The circular economy: recycling or prevention?

The circular economy has been perceived by many people as an approach that favours recycling of materials over their landfilling, which was the basis of the old ‘take-make-dispose’ linear approach. However, this is only partly true as recycling should in fact be considered only the last option among all circular solutions.

The Circular Economy Action Plan for a Cleaner and More Competitive Europe (COM/2020/98) is one of the main building blocks of the European Green Deal. According to the plan, the circular economy is defined as “a model of production and consumption, which involves sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing and recycling existing materials and products” with the aim to keep their value in the economy as long as possible. It shows that recycling is only the final stage of a product lifecycle and as such should be avoided whenever possible. It all starts with design of the given product or service that predetermines its future use, resource consumption, modularity, repairability, etc. Nevertheless, the first step towards limiting the amount of resources used should be prevention so that a product actually never emerges in the first place. However, this is not easy to achieve because in the modern era, we have been orientated towards growth and increase of our living standard by consuming more and more products, where lower consumption is often perceived as uncomfortable. Therefore, the greatest challenge of our current society is to find a way to maintain the level of comfort that developed countries possess, while decreasing our carbon footprint.

The European Circular Economy Action Plan is one of the initiatives aimed at achieving this. Its purpose is to redesign the system via regulatory incentives. Producers are encouraged to develop long-lasting products that are repairable and can serve various users throughout their lifecycle. Another step towards this goal is standardisation of parts and key components so that they are easily replaceable. This forces producers to change their business strategies and there are manufacturers across all sectors, from apparel to the automotive industry, that are experimenting with new ways of delivering the product experience. The important thing to keep in mind is that no matter how efficient the circular economy may be compared to the linear economy, it still consumes a lot of energy and resources. Furthermore, history has shown us many times that once we manage to do something more efficiently, it often leads us to even greater consumption than before (the so-called rebound effect). Therefore, together with the technical approach of the circular economy, it is also necessary to address the problem of lifestyles and overconsumption.