Start thinking in circles and you will see a world of opportunities

40% of all the food that we grow never gets eaten. More than 1 billion tons of food is wasted every year. It means that we can already feed the world with the food that we have available to us, all these 700 million people that go to sleep hungry every day. There’s enough food. We just have to stop wasting it. It’s a huge opportunity to turn this around.

 

Nature as role model

If you think circular economy is a rocket science, it’s not because nature has been doing this for billions of years. If you walk into a forest you will notice: There is no waste. Everything flows in these harmonious cycles. Everything serves a purpose. The challenge is to apply these principles back into the world of humans. How we design our products, how we build our companies, how we build the whole cities, how we structure our national economies.

 

Recycling is not the silver bullet

Recycling is just one out of many tools that we have in our circular economy toolbox. But not everything is recyclable. Not everything is collected. And even if it’s collected and sent for recycling and recyclable, there are huge losses in the process itself. Globally, from the 100 billion tonnes of resources we use as a humanity, only 7% are recirculated back into our economy. The rest is added to stock landfilled, incinerated or dissipated. Recycling has a role to play, but it shouldn’t be the only one.

 

Circular economy against climate change

Circular economy is the missing link to tackle climate change. Going carbon neutral is not just about renewable energy. Renewable energy is incredibly important, but it still tackles about 55% of all the greenhouse gas emissions. The rest, the 45%, are embedded in everything that we surround ourselves. The clothes that you’re wearing, the phone that you have in your pocket, the chair that you’re sitting on, and suddenly it’s not just about if this phone was produced thanks to renewable energy. It’s about questions like, how long will I keep that phone? Will I get a new one every year? Or will I use it for four years instead? Is the phone made from recycled materials? Will it be given another life?

 

Circular economy as business opportunity

When Ikea started thinking in circles and they asked themselves, what does it look like for a company to go circular, a whole new world of opportunities opened up suddenly looking at the same product without changing anything in the design phase. They realized that they can create a second life for the product by just reselling it and making €300 when the cover would break or it would have a deficiency, they could fix it for about another €160. If you like breaks, they can provide a refurbishment service for another hundred and at the end of its fourth life, they can make sure that the couch gets actually recycled and they get back some of those precious resources and perhaps even make a new couch out of it. In one life, they can create four lives. Instead of €600. They can create almost €1,200 by utilising what’s already out there.

 

Six powerful “R”-Strategies

Six practical principles, all starting with the letter “R,” provide actionable guidance for companies and individuals alike:

Retain: Extend the use of existing resources, like Nudie Jeans, which offers free lifelong repairs.

Rethink: Restructure value chains, such as Gouach’s modular batteries, which can be repaired instead of discarded.

Regenerate: Align business success with ecological regeneration, like Ecosia, which plants trees for every web search.

Reduce: Achieve more with less, as Too Good To Go does by reducing food waste through surplus meal sales.

Reuse: Keep materials circulating, as RePack does with its reusable packaging solutions.

Recover: Extract value from products at the end of their life, exemplified by BMW’s dismantling and recycling efforts.