Circular economy, an end to all the waste?

Our generation’s equation is quite simple: the resources of our planet are finite. Each year, to meet our appetite for growth, humanity consumes more than what the planet can sustainably provide. The date of the symbolic “Earth Overshoot Day” keeps being brought forward. So how do we meet our legitimate growth targets without compromising the future generations’ ability to meet their own?

To propose an ambitious and viable answer, we must shift from a linear to a circular approach, redesign production cycles on a global scale in a way that combines an optimal use of resources with a maximum reduction of the quantity of waste that is not reused.

We are well aware that the raw materials we use are based on natural resources, some of which are finite. It is therefore vital to cut down on their exploitation. First of all, for obvious environmental reasons. Second, to protect ourselves from radical supply fluctuations and price rises.

What can we do to attain this?

Reducing waste

Waste is an economic and environmental aberration – it is very true for materials! In the construction sector for instance, an excessive quantity of materials is wasted. Be it due to poor estimates of the quantities needed, poor installation, etc., there are endless reasons for excessive wastage of the materials we use. Any person who has refurbishment work carried out in their home can visualize the problem that such waste might represent on a global scale.

The first way to tackle this problem is to improve the design of the products used – better quality and longer lifespan – and to manufacture them to the highest standards of operational excellence. The advances of industry 4.0 are a great catalyst for optimizing in real time the level of production and the use of natural resources, and for producing on demand.

We also need to think about the use of materials as of the stage of their design. Let’s take a simple example: prefabricated modules, a fast-growing trend in many countries. This technique enables faster and more efficient construction, by limiting the quantity of waste generated on building sites.

Substituting

Another key means of reducing our environmental impact is substitution.

Take sand as an example. It is possible to replace raw sand by cullet, a waste by-product of glass production. There might be limits, but not technical limits: it is mostly due to the difficulty of gathering the cullet. Given the quantities that we are currently able to gather, we manage to constantly improve the percentage of recycled materials that we put into our ovens for the production of glass or glasswool. And there’s a further bonus: each ton of sand that is replaced by a ton of cullet can avoid the emission of 350 kg of CO2 into the atmosphere. Our efforts in this direction are already enabling us to avoid the extraction of more than 9 billion tons of natural raw materials in any given year.

Recycling

Substitution often implies recycling, i.e. reusing existing resources rather than extracting new ones. Reusing and recycling open up the prospect of both potential economic opportunities and a reduction in the quantity of waste that is generated. In France, 40 million tons of waste were recycled in the construction and public works sector alone in 2016. Such potential benefits must be taken into consideration from the design stage of the products: the end of a product’s life must be treated as an integral part of its life cycle. Such an approach enables us to offer, for instance, external insulation systems that are completely recyclable, with all components that can be separated and returned to the production circuit.

Such solutions tend to be primarily local, and during my travels, I come across many different opportunities from one country or region to another. In developing countries, civic awareness (starting with that of our employees) is growing and the issue of recycling is becoming more and more pre-eminent. Our decentralized organization, which enables us to efficiently adapt to local concerns, gives us the ability to respond optimally to these various opportunities.

For in order to be fully operational, the recycling effort must form a network, spanning many sites across all territories. In France, there are various emerging initiatives, such as an obligation for distributors of construction materials to recover building site waste, introduced by the country’s Environmental Transition law that was passed in 2015. Saint-Gobain was a pioneer in this field, creating the very first French plasterboard recycling network back in 2008. Nowadays, we have implemented plaster recycling systems in 18 countries. And we already recycle the equivalent of the yearly production of two average size factories!

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Understanding how materials are designed and what they become: for consumers, this information is no longer optional. Companies that commit to this approach are therefore adopting a winning, responsible attitude.

The circular economy should be seen as a new frontier that is opening up to us, where we will have to act, produce and sell differently. It is a key vector of innovation at all levels of the company, a great challenge that we need to meet!