At Your Carbon Steps, our focus has been on helping companies fight climate change through measuring and reducing their greenhouse gas emissions. A related consideration is the resources a company uses, the waste it generates, and the environmental impact of consumption and waste.
Circularity refers to an economic and design principle where resources are kept in use for as long as possible, extracting their maximum value before recovering and regenerating materials at the end of each product’s life.
In a circular system, waste is minimized and ideally eliminated by:
- Designing out waste and pollution (through smarter product and process design)
- Keeping products and materials in use (through reuse, repair, remanufacturing, and recycling)
- Regenerating natural systems (by returning valuable nutrients and materials to the environment)
In contrast to the traditional linear economy — which follows a “take–make–waste” model — circularity promotes a closed-loop system where economic activity is decoupled from resource consumption.
Ellen MacArthur Foundation & The Butterfly Diagram
In a circular economy, waste from one cycle becomes the input or food for another, keeping materials in continuous use with no waste.
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation is focused on helping businesses transition from a linear to a circular model. The Butterfly diagram captures all the processes of the circular economy.
A product is composed of technical nutrients and biological nutrients. The middle of the diagram shows the traditional linear path of products, and the wings show pathways to keep the nutrients in the cycle, increasing circularity.
Designing with circular economy principles helps companies address issues such as sourcing critical minerals and managing plastic waste. These issues are addressed through redesigning products and supporting policies that enable circular-economy principles. The companies in the Ellen MacArthur network share their experiences and best practices to implement these principles. To avoid some of the pitfalls, companies need to lead with a long-term mindset, plan to scale pilots, connect programs to strategic business goals, focus on the customer experience, and use KPIs to track the financial implications. To be successful in implementing circular economy programs, companies need to implement programs that are specific to their contexts and aligned with their core business objectives.
Challenges for a Circular Economy
Implementing a circular economy faces policy, technology, infrastructure, financial, organizational and social barriers. For example, even a company like Patagonia indicated that ~85% of their products do not have an end-of-life solution.
SourceL ICC (2023). Circular material flows for research and innovation. http://www.iccwbo.org/newspublications/ policies-reports/circular-material-flows-for-research-and-innovation/
Circular Economy: Action Levels
To address these challenges, we need to act at different levels of the economy.
- Collective Action: To resolve infrastructure and policy-related issues, we need industry-level action. This can help set industry guidelines, create clear definitions, and build infrastructure for reverse logistics, such as collecting goods from consumers. For example, the Circular Electronics Partnership defines what constitutes a circular product or service, provides a knowledge repository for circular design, creates secondary markets, develops recycling infrastructure and materials tracing functionality, and develops an educational program to support the circular electronics industry.
- Company Level Action: Invest in circular business models, including take-backs, circular procurement of input materials and tie-in the products and business model innovations to the core company strategy and financials.
- Stakeholder Level Action: Stakeholders like regulators and customers can create regulator environments that promote the circular economy and consumers can drive demand for circular products and services.
Circularity: Addressing Material Flows
While there are systemic challenges to implementing the circular economy, companies need to explore pathways to circularity in their operations and to provide leadership in making the systemic changes required.
To start the circularity journey, companies need to address material flows in the products they make and address material input and output around four dimensions:
- Minimizing Inputs: Resource Efficiency – Using resources efficiently
- Maximizing Utility – Product Life Cycle Extension, designing products to be durable, repairing or refurbishing products to extend their life
- Minimizing waste – Reducing waste generation at every stage of the product
- Material Recovery – planning for end of life, the ability to recycle and return the materials back into the loop.
KPIs used to track material flows include non-virgin material usage in products and packaging, measured as total weight or as a percentage of total content. Another KPI is the amount of input materials that sources sustainably.
New business models like “product-as-a-service”, product sharing, designing for repair, and recyclability can help address utility, waste, and recovery in material flows.
Social Barriers
Consumer preference for convenience and cheaper products over sustainable alternatives is one barrier that needs to be addressed. On the business side, companies focus on short-term profits and are not required to deal with externalities from end-of-life waste generated from their products unless required by regulations.
Consumer behaviors can be addressed by increasing consumer awareness through certifications and labeling, and educating customers on the benefits of a circular economy. Companies can also encourage reuse and repair, increasing the time the materials remain in use.
Implementing Circularity
If you are starting your circularity journey, the Circular Economy Indicators Coalition (CEIC), along with the Platform for Accelerating the Circular Economy (PACE), provides a practical guide for companies to set, measure, and report circular targets. They distinguish between outcome KPIs, or key performance indicators, what you’re trying to achieve, and enabler KPIs, or how you support these outcomes.
