What do you want from the circular economy?
On 1 May, I attended the Royal Academy of Engineering Circular Economy symposium. Actually, more truthfully, I attended one of three days of symposia, but I think I got the gist of it – three days of talks, workshops, and networking opportunities between, for the most part, engineers and designers within the circular economy looking to make new connections, share ideas, and discuss how to better promote the circular economy.
For those who don’t know, WRAP’s definition is pretty spot on: an alternative to a traditional linear economy (make, use, dispose) in which we keep resources in use for as long as possible, extract the maximum value from them whilst in use, then recover and regenerate products and materials at the end of each service life.
Now, Materials World is about the materials science and industry spaces, which fundamentally concerns itself with the acquisition and use of materials within scientific discovery and the infrastructure of cultures and societies. Included in this are entities that work in oil and gas, and mining where the tenets of the circular economy may not mesh with their professional interests.
That’s something I talk to Professor Raimund Bleischwitz, environmental and resource economics scholar, and David Fitzsimons, director of the European Remanufacturing Council, in the June issue of Materials World. But it got me thinking – the circular economy means a lot of things to a lot of people. How can it serve everyone satisfactorily?
I can’t answer that right now. But I wanted to see what you guys would want out of a circular economy society. What form do you see the mining or steel industries taking? What kind of product design do you envision? How do we balance the responsibilities of nations that have benefitted from previous industrialisation?
Let us know in the comments!
