#10 - The Making of a Circular Box

I dream of a world without waste. A world where no life and no materials would go to waste. A world where our limits and those of our planet would be recognised.

As the great 18th century chemist A. Lavoisier wrote: “Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transferred.” As a physical fact, this was true before the Industrial Revolution and it is true today. The only difference is that our linear economy is transforming everything into waste and our planet into a dump.

Human-made mass already exceeds all living biomass and there will soon be more plastics than fish in the oceans…

A linear economy is one where we extract raw materials, transform them into something like a bag, use it and throw it away sooner or later. About 92% of our productive systems are based on this extract-transform-dump model. 92% of what we make goes to waste ! Usually with huge social and environmental damages (just look at a copper mine anywhere in the world…).

The circular economy takes a different approach in that it designs things in a way that the waste (the used bag) becomes food for another process. At first glance, one might think that is exactly what industries (and marketers) do when they sell us a garment made of “100% recyclable fibres”. Unfortunately, that is where things start getting a bit more complicated: can the garment actually be unwoven for the fibres to be effectively recycled? (Hint: the answer is usually “No”).

Damage control

Don’t get me wrong: recycling is absolutely necessary. Just not sufficient. When companies realise they have a problem with waste (often thanks to new regulations driving up costs), they usually start with the most visible (piles of waste) and setup some form of “zero waste to landfill” program, often starting with packaging as the “lowest hanging fruit”.

The limit with that approach is that recycling is an afterthought: we see our piles of waste and wonder what they can be used for (and if we could not extract a few dollars in the process).

Often, we will be able to “down-cycle” materials.

For example, most plastics made for food transportation might be transformed into grey water pipes with a much lower value. In this case, one will still need virgin materials to make new plastics for food transportation.

To further reduce waste, the next step is to intensify the usage or lengthen the life of a product. An example of the former is car sharing and an example of the later is the 2011 Patagonia “Don’t Buy This Jacket” add campaign that, while nudging consumers towards their repair services and second hand offering, resulted in a 30% increase in sales! In both cases, the idea is to increase the service rendered and the value per ton of waste.

Towards circularity

But as Ron Gonen illustrates in his book The Waste-Free World, reducing the harm of the linear model will not suffice. Not only is less harm still painful, but it may not even be sufficient to compensate increased volumes.

I was shocked a couple years ago at the Amazon Web Summit when a large bank explained that they had moved their energy intensive quarterly global risk calculation to AWS in order to divide CO2 emissions by a factor of 7. Kudos to Amazon for offering such energy efficient servers. The problem was that the calculation was now so quick and easy the bank decided to run it 120 times a year… Divide energy consumption by 7 and multiply usage by 30: the pollution linked to this risk estimate was now roughly 4 times worse.

In a truly circular model, resources are recycled in a way that preserves their physical and mechanical characteristics so they can be reused with the same properties.

A resin food container becomes raw material to make a new identical food container. One could even go further and design products to be “up-cycled”: an example would be a paper packaging containing seeds and nutrients that could be thrown away to “replant” the desired trees in a given area.

Back to the drawing board

Design is the keyword here: design of the product, design of the industrial process, design of the economic model.

Last year, I met an entrepreneur keen on launching a piece of luggage that would not end up in the bin for a broken handle (or wheel). An engineer at heart with a strong experience in after sales for a large luxury brand, Thomas Chaperot just could not stand seeing all this waste. I had to join in the project.

With the help of Pascal Nuzzo , a very talented designer, and the principles of circular design, we developed a luggage that we like to think of as a travel companion. We started with functionality: the cabin trunk needed to be practical in use for the traveler, but also durable and easy to repair for the inevitable accident.

All parts can be unscrewed and changed or upgraded in a few minutes. And the broken part can be used to make another suitcase.

We went through many iterations until we could find the right composite of natural flax for use as our base material. Different weaves of linen (the fabric made from flax) hardened with different resins and polymers were tried until we could reach adequate strength and weight: slightly heavier than carbon fibre but more flexible, it will resist pressure like a reed while being fully reusable into our industrial process.

Obviously, we could not have done any of this alone and we were lucky to meet great partners with whom we could build our first prototypes and with whom we will now industrialise production. Work is obviously only starting and we still need to grow our ecosystem further to find more potential distributors and the right financial partners to bring our CHAPOGET “Cabin Trunk” to market.

Ecosystem redesign

That is another aspect of circular models: they often rely on ecosystems. No company will have all the capacity and knowledge necessary to transform their business models into fully circular ones alone. Ecosystems and value chains have always existed, but they have to be redesigned to include many new partners, from material sciences to sharing platforms to reverse logistics…

For many big companies, this may not be natural as it implies a certain loss of control. But it becomes an evidence once we decide to only build a product or service if it contributes positively to making our world a bit more sustainable.

As Michael Braungart and William McDonough put it in Cradle to Cradle: “It's not the solution itself that is necessarily radical but the shift in perspective with which we begin, from the old view of nature as something to be controlled to a stance of engagement.”

Today, about 8% of our productive systems are based on circular models. 8% might not seem like much: but it is proof that it is possible!

And we may not be that far from Malcom Gladwell’s “tipping point” where a new norm is established. Imagine if we could reverse the circular versus linear proportions of our economies. Imagine a world without waste. The planet would strive, we could forget about ESG and I would need to find a new job.

Please share your comments, ideas or questions!