What is the circular economy? Why does it matter to associations?
Per the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency:
“A circular economy reduces material use, redesigns materials, products, and services to be less resource intensive, and recaptures ‘waste’ as a resource to manufacture new materials and products.”
This is in contrast to our more customary linear economy, “in which resources are mined, made into products, and then become waste.”
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation has created a useful graphic to illustrate how this works, which is the image for this post (to see a larger version, visit: https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/circular-economy-diagram).
This graphic breaks all human activities down into two cycles: a biological cycle and a technical cycle. In the circular economy, all activities derive from and return to renewable sources throughout their entire lifecycle.
Once a material enters the cycle, the main question becomes: How do we eliminate waste?
The biological side is easy to understand, as we’re already familiar with natural restoration processes. As long as we do not take too much at any one time, or pollute natural resources beyond their ability to recover, any natural resources humans use can be fed back into the system in order to regenerate nature’s own stock. If you compost food or yard waste at home, you’ve already seen this process in action.
On the technical side, users and manufacturers share responsibility for eliminating waste.
The first level tasks users with sharing resources. In practice, that looks like Zipcar, public transportation, borrowing tools from a neighbor rather than buying, or checking out books and other resources from your local library.
The second level involves both users and manufacturers in maintaining or prolonging use. Manufacturers are tasked with developing durable, affordable, easy-to-repair products, and users are tasked with taking the trouble to repair those products when they break rather than just throwing them out. Even now, many municipalities offer free hands-on repair clinics, where people can bring in broken items and learn from experts how to fix them, with the necessary tools provided.
On the third level, reusing and redistributing can happen in a one-to-one user way, for instance, via Buy Nothing groups and neighborhood-based “curb-cycling,” or at a larger scale via thrifting and second-hand shops or even at the level of the original manufacturer taking used products back and reselling them. If you’ve ever bought a used car, you’ve participated in this process.
The fourth and fifth levels depend on manufacturers to refurbish products, break them down into their component parts for use in remanufacturing, or recycle base materials into something new.
In all cases, the goal is to minimize anything that drops entirely out of the system, e.g., “systematic leakage and negative externalities,” and to learn to live with less.
Questions for associations:
- What resources might your association be able to share with another organization? Office space or equipment? Exhibiting materials?
- If you sell or give away any physical objects, can you ensure that they’re durable and well-made, able to be used, repaired, and re-used over the long term?
- Can you make it a policy to select vendors for durable goods your association purchases that have processes for refurbishing, remanufacturing, or recycling those goods when they’re at the end of their useful lifespans?
(excerpted from The Time Is Now: Association Resilience and Adaptation and the Anthropocene Climate Disruption – full text freely available at https://bit.ly/3qK5EfZ)
