Quasi-circular economy or <1%, >60%, >80%

The thesis is that a circular economy will require growth in material consumption (primary and recycled materials) of less than 1%, a recycling rate greater than 60% and a discharge rate (i.e. how much consumption is discharged rather an accumulated) of more than 80%.

Effectively, the circular economy has economic growth less than 1%, almost everything is recycled and nothing is accumulated. A minimalist’s dream!

Grosse, former executive of Veolia, built a remarkably concise model of how materials are extracted, consumed, discharged, recycled or disposed as waste. The figure below shows a sustainable and not sustainable model. I won’t explain it here but its the interplay of the consumption, discharge and recycling that makes it work.

Two  key illusions:

• The illusion that recycling on its own could play a key role in the conservation of deposits
  and in the reduction of primary consumption environmental impacts, whereas it is almost
  useless in the absence of any slowing down of total material consumption growth; and
• The illusion that an effort to reduce waste generation would lead automatically to slowing
  down material growth, whereas it is just as prone to having the perverse effect of increasing
  material accumulation.

Gross also calls for waste minimization only for non-recyclable products and increasing the velocity (i.e. the speed from extraction to discharge as waste) for recyclable materials. Get the materials as fast as possible from the recycler or extractor, through the customer, to the recycling plant. He then argues that policy should focus on building markets for recycled goods because just having recycling targets doesn’t build the market so recyclers aren’t able to monetize their output.

This paper is clearly the culmination of decades of resource and waste management experience. Its logic is impeccable and each sentence sets off a range of possible investment considerations.