This article is based on a panel discussion held on March 12, 2021, focusing on the circular economy within the European region and was moderated by Kritika Kharbanda, who is an MDes Energy & Environment student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Sustainability Engineer at Henning Larsen Architects, and co-founder of Cardinal LCA. The panel was strategically planned with eminent individuals from the Architecture, Engineering & Construction (AEC) industry. It included Björn Appelqvist, the Head of Waste Management and Site Solutions Department at Ramboll, and an active member of the International Solid Waste Association (ISWA) since 2006 more than 20 years of experience in the waste management sector. The second panelist was Torben Kulasingam, currently a senior engineer at Ramboll, who successfully represented Denmark and Ramboll at UNLEASH - Innovation lab for SDGs. Torben also emphasized circularity through his master's thesis called 'Conceptualization of livability, using Rambøll as a case'. The final panelist was Duncan Lithgow, a passionate building designer at Ramboll, with Design for Disassembly as the major propaganda. He is currently developing a community to gain information around the open standards for disassembly and material passports, proposing buildingSMART Data Dictionary (bSDD) as the solution.
by Katrin Kuhlmann, Chantal Line Carpentier, Negin Shahiar, Tara Francis, and Ana María Garcés Escobar
Changes in the international economic order have brought to the forefront two divergent trends in global trade that will continue to play out over the course of 2020. On one end, the World Trade Organization (WTO) is facing significant reforms following the U.S. Administration’s decision to block new Appellate Body judges.
by Christina Mahjouri and Jordan Taylor Sloan
The fashion industry is a complex, global supply chain heavily utilizing fast and low-cost production. The ‘fast fashion’ business model originated in the 1980s when fashion brands and retailers started selling designer-inspired, low-cost fashion products in chain stores across the United States and Europe (a). The success of this model has resulted in negative environmental and societal impacts, including pollution, forced labor, and large quantities of textile waste. This paper provides an overview of the current state of the industry, emerging trends within the industry, and a proposal for how three critical roles can make the fashion industry a force for circularity.
by Kezi Cheng & Peter Christensen
As we continue to advance towards producing optimal quantities at lower costs, higher speeds, with faster delivery times, we should also consider waste output (including end-of-life products) as a critical area for optimizing profitability. Here, we discuss several key factors surrounding material circularity that make it difficult to optimize for profitability. We suggest that in order to close the gap between profitability and maximum materials efficiency, it is necessary to create a careful balance between material demand, material recovery, and product lifetime. Looking to the future, we highlight select recent advances ranging from fundamental academic research to promising startups and commercial developments paving the way to profitability through material circularity. Our discussion is focused around the major components of a circularity ecosystem: economics, research, industry, and policy.
by Marianne Kettunen, Institute for European Environmental Policy
The shift to a circular economy in the EU will not be sustainable by default. It will only be so if it reflects the implications both within and outside the EU.
As the recent global saga of plastic waste recycling illustrates, if not carefully thought through, the EU’s internal policies can lead to adverse impacts outside the EU, including negative environmental and social impacts on developing countries.
On the other hand, several positive developments are also possible. For example, an EU-led push to implement clear and appropriately stringent product standards and criteria to support circularity can lead to the elevation and standardisation of circular economy related standards globally.
Ensuring sustainability of circular economy actions on a global scale requires cooperation between three key policy domains: circular economy, trade and development cooperation. The science-policy community has an important role to play in facilitating the dialogue between these different domains.
by Monica Wilson, Edel Garingan and Mariel Vilella, Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives
Innovative zero waste projects in the public and private sectors provide an important opportunity to build local circular economies while avoiding serious environmental harm from plastic pollution and waste disposal. The number of zero-waste city projects is growing in Asia, and these projects require access to flexible, smaller-scale financing with low or no interest. Yet traditional development capital for waste systems is frequently misaligned with these effective zero waste approaches. To have a greater social and environmental impact, donors and lenders will need to adapt to the needs of cities and others developing circular economy solutions.
by Grey Lee and Adam Mitchell-Heggs
The built environment, or the human made environment, is the space that we live, work, and recreate on a day-to-day basis. From being born in hospitals, learning in schools, working in offices, and living at home, almost all human activities are concentrated into different structures within the built environment. Globally, the construction industry generated $1.39T in revenue in 2018 according to Deloitte within a total built real estate valuation of $200T, based on research done by Savills. Despite being the basis of our daily livelihoods, the construction, maintenance, use, and demolition of our built environment is one of the most important sectors from the perspective of resource consumption, and waste generation.
by Avery Wendell and Siddarth Shrikanth
As circular economy and zero-waste initiatives gather steam, where does the public stand on these issues? Through original polling conducted by Data for Progress, Avery Wendell and Siddarth Shrikanth highlight evidence of growing awareness and support for such initiatives. They suggest that that in an era of growing polarisation, waste reduction and circular economy efforts could have the potential for unusual bipartisan appeal.
by Tze Ni Yeoh
The construction sector has an outsized impact on the world’s resources, accounting for 40% of global energy use, 30% of energy-related greenhouse gas emissions, and produces up to 40% of annual solid waste.
