Circular Economy For Dummies

Introduction

Welcome to Circular Economy For Dummies!

This is a book about materials and waste, but it’s also a book about design and business and how these elements are connected. At its heart, this book is about rethinking how we humans can create food, buildings, fashion, and other products without destroying Planet Earth and burying the world in waste.

To safely provide for the needs of billions of people in an ever-warming world, we need to change the situation dramatically. Every manufacturer, designer, and producer of goods needs to rethink their industrial approach to how products are made. Instead of the old take-make-waste approach to manufacturing, where natural resources are extracted from the earth to make stuff that ends up rotting in a landfill, we need to explore a new model. That’s the definition of the circular economy.

Although you’ll find a lot of information about the impact of waste in this book, it isn’t a book about trash. Nor does the book focus only on how to reduce plastic, even though that’s a part of the story. At its core, the circular economy focuses on how to redesign everything so it can be made and remade over and over again. It turns out that doing good can also be beneficial to a business’s bottom line.

The planet is swimming in trash. Though the industrial revolution transformed the quality of life for everyone, it also produced billions of tons of plastic waste, nearly all of which ends up in the oceans or in a landfill. At this rate, the ...