Circle economy is a new terminology to help lead a more sustainable trend within businesses. The article discusses how the world needs more than just reducing, reusing, and recycling to reverse or halt the damage done to the environment. The circular economy can be the more that we need. The term circular economy ties into the cradle-cradle analogy versus the cradle-grave. With a circular economy, resources are reduced.
A linear cycle goes from production to seller, to use, to landfill. With a circular economy, the landfill step gets skipped and replaced with recycle, reuse, refurbish, and repair. With a linear cycle, waste is huge and the products are essentially one and done. With the linear cycle, when businesses actually see the amount of waste they are creating, it forces them to look internally and go through a life-cycle assessment. A life-cycle assessment has 5 steps–define the objective of the analysis, define the scope of the analysis, collect background data, collect data by conducting interviews or observations, interpret the collected data, and create an action plan. The last step of the life-cycle assessment is to create an action plan, and switching over to a circular economy can be that action plan.
A circular economy minimizes waste greatly. It is a modern solution to the waste problems we see today. It is like the regenerative process of nature using a closes loop system. Both biological and technical materials can be reused. Biological materials include waste that can be absorbed into nature while technical materials consist of materials that can be utilized over and over again.
Many companies might be inclined to shift their production to a more circular economy. There are many benefits to companies for switching over to a circular economy. Some of these include improved brand reputation, increase in competitive advantage, access to new markets, reduce costs due to energy efficiency, reduction of costs, improved regulatory compliance, more stakeholder/investor relationship opportunities, innovation in business models and products/services, etc.