Circular Economy For Dummies

Chapter 12

Improving the Material Lifecycle

IN THIS CHAPTER

Looking at materials and products in a new way

Adopting innovative approaches to reducing the impact of materials

Rethinking the entire lifecycle of a product to make it more useful and less wasteful

Every material has a lifecycle: It has a birth (extraction), a process of growth (manufacturing), a life (use), and eventually a death (disposal). If you grasp that basic fact, you can then start to identify ways to improve the quality of that lifecycle and ways to minimize and mitigate its impact on the environment. Surprisingly, the best way to improve the lifecycle of anything — any product or material — is to start questioning the way we humans do things.

The way people produce products and manage materials has remained relatively unchanged for the past century. The world has seen, of course, advancements in manufacturing, robotics, and processing, but at the end of the day, we’re still just pulling valuable commodities out of the ground and slowly turning them into landfill in the most expensive way possible.

Most of the manufacturing-and-design decisions behind how our current economy works have gone unquestioned. And ...