{"id":40463,"date":"2018-11-13T07:39:16","date_gmt":"2018-11-13T12:39:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=40463"},"modified":"2018-11-13T07:39:16","modified_gmt":"2018-11-13T12:39:16","slug":"how-circular-is-the-circular-economy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=40463","title":{"rendered":"How Circular is the Circular Economy?"},"content":{"rendered":"

How Circular is the Circular Economy?<\/a><\/h3>\n
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\"Circular-economy-2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Illustration: Diego Marmolejo<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Introducing the Circular Economy<\/strong><\/p>\n

The circular economy has become, for many governments, institutions, companies, and environmental organisations, one of the main components of a plan to lower carbon emissions. In the circular economy, resources would be continually re-used, meaning that there would be no more mining activity or waste production. The stress is on recycling, made possible by designing products so that they can easily be taken apart.<\/p>\n

Attention is also paid to developing an \u201calternative consumer culture\u201d. In the circular economy, we would no longer own products, but would loan them. For example, a customer could pay not for lighting devices but for light, while the company remains the owner of the lighting devices and pays the electricity bill. A product thus becomes a service, which is believed to encourage businesses to improve the lifespan and recyclability of their products.<\/p>\n

The circular economy is presented as an alternative to the \u201clinear economy\u201d \u2013 a term that was coined by the proponents of circularity, and which refers to the fact that industrial societies turn valuable resources into waste. However, while there\u2019s no doubt that the current industrial model is unsustainable, the question is how different to so-called circular economy would be.<\/p>\n

Several scientific studies (see references) describe the concept as an \u201cidealised vision\u201d, a \u201cmix of various ideas from different domains\u201d, or a \u201cvague idea based on pseudo-scientific concepts\u201d. There\u2019s three main points of criticism, which we discuss below.<\/p>\n

Too Complex to Recycle<\/strong><\/p>\n

The first dent in the credibility of the circular economy is the fact that the recycling process of modern products is far from 100% efficient. A circular economy is nothing new. In the middle ages, old clothes were turned into paper, food waste was fed to chickens or pigs, and new buildings were made from the remains of old buildings. The difference between then and now is the resources used.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How Circular is the Circular Economy? Illustration: Diego Marmolejo. Introducing the Circular Economy The circular economy has become, for many governments, institutions, companies, and environmental organisations, one of the main components of a plan to lower carbon emissions. In the circular economy, resources would be continually re-used, meaning that there would be no more mining […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2791,22936,11521,671],"class_list":["post-40463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-circular-economy","tag-linear-economy","tag-low-tech-magazine","tag-recycling"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40463"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40463\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40464,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40463\/revisions\/40464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}