Circular Economy -

Lent term means it's time for our 'People as Consumers' unit...

Maybe we wouldn't buy light fittings, but we'd pay for the service of light, and the manufacturers would recover the materials and change the light fittings when we had more efficient products. 

What if packaging was so nontoxic it could dissolve in water and we could ultimately drink it? It would never become waste. What if engines were re-manufacturable, and we could recover the component materials and significantly reduce energy demand. What if we could recover components from circuit boards, reutilize them, and then fundamentally recover the materials within them through a second stage? What if we could collect food waste, human waste? What if we could turn that into fertilizer, heat, energy, ultimately reconnecting nutrients systems and rebuilding natural capital? And cars—what we want is to move around. We don't need to own the materials within them. Could cars become a service and provide us with mobility in the future? 

All of this sounds amazing, but these aren't just ideas, they're real today, and these lie at the forefront of the circular economy. What lies before us is to expand them and scale them up.

Dame Ellen MacArthur

http://edu.szmdata.com/TED/TED/dame%20ellen%20macarthur%20the%20surprising%20thing%20i%20learned%20sailing%20solo%20around%20the%20world.html

Source: https://foe.scot/campaign/plastic-pollution/what-is-a-circular-economy/