factories to make new products. This means that all nutrition is living in this biological cycle. So all the products that can be made compost like food or some kind of paper can go in this cycle.

• The second system is also tapping just after the consumption part. The products are being decomposed properly after use, so similar materials can be re-melted so that the quality is still at a high level and these materials can be redesigned and new products can be designed to have the circularity of the technical cycle Can be fed in. Products such as cars or laptops, among others, are examples of this.

If a product is fitting into one of these two cycles, it is another step towards becoming more eco-efficient and greener in the future and therefore supports the circular economy.

Be SMART

.

.

.