This framework helps companies answer four critical questions:
- What materials are you using?
- What waste are you producing?
- What are you collecting and recycling?
- And how are you enabling circular models?
Roadmap for Implementing Circularity
Designing for Circularity
80% of product-related environmental impacts are determined in the design phase.
Designing for circularity means finding new ways to make products while keeping circular principles in mind. It means designing out waste by using an environmental lens to the input materials, keeping the product in use longer by designing for repair, reuse, and remanufacturing, and finally designing for end-of-life, where the materials are recycled and go back into the loop instead of being disposed of as waste.
Design for Re-use: Designing durable and long-lasting products.
Designing for Repair/Disassembly: Designing for repairs, requires thinking about repairs in the early part of design. Designing for repair often involves making the product modular, with modules that can be disassembled and replaced. Designing a product for repair also requires a rethink of the company’s business model, including a repair-based design.
Design for Refurbishing and Remanufacturing: Refurbishing is replacing the worn or broken parts to get the product back in use. It’s beyond just repairing the broken product, as it’s a complete top-to-bottom product inspection and service. Remanufacturing is even more extensive, as it’s a complete tear down of the product into its constituent pieces, parts. Worn out parts replaced and then rebuilt to perform as new. In either case, refurbishing and remanufacturing both support the circular economy and provide products at a lower cost to consumers like us. But let’s get more specific, starting with refurbishing and refurbishment.
Design for recycling: Designing for the end-of-life of a product also requires designing for disassembly, separating the product into its constituent technical and biological materials.
Packaging and the Circular Economy
Although packaging is an add-on, something we hope to throw in the recycling bin and give little thought to, it plays a crucial role in getting the desired product to us. For example, packaging plays a key role in shipping products that require temperature control and in controlling moisture in or out of products. Shrink-wrapping vegetables extends their shelf life and reduces food waste.
Packaging is more than the primary packaging we see around a specific product; it also includes secondary packaging to collect products into saleable packages and tertiary packaging, such as larger boxes and containers, for shipping.
The packaging industry is a $1.2 trillion global market and the third-largest worldwide. Unfortunately, once the product is delivered to the consumer, the packaging becomes waste. Packaging waste accounts for about 28% of solid waste, and unfortunately, only 54% of packaging is recycled.
Plastic accounts for 18% of packaging waste, and only 14% of that plastic is recycled. 70% of plastic ends up in landfills, and the remaining is incinerated. Incineration has its own issues, including the release of hazardous chemicals during the burning process. Paper and cardboard have a better recycling rate, with over 81% of being recycled.
Functions of Packaging
- Protection – Protect the product during transportation, storage, and handling. Products need protection from thermal conditions, vibration, and potential dops by handlers.
- Preservation – Packaging functions as a chemical and physical barrier to preserve quality and extend shelf-life, limiting moisture, light, and air.
- Convenience – Provides ease of handling by customers, like cookie packaging and stand-up packaging bags.
- Communications – Serves as a marketing tool, provides information, and communicates brand image, sustainability initiative, product ingredients, and any messaging required by regulations.
- Safety – to protect against improper handling and tampering, like child-proof packaging for pharmaceuticals.
Each function might have a different level of importance depending on the product’s domain; preservation might be more critical for food, convenience for consumer goods, and safety for medical products. Sustainability is also a concern in packaging design, ensuring the product is delivered undamaged and that the packaging is optimal and sustainable. Underpackaging can lead to product damage and additional costs, while overpackaging can have a negative environmental impact and result in wasted packaging costs.
Packaging Regulations
Regulatory Requirements – Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) laws might require companies to address their packaging waste. Regulations might include labelling, tamper-proofing and safety requirements.
EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive, EU 2015-720. It requires packaging to meet specific requirements, such as limiting the weight and volume of packaging to the minimum necessary to meet safety, hygiene, and acceptance to consumers
In the US, seven states have EPR laws: California, Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oregon, and Washington. The EPR defines a fee that must be paid based on the amount of packaging products sold. So the more a producer sells, the greater the fee. There is also something called an eco-modulated fee, meaning the more environmentally damaging the material, the higher the fee. Next, the producer must report to the Producer Responsibility Organization (PRO) on how much packaging they sold, and then pay the fee based on that amount. The PRO is responsible for collecting the fees and then distributing them to the state governments, which then funds programs to help educate people about recycling, for instance. These can also go directly to the material recovery facilities, or MRFs, and material processors. This helps to offset the current economic imbalance between the commodity price for recycled materials and what it costs to make them
Packaging Design
- Protection – This is the #1 responsibility of the packaging
- Material Use – The first function of the material is protection, but looking for environmentally friendly materials that still meet the protection needs addresses sustainability in package design
- Apportionment is more logistics-related, such as how many primary packages should go into the secondary package, and how many secondary packages should go into the tertiary package.
