In the December 2013 CIWM Journal, I wrote: “Councils must be taking decisions that are based upon the holistic life-cycle of the particular material”.
A decade on, and the message is still the same, because, as a sector, we are still focused on recycling rates and energy from waste, with just a cursory nod to reuse, refurbishment and material management.
It’s been 13 years since the circular economy, in its current form, was launched by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. In that time, it’s gone from concept to EU law, and is embedded in our own UK resources and waste management strategy; but what does it actually mean in terms of waste management?
I like to look at it from two perspectives: life cycles and systems; and business models. This is what I do when I’m talking to students at the University of Brighton about the value of materials at all stages of the life cycle.
To ensure the best circular economy interventions are created, we need to know a lot more about the materials we’re dealing with.
Let’s look at the life cycle and systems perspective first. It has five stages: design a “thing”; choose materials used in the “thing”; construct the “thing”; use the “thing”; consider the next life/end of life for the “thing”.
Each of these five phases gives us opportunities to include circularity, from choosing the right raw materials and asset tagging to enabling repair and understanding the potential for disassembly at end of life.
To ensure the best circular economy interventions are created, we need to know a lot more about the materials we’re dealing with, and that’s where the waste management sector can start to help.
There is a selection of business models that can be used in a circular economy. I use the five published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in 2018:
These models offer interesting opportunities for the waste management sector. In fact, two of them are where the waste sector (a phrase we should now be replacing with “resource sector”) can flourish: resource recovery – what the sector has been doing for the past 150 years, if not longer; and circular supplies – the replacement of virgin raw materials with new, improved, preferably secondary, raw materials.
For many people, resource recovery is all about recycling, incineration, anaerobic digestion, etc. But in a circular economy resource recovery is about understanding individual materials and taking them to a higher purpose.
How do we create secondary raw materials out of these resource streams, and how do we ensure the environmental and economic value is maximised? Do we know the carbon footprint of that material on its own, if it’s managed incorrectly? Or if it’s separated?
These are the questions modern resource managers need to be asking, not just “how quickly and cheaply can I lift and shift this”.
This is where extended producer responsibility and deposit return schemes are starting to change mindsets. Individual collection schemes are rolling out across the UK, including Podback, which offers coffee pod recycling, and Tech-Takeback, which uses the ZeroNet app in Brighton to collect waste electrical and electronic equipment. The question, therefore, becomes: how many individual streams will we be collecting on refuse collection vehicles, or are we transitioning to material stream collections?
In the 2013 article, I suggested: “It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives. The species that survives is the one that is best able to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.”
Ten years on, I still believe the modern resource manager should be savvy about recovering resources for single-stream circular economy options and understanding where those materials sit within a supply chain.
I hope that, in another 10 years’ time, I am not still commenting that we, as a sector, need to be focusing on material recovery. Now is the time to embrace it – and the circular economy.
See the published article on Circular here.