Magazine_BEAST_2017_Edition_8_complet

64
#Science | Green
THE ORIGINS OF
CIRCULAR ECONOMY
WITH DR. STAHEL
BY ALEXANDRE
KEILMANN
Swiss architect and industrial analyst Walter R. Stahel is known as
one of the Founding Fathers of Circular Economy and for coining
the expression «cradle-to-cradle». On October 19 th , he will share
his vision and knowledge during the 7 th edition of the Luxembourg
Green Innovation Summit. BEAST met with Dr Stahel to discuss
sustainable development strategies and his best practices.
For more than 40 years, you have been promoting circular economy, notably
through repairing and remanufacturing. How did industry professionals first
react to the change of mindset?
Circularity has been the functioning principle of nature since the Big Bang,
and is as old as mankind, but for the first millennia it was one of poverty and
scarcity. “Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without”.
The modern circular economy for manufactured objects is industrial and
one of abundance. The drivers now are personal motivation of people, not
necessity. The existing example of reuse, buying and selling used goods are
so integrated into society that we do not see them. Have you ever bought or
exchanged a NEW banknote? All of them are second-hand objects, polluted
with traces of drugs and bacteria.
The obstacles of change are not industry professionals but economists.
They simply cannot imagine that used goods are cheaper and better than
newly manufactured ones – because they only know manufacturing -
remanufacturing is as well researched as the backside of the moon. Examples
like Xerox, Caterpillar, Michelin and Rolls-Royce have shown that you need a
holistic understanding of business to see the higher competitiveness of the
circular economy, which breaking out of (the comfort of) silo-thinking. People
also need good reasons why they should shift from optimising value chain
process up to the Point of Sale, to optimising the use of stocks of objects over
their full product-life. This implies a radical change of management objectives
from flows to stocks, and from value added to value maintained!
From the first initiatives of companies to today’s sustainable development
strategies, which strategies proved to be more efficient? And why?
The most efficient corporate strategy in shifting to more sustainable business
models is selling performance, selling goods as a service. This business model
enables companies to exploit sufficiency as well as efficiency strategies and
develop new systems solutions, in addition to all circular economy options.
In exchange for retaining the ownership of their goods and the embodied
resources, they gain resource security with regard to the future availability
and prices of resources. And these companies have to internalise all costs of
future liabilities, risks and waste; as a result, societal sustainability increases
because the companies have a strong financial incentive to take measures to
prevent waste and losses by managing risks on systems level.
While some countries acknowledge the fact of
reducing waste and carbon emission, others
tend to keep a blindfold. How would you
convince political leaders to engage and adapt
in a sustainable-circular economy strategy?
Originally, economics has been the driver
of the circular economy. Reuse, repair and
remanufacturing helped owners of objects to
reduce the costs of using them. Ever increasing
waste volumes brought political leaders into
the game for environmental protection reasons.
The political solution was waste management,
recycling, getting rid of the waste problem.
But the circular economy is about preserving
resources, natural, human, cultural and
manufactured assets, a holistic optimisation
involving loops, people, economics and speed.
Material recycling is only a sustainable option if
we succeed in recovering atoms and molecules
to the same purity as new resources.
The loop axiom says that the smaller the loops,
the more profitable they are: reuse before repair
before remanufacture before recycling; and local
before regional before global.
People are a renewable resource, and the
only one with a qualitative edge. The circular
economy substitutes manpower for energy, on
a micro- and macroeconomic scale. Introducing
the circular economy on a national level would
reduce GHG emissions by 66%, and increase
employment by 4%, according to latest research
reports.
BEAST MAGAZINE #8