More recently, the Ellen Macarthur Foundation and, McKinsey building on the Macarthur Foundation work, have been detailing business aspects of implementing the circular economy. The thesis is to move away from the “take, make, dispose” system and replacing it with restoration.
The image below, from a McKinsey Quarterly Report, No. 1, 2014 titled “Shaping the Future of Manufacturing” as part of a section on “Remaking the industrial economy” illustrates how, in a circular economy, products are designed to enable “cycles of disassembly and reuse” and thus reducing or eliminating waste. You may want to click on the image to get a larger view.
There is a comparison between these cycles in biological-based materials on the left of the illustration and “technical materials” on the right side. At the bottom of the illustration are notes about minimizing “leakage” – the loss of opportunities to re-use materials before returning to soil for biological materials and landfilled/burned for technical materials.
The loops in the illustration (for example, on the technical material side, of maintenance, re-use/redistribute, refurbish/remanufacture, etc.) mimic the loops in the comet circle.
As with green manufacturing, this is a concept that is logical and possible to illustrate schematically but can be challenging to actually implement in practice – that is, to put some wheels on the concept so we can move with it!
I’ll do more with this in my next article, Part II of Creating the Circular Economy.
David Dornfeld is the Will C. Hall Family Chair in Engineering in Mechanical Engineering at University of California Berkeley. He leads the Laboratory for Manufacturing and Sustainability (LMAS), and he writes the Green Manufacturing blog. This article was republished with permission by David Dornfeld.