- Fill rate: the packaging efficiency itself. For example, how can you fill the primary package, the secondary package, and the tertiary package.
- User friendliness – packaging that is easy to open and recycle.
- Communication – information about the product.
Conventional Packaging Materials:
- Paper, paperboard, and cardboard: Highly versatile with a wide variety of applications, with the added benefit that paper is highly recyclable and compostable. Made from wood pulp, this material is low-cost and readily available. Forest Stewardship Council, or FSC, certifies the source of this material from sustainably managed forests. Some negative environmental impacts of this material include monoculture forests that reduce biodiversity, and illegal logging in ancient tree forests is also an issue. Paper processing also takes a lot of water and energy and generates waste pollutants, another reason why recycling can be important: it uses less water and energy. Paper-based packaging can be recycled multiple times, but after eight cycles, the fiber length is significantly reduced and must be mixed with virgin paper. Light-weighting, reducing the amount of paper used in packaging, can also help reduce the environmental impact of this material.
- Molded Pulp: This is also a paper-based material, molded to the shape of the product. It can be made from paper that has reached its recycling limit. Some of the negatives are that it does not have as much strength as cardboard, and it does not have a smooth surface for printing.
- Glass: Highly versatile, cost-effective, non-toxic, durable, and infinitely recyclable. It can be easily formed into a variety of shapes and colors, and made from materials that are plentiful, inexpensive, and safe for people and the planet. The cons of glass are that the input materials need to be mined, which brings environmental concerns. The manufacturing process is energy-intensive, it is more expensive than plastic. Glass is also a heavy material, which increases transportation emissions.
- Aluminum: Versatile, cost-effective, light-weight, and infinitely recyclable material. One of the cons is the input material, bauxite, which must be mined and is in limited supply. It also requires a special high-temperature manufacturing process that is the most energy-intensive.
- Plastic: There are many types of plastic. Plastic has only been around since the 1950s and is incredibly inexpensive to make, and can be tailored to have a wide range of engineering properties. In fact, because it is so inexpensive to make, the business case for plastic recycling is hard. This makes plastic end up in our trash bins and eventually in landfills and oceans, where they do not biodegrade and stay around forever. The pollution problem has led to EPR laws and the creation of a Global Plastics Treaty, which is still under negotiation.
Innovative Packaging Materials
- Biopolymers and Bioplastics: Unlike conventional plastics made from petrochemicals, biopolymers, or more commonly known as bioplastics, are generally made from agricultural sources, such as corn, sugar cane, and even wood. Advantages of these materials include a lower carbon footprint, independence from fossil fuels, and being mostly biodegradable and/or compostable, making them nearly a drop-in replacement for petro-based plastics. The disadvantages are that they currently cost much more than conventional plastics and might be limited in their biodegradability. Some bioplastics are only compostable in industrial composters, so if they end up in the environment, they face the same issues as conventional plastics. Furthermore, the infrastructure for collecting bioplastics is not well developed, so it does not solve the waste issue.
- Starch packaging: Corn or potato starch can be made into packing peanuts, which are compostable and dissolve in water.
- Plant fiber packaging: derived from sugarcane, wheat, palm, and bamboo fibers. These are biodegradable, compostable, and recyclable. Applications are plates, cups, trays, and clamshells.
- Mycelium packaging: derived from hemp herds and mycelium fibers. Applications include transit packaging, bottle shippers, and insulating boxes. While not recyclable, the material is compostable.
- Seaweed packaging: Derived from seaweed, a fast-growing and abundant resource. This material is also easily compostable.
Examples of Circular Economy Companies
- Ecovative – Design out waste and pollution – Mushroom-based compostable packaging.
- Hiut Denim – Repairing and refurbishing jeans.
- Apricot Lane Farms: The Biggest Little Farm – Regenerative Agriculture Farm in LA.
- AMP Robotics – advances in sorting; robotic sorting facilities.
- NIR – near infrared sorting – sorting different types of plastics.
- Sortile – textile recycling, using NIR to sort different materials in textiles.
Recycling Rates
The image below shows the different amounts of materials in Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) in the United States. About 78% of aluminum, 31% of glass, 68% of paper, and 91% of cardboard is recycled. In 201, the U.S. produced 40 million tons of plastic; only 5-6% is recycled.
References
ICC (2023). Circular material flows for research and innovation.
