‘Born from earth; return to thence, when the clock has come a full circle.’ An ageless adage, spoken in not so many words through the millennia. We have reached the stars but lost the understanding of this maxim. Over the centuries, the impact humanity has had on its surrounding ecosystems has been steadily increasing, from the stone age, to the advent of farming post the neolithic age, to the iron age, to the industrial revolution in the late 17th century which changed our effects from arithmetical to exponential. This exponential crater, humanity’s ecological footprint, shows no signs of slowing down even today. Circular economy is the spark, that could en-kindle the flame of a greener tomorrow, where the phrase ‘born from earth; return to thence’ resonates in all our ideologies of production, consumption, and everything in between and after.
Circular economy refers to a complex industrial economy that relies primarily on renewable energy, minimizes and aims to eliminate the use of toxic chemicals, and reduce waste generation rather than scavenging through mountains of rubbish for recyclable items. Circular economy seeks to provide a model to decouple economic progress from resource constraints in a way that inspires innovation throughout the whole value chain, rather than relying solely on the waste recycling end of the market. The entirety of circular economy falls on the back bone of clever and elegant design. Biological systems are most commonly cited as role models. Biological systems establish an equilibrium with their ecosystem; consider a typical organism, it relies only on renewable energy, produces non-toxic waste, and strip the majority of the nutrients from their food before excretion of said waste. The waste that is excreted serves as manure for the plants in its habitat, which grow into its source of renewable energy. This closed loop can be attributed to Life’s chemistry. Life’s chemistry is leagues distant from industrial chemistry. Factories use large amounts of energy to process materials, wasting a majority of it. Life’s chemistry is adroit and gentle, building chemicals at low temperatures and pressure, using only a small number, if any, of non-toxic elements. Life’s large chemical chains (proteins, carbohydrates, fats, etc) are made up of sub-units that are easy to assemble and disassemble in a controlled way. These chemicals then gain form and function by clustering themselves into nested hierarchies. At the end of their life, these chemicals biodegrade back into the biosphere. The concept of ‘cradle to cradle’ is central to circular economy. It refers to the idea of utilising the waste and pseudo waste material from one process as the raw material for another process, and the subsequent waste from the second process as input to another system until we return to the original process that first created the waste. The industry today however, follows a ‘cradle to grave’ approach, willing to sacrifice just about anything for a marginally higher profit. It seeks universal, one size fits all, solutions overwhelming and often downright ignoring natural and cultural diversity. The ‘cradle to cradle’ approach is biomimetic and moves us towards sustainability. ‘Cradle to cradle’ systems are generally large incredibly complex systems relying on diversity for the circular use of resources. The cradle to grave concept juxtaposed against the cradle to cradle concept reveals its linearity and brute force approach, incapable of the flexibility, efficiency, and circularity of the latter. A great example of a cradle to cradle system is Bio Foam. Bio Foam is the cradle to cradle product to replace expanded polystyrene. It looks similar structurally and has more or less the same properties. The major difference is that expanded polystyrene is made of polymers that are based on fossil raw materials (a finite resource), whereas Bio Foam consists of biopolymers, which are made from vegetable materials (an infinite resource).The consequence is that Bio Foam can be reused, is biodegradable, and it can be industrially composted at high temperatures under the influence of moisture and bacteria. Whole System Design is increasingly being seen as one of the most cost effective ways to both increase the productivity and reduce the negative environmental impacts of an engineered system. Consider cars, but before trying to reinvent the wheel from a whole systems design view, let’s look at the approximated environmental cost of a car. The carbon footprint of making a car is immensely complex. Ores have to be dug out of the ground and the metals extracted. These have to be turned into parts. Other components have to be brought together such as rubber tyres and plastic dashboards. All of which involves transporting things world over, followed by assemblage; every stage in the process requires energy. The companies that make cars have offices and other infrastructure with their own carbon footprints, which we need to somehow allocate proportionately to the cars that are made. Using a input-output analysis to break up the known total emissions of the world or a country into different industries and sectors, in the process taking account of how each industry consumes the goods and services of all the others. If we do this, and then divide by the total emissions of the auto industry by the total amount of money spent on new cars, we reach a very rough ballpark estimate of 720 kg CO2 per £1000 spent. Thus, producing a medium-sized new car costing £24,000 may generate more than 17 tonnes of CO2. These figures have been derived for the UK and would differ for India, however, this still sheds light on the immense pollution a car causes even before its’ driven. The estimate doesn’t even take into account all the other pollutants generated over the course of production such as methane, abrasive waste, oxides of nitrogen, etc. A car causes more pollution before it's ever driven than in its entire lifetime of driving. So what could be a holistic solution? One of the first steps could be to switch to electric vehicles until completely renewable solid fuels aren’t created, something along the lines of hydrogen fuel tanks. The boon and bane of electric vehicles is that the emissions simply move to another place, the