The Circularity Gap

Our economy was 9.1% circular in 2018, 8.6% in 2020, and is now only 7.2% in 2023

Living in the Anthropocene is a complex thing. We can’t all be experts in all the issues, so it’s necessary to simplify. Responsible humans can at least grasp the rudiments of the big picture, and then do what we can in our own corners of the world. For anyone with bandwidth, it’s possible to pick a narrower problem and specialize.

My own version of high level simplification is to sort out issues along four dimensions:

A1 (Anthropocene 1) — the giant megatrends happening over historical time, including population growth, energy use, industrialization, climate change, and so on.

A2 — impacts happening across space: land use patterns, and what’s happening with oceans and waterways, including with all non-domesticated plants, animals, fungi, and microorganisms living in the world’s ecosystems.

A3 — our economy, currently operating more than 90% linearly as: Take, Make, Waste; upon which the entire human population relies for survival and well-being.

A4 — the search for an adequate anthropology for the Anthropocene, including human culture, ethics, politics, philosophy, and religion.

I am a non-expert in A1, A2, and A3. To the extent I have bandwidth to specialize, I’m trying to think through the anthropology problem (A4).

Still, I want to keep up with at least the basics in the other areas.

Today’s post is to share the newly released Circularity Gap Report 2023, which provides a high-level overview of global resource use. There’s a full report along with a nice web page, infographics, and video. Here’s the headliner:

Rising material extraction has shrunk global circularity: from 9.1% in 2018, to 8.6% 2020, and now 7.2% in 2023. This leaves a huge Circularity Gap: the globe almost exclusively relies on new (virgin) materials.

This means that more than 90% of materials are either wasted, lost or remain unavailable for reuse for years as they are locked into long-lasting stock such as buildings and machinery.

Materials that are cycled back into the global economy after the end of their useful life, otherwise known as secondary materials, account for 7.2% of all material inputs into the economy—this is the Circularity Metric.

At today’s global population level and rate of economic activity, including in the CGR’s four tracked areas:

• food systems,

• built environment,

• manufactured goods and consumables,

• mobility and transport

— the fact that we run almost everything new, and the circularity metric is getting worse year after year, really seems unacceptable.

The Circle Economy Foundation recommends balancing four main levers (use less, use longer, use again, and make clean) for countries at different levels of economic development, i.e. that follow scenarios: Build, Grow, or Shift.

It’s well understood that not every country can move toward a more sustainable circular economy in the same way.

But in any case, the overall point is to stop extracting new materials from the earth through a dedicated effort to re-design our processes of resource acquisition, manufacturing, and waste.

One could try to argue — and many do — that sourcing new (virgin) materials every time, using products once, and throwing them way, is the most economical or cost-effective way of running our Stuff System. Is that really true?

What would it take to put new rules of the game in place, upon which markets have to work? What would it take to phase out entrenched institutions, turn backwards-looking companies around to be forward-looking, and radically innovate industrial practices? What would it take to make throwing away and extracting new not cost-effective anymore?

In Vivo by XTU Architects

The heart of Paris’ 13th district has been reimagined as a thriving sustainable ecosystem. The Reinventer Paris competition recently named a trio of green eco-conscious buildings winner of the Paris Rive Gauche site M5A2. Designed by XTU Architects in collaboration with BPD Marignan, SNI Group, and MU Architecture, the winning design, called In Vivo, seeks to inject urban greenhouses, vertical forests, and even a solar-powered algae biofacade into the mixed-use block.

Source: Trio of living green buildings reinvent Paris as a thriving sustainable ecosystem (inhabitat.com)