Circular Economy For Dummies

Chapter 23

Ten Questions to Foster Innovative Thinking

IN THIS CHAPTER

Coming up with questions to spur circular thinking

Identifying design strategies to improve production or extend a product’s lifespan

Revisiting outdated assumptions around a product’s design, manufacturing, or usage

Every year, humans throw away over 14 billon tons of stuff. That’s over 4,400 pounds of material that will sit in a landfill and leech chemicals into the ground and then never get used again. Although our planet is big, it’s not big enough for an endless pile of waste.

The whole idea of building a circular economy aims to address this situation by rejecting an outdated take-make-waste model of endlessly extracting, producing, and consuming that has dominated our approach to manufacturing for centuries. To design-out waste, so to speak, we need to reinvent our models of business, manufacturing, and use. A paradigm shift like this one requires some innovative thinking and asking some really big questions (that normally aren’t asked).

This chapter presents ten questions to get your innovative and creative juices flowing so that you can start the process of creating a more circular product or service. ...