Can wider adoption of green construction methods be both competitive for the private sector and have the ability to reduce its carbon footprint? This article explores several conditions which could optimise its economic, social and environmental gains.
by Laxmi Haigh
Circle Economy’s investigation into circularity paints a bleak picture, but the power of countries can be harnessed to change the game. It’s difficult to put a figure on global circularity, but not impossible. In fact, the world is 8.6% circular, finds Netherlands-based impact organisation Circle Economy’s latest report. Launched during The World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos in January, the Circularity Gap Report (CGR) 2020 presents hard truths; circularity is not just low, but it’s gone into reverse”. In the initial CGR launched in 2018, global circularity stood at 9.1%. As well as present the core findings of the groundbreaking report, this article seeks to further investigate this quantification of circularity and asks, how important is it for us to quantify our journey to a circular economy?
by Tze Ni Yeoh
For decades, the informal sector has played a significant role in the recovery of post-consumer waste in developing countries. Using Minh Khai village of Vietnam as a centrepiece, Tze Ni Yeoh discusses why it is crucial for policymakers to integrate the informal sector as countries strive towards sustainable, equitable development. Integration of the informal sector not only brings about socio-economic gains to the typically low-income individuals and micro-businesses that are involved in informal recycling but is an economic opportunity to produce secondary raw material from waste.
This article, concurrently published at the Kennedy School Review, proposes several policy interventions which can act as a catalyst to integrate and improve the informal waste sector, from collectors to secondary raw material manufacturers.
Circular Economy, cradle-to-cradle, beyond take-make-waste, the new material flow model… There are many names for the idea that our current linear resource-extraction and -use model might be less than perfect – but have any of them really caught on?
Faced with rapidly progressing environmental degradation, we must think about regenerative rather than consumptive modes of living on this planet. Whilst we are not directly “running out of materials […] our economy depends on the productivity […] of biological systems that start to default.” The concept of a Circular Economy is thus compelling, and has achieved some popularity with policy makers, businesses and consumers.
But as intuitive as the idea sounds, examples of its application remain scarce. Successful, large-scale circular systems are rare and academic research remains fragmented. Of course, systemic change is difficult to accomplish and hugely path dependent. Understanding what currently stands in the way of faster change is therefore key. In what follows, we aim to explore some of the challenges the Circular Economy is facing today. Ultimately, these barriers can be translated into areas for policy, companies and individuals to tackle.
by Giorgos Dimitriou & Vasilis Katos
One of the main challenges of a modern smart city is to bring people together, making them ambassadors of a sustainable, restorative and regenerative way of life and expediting the shift to the Circular Economy model. A city achieving a smart city status cannot be automatically considered sustainable nor inclusive. A Sentient City achieves sustainability of the resources and inclusiveness for the people.
This paper from IDEAL CITIES, a European Union-funded project, examines how smart city technologies can promote a data-driven circular economy model. Under this framework, a city's finite resources as well as citizens will form the pool of intelligent assets in order to contribute to high utilization through crowdsourcing and real-time decision making and planning. For instance, by helping the visually impaired citizens navigate and productively enjoy their city, services becoming enabled to respond in real-time and in the most cost-effective manner by identifying and repurposing resources with a minimum effort. A data-driven sentient city will know when it has achieved its goals because it will at the same time measure one of the most important performance indicators: citizen’s happiness.
by Quinn Liu
The Basel Convention was amended in 2019 to include plastic waste as hazardous wastes with restrictions for international trade. The amendment will make global trade in plastic waste more transparent and better regulated, whilst also ensuring that its management is safer for human health and the environment. These international trade policy changes signal a transition towards a more resource efficient and circular economy, which can occur at various levels along the product value chain such as second-hand goods, end-of-life products, secondary materials or waste, as well as trade in related services. In this paper, Quinn Liu highlights gaps and opportunities in updating the existing regulatory framework and re-designing the global supply chain to transition to a sustainable circular economy.
by Henrique Pacini and Carrie Snyder
Waste is fundamental to the way our societies work. Moreover, such residues move across borders. So how can we design an economy that closes the loop, produces less waste, and makes sure the materials and energy that are currently discarded are able flow back into productive economic cycles? In this article for the Weatherhead Centre, Henrique Pacini and Carrie Snyder argue that this will require more than technology - and that this goal depends on a confluence of factors, including cooperation among and within countries on things such as taxation / subsidy reforms and multilateral standards which reinforce the governance of materials throughout their lifecycles.
The recently announced initiative, the Agreement on Climate Change, Trade and Sustainability (ACCTS), provides a fresh opportunity to use trade agreements to tackle the challenges of climate change and sustainable development. In this piece, Giridharan Ramasubramnian argues that if it wishes to be an influential and effective international grouping, the ACCTS should facilitate the transition to a more circular economy among member countries and successfully shape discussions at the nexus between trade, climate and sustainable development in other international forums and institutions. As a potential institutional pathfinder and a living agreement, the ACCTS could expand in scope by bringing in issues related to the circular economy: the removal of barriers to trade in secondary materials, goods and waste, and the development of guidelines for eco-design and recyclability standards. It could also expand in membership by bringing on board countries that are thinking seriously of transitioning to a circular economy. Thus, the ACCTS has a unique potential to act as a catalyst to a circular economy within member countries’ societies and an institutional catalyst that will drive discussions in other international institutions on the topic of circular economy to achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
by Katie Segal
Nearly 80 percent of all the plastic waste the world has ever produced is sitting in landfills or polluting the environment, and an estimated 8 million tons of this plastic finds its way to the ocean each year. Despite its remote location and relatively small population, the Arctic region is not immune from the plague of plastic pollution infecting oceans around the world.