Circular Microeconomies: How they work

Circular economies are great for not only the invite but also resource management. The trouble with conventional circular economies is they maintain many of the transportation footprints of conventional linear economies. So take make waste tends to have a smaller transportation footprint then circular economies and where that transport distance is vast, it can sometimes even be more than the emissions of wasting product.

Conducting the entirety of circuit economies locally is key! But with packaging and single use plastics, this is a huge undertaking. obviously the technology exists to create reusable products, but this still leaves a question of what to do with the existing plastics caused by single use product's.

That’s one of the biggest reasons why we developed our cradle-to-cradle circular microeconomies to act as unified, in-house circular systems, that align with donut and helical economic principles. These micro-economies differ From conventional circular economies by decentralisation and transportation removal. anybody who is familiar with lean manufacturing will know why that's key. Transportation and movement is one of the 7+1 wastes of Lean (the 7 Mudas).?

Conventional Recycling: The Good, Bad and Ugly

Our model differs from conventional recycling in many ways. Conventional waste management has several economic actors.

• Waste recyclers capture lots and lots of plastic in bins from many different places (commercial and/or municipal). Bottles are the majority of the valuable material dropped off at Material Recovery Facilities (MRFs)
• There, plastic is “recovered” (sorted) & baled and they sells those bales to someone. It sits in a yard until it’s collected. here, soft plastics presents a challenge, especially if they're woven because they can tangle around different key parts of the recovery infrastructure, which makes it difficult to recycle. While there are now ways of dealing with soft plastics, their presence in the hard plastic waste stream still posed a challenge and at scale, its effects get exponentially worse.
• The buyer/broker, who could be anywhere, granulates or even pelletise it, via extrusion & sells it on to a manufacturer, who could also be anywhere
• The manufacturer either combines that with virgin plastic, or uses it native and then makes something out of it
• That is then shipped to another buyer who uses it for a thing (e.g. refilling the bottles with drinks) via freight, haulage and logistics
• …to a warehouse, often run by an importer.

In between each of these stages is a transportation step which is significant. Conventional recycling takes a plastic bottle at one end and it only becomes part of another plastic bottle (if it becomes part of another plastic anything) 18 weeks later. It’s cycle-time is 18 weeks!

Worse, as we've seen over the last decade, the law doesn't stop unscrupulous or unregulated markets from getting this waste through exports one way or another.

At the other end, most areas that use products, use commodity products. Meaning the combination of recycling and manufacturing is akin to transporting waste hundreds or even thousands of miles only to bring it back hundreds or thousands of miles after manufacturing something from it.

Not only that, the grade of plastics has to be high. Any plastic that doesn't meet the grade then gets downcycled, landfilled or burnt. Energy from Waste, while half the emission of energy from coal, can only recover a third of the energy density. Means three times as much plastic is burnt for the same MWh of energy. Making it worse than coal per unit of energy consumption! Plus, it's destructive. Requiring the accumulation of emissions all the way from cracking oil, with transportation, even though the destroyed plastics were totally viable! They just don’t have a market for it.

So to get some value from operationally unrecyclable waste (waste that is technically recyclable but isn’t economically viable at the scales it is done at) especially if it looks good on statistics, it will often be exported. Including to countries which don’t have the recycling infrastructure. Ecologically and commercially unethical, as this is a form of what we call “carbon tax avoidance”.

What we do

At Automedi, our process is completely different! We don’t move the waste that far from where the waste is generated. Our Stockport facility is built into a mill [Cheeky self-promo: Eventbrite to our open day]. Serving up to 90 businesses inside the building and those in surrounding areas. It can take the place of half the garbage room. So instead of one centralised material recovery facility, which then has to send waste on elsewhere, silo-to-silo, the entirely of the circular economy, cradle-to-cradle, from the point of bringing the waste in until products come out of the back end, is inside that one room! Not only, that but we have built this into half a shipping container before.

Unlike conventional circular economies, we are our own manufacturer. Our cycle time can be as little as 25 minutes to go from plastic cutlery, to something else. For a city, hundreds of smaller, energy efficient facilities, tear through recycling a city’s waste, into higher economic value products, in parallel, in no time!

Each one of our cluster hubs, can process up to 250kg of Plastic a week and the product output depends on how many 3D print machines you want to distribute in the district around the facility (usually within 15 minutes, to align with 15 minute communities) but a basic 10 machine, nano v1 cluster can turn 60kg of product from that while our nano v2 fleet can make up to 360kg in the same period.

Better still, We optimally engineer our products to remove plastic where it's not needed. Which is something you can't do with injection moulding. Creating a higher volume of products for the same weight of plastic and because we recycling much wider range of products, we can take plastics that drop out of the MRF, or are fished out of the ocean, because of the way we engineer and combine it.

This is how we recycle in “whatever building you're in, wherever you are and we do the manufacturing near you as well” :). Permitting, insurance and regulation which differs by country, shape what the cradle-to-cradle offering will look like in that country.

Just like the networks and the internet allowed people to swap great big, single site, mainframe systems, with hyper-distributed servers and then hyperscale cloud, we are creating hyper-distributed circularity instances in our “manufacturing cloud”.??