power plant. So now the environmental impact of the car depends upon the environmental impacts of the power plant, and the impact due to extracting, transporting, assembling the car itself. The panacea, in part, can be solar charging stations, or in locales with less suitable weather, wind and other renewable sources. Falling short of sufficient as the central power grid will always be present to provide power in more diverse and convenient locations. We would need to ramp up the efficiency and reduce the waste material generated in power plants. It takes immense resources to create new state-of-the-art power plants, so we emphasize on upgrading existing ones. The other issue to tackle is raw material extraction, transport and assembly. Raw material extraction should be carried out after strict environmental impact assessment reports, which highlight ways the initial plan can be improved: better locations for extraction which affect less biologically diverse and/or dense areas, optimise engineering approaches, etc. We are on the cusps of space age exploration, the increasing commercialisation of space related activities, flowers the idea that our most eco-friendly source of raw materials will soon be asteroids. Such a shift would masterfully eliminate all the adverse impacts on our biosphere. Transportation could be facilitated through electric vehicles whenever a new vehicle has to be brought on for transportation as the environmental cost of creating a new vehicle and effectively dismantling an old one is incredibly high still. Assemblage however has no real solution besides increasing the efficiency of the machines used. The system designed is not without flaws but reigns supreme over the current one. BASF The Chemical Company, in 1998, launched ‘ecoflex’. A great leap forward in the for the plastic industry; the most notable of its properties being: a certified compostable polymer, an ideal blend component for biodegradable polymers, processable on conventional blown film plants (for polyethylene), elastic as well as water and tear-resistant nature, printable and weldable, suitable for contact with food. By sheer virtue of its properties it had numerous applications spanning from mulch film for agriculture to breathable films in the hygiene sector. Ecoflex embodied the circular economy that BASF was adopting at the turn of the 20th century. Ecoflex is a material facilitating the use of and compounding with renewable raw materials, however Ecoflex was derived from fossil raw materials. Ecovio, an evolutionary leap from Ecoflex, was launched in 2006. Building upon Ecoflex, it brought to the table primarily two attributes: Ecovio is a completed product, not just a blend and compounding product; Ecovio is composed of at least 80% renewable raw materials. It is made from Ecoflex and Polylactic Acid (PLA), derived from sugar based renewable raw materials. Ecovio being a finished product, allowed smaller industries and companies to adopt it without the need for further processing to obtain input material. Currently, BASF is building product partnerships to introduce Ecovio in as many products as possible. Swiss Coffee Company’s Beanarella system uses Ecovio as an example of an injection mould-grade application. It is a Ecovio-based multi-layer system with high barrier properties to provide a combination of a coffee capsule and an aroma-tight outer packaging to fulfil the demanding requirements for protecting the product and brewing coffee in high-pressure coffee machines. BASF has shown that circular economies have room to grow, the transition from Ecoflex to Ecovio is proof of that. Circular economy and its principles aren’t only conspicuously valid in India, but also greatly needed. Our developing nation is exactly that developing; early adoption of circular economy by our nation would solve a great number of issues we face today simultaneously vanquishing those that would crop up in the future were circular economy ignored. The issues that it solves outreach cleanliness, closed resource cycles, disparition of economy and the natural resources, natural pollutant free ecosystems; circular economy could provide the open spaces currently occupied by landfills and waste dumps, an incredible reduction in energy demand, stifle disease ridden habitats. It also appeals to that higher morality that humanity constantly strives towards. As a developing nation, not adopting circular economy designs would lead to a bleak future contrasting everything represented above. It’s a route that will be taken, sooner or later, of our own volition or in the miasma of despair. Businesses and local economies can boom and they can tank. To look at the awe radiating complexity of the entire economy of a nation as a single entity, singularly characterized as a binary yes or no, is folly. Our economy will see increased consumer demand simply to keep our aspirations and developmental priorities on track. The government has a key role to play: mitigate any possible butterfly effects in such an intricate connection of businesses and economies. Schemes should be brought in place to ease the transition. Large corporations can take the blow from delayed action but new upcoming businesses would collapse if not assisted. It would be great to be able to predict which industries would fall in the winds of change and which would ride the wave to unimaginable profit, but it is without a doubt clear, that India would survive and evolve to meet its development goals and aspirations because we as a nation have grown in change. As an independent nation we are relatively infant, so to adopt and mimic the first world industrialized countries is involuntary simply because we have seen that particular thing we’re adopting flourish. Curiosity is probably the most human of all qualities. Our curiosity along with our intelligence in the whirlpool of all the qualities that make us so, has ushered us into an age of great prosperity, but at what cost? Circular economy is a brilliant spark to set us on the path of harmony with nature. Now we just need elegant design and witty solutions. The human condition is to think, to think curiously, to think deeply, to think tangentially. To think.
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