Circular Economy For Dummies. Eric Corey Freed
to change. Having a lot of resources isn’t always the answer, but having the capacity to respond to change is. Having a bunch of cash is useful, but not if you’re stranded on a desert island.
Within the circular economy, diversity is achieved by creating products that are modular, versatile, and adaptable to different applications. It’s important to understand, however, that in order to develop an effective, well-functioning system, diversity and efficiency need to find a balance. The most efficient product lifecycles will have very few nodes or areas of connections, but will be much more vulnerable to any severe changes that may occur. If, for example, a restaurant has only one available produce supplier and that farmer’s supply gets destroyed, so does the restaurant owner’s business. On the other hand, product lifecycles with low levels of efficiency and a diverse level of connections have multiple nodes and will be well prepared to respond to severe changes. If the same restaurant owner had multiple produce suppliers, one farmer’s misfortune wouldn’t destroy the restaurant owner’s business.
If you look toward the natural world as the prime example of the circular economy in practice, you see that diversity is one of the natural world’s key design principles. In permaculture — a design framework that guides the design of ecosystems intended to be sustainable and self-sufficient — you can see that use-and-value-diversity is one of the design principles extracted from the natural world. (For more details on the permaculture concept, see Chapter 15.) The innate goal of the natural world is to preserve the opportunity for tomorrow. “Only the strong survive” and “survival of the fittest” —both sayings suggest that the individual elements of a system that survive over time are strong and durable, and fit in with their surroundings. Why can’t the global economy act in a similar fashion? In the future, when we move away from monocultures (planting one type of crop throughout an entire field) and move toward polycultures (planting many plants throughout an entire field), we’ll see that the resilience of these fields will be stronger and they’ll have the ability to bounce back from any natural or human-caused disruptions.
Responding to disruption
Considering the proposed methods of a circular economy business model, it’s difficult to comprehend the reasons behind their delayed implementation on a global scale. It really does seem like common sense. Developing more durable products that last longer, increasing the repairability and customization potential of products, developing smarter material lifecycles and collection methods, recycling waste, and creating community sharing platforms are all methods that prepare businesses to respond to disruptions. On top of all this, implementing circular economy practices saves customers money, reduces waste, keep products in use longer, and allows the natural world to regenerate itself.
A whole range of companies is already implementing circular economy principles within their business processes — like Airbnb, General Motors, and Patagonia — which proves that the future of the global economy is circular. This is bad news for the business-as-usual approach to systems design. This linear approach will seem like anything but usual in the coming years. It makes sense that these industrial giants are adopting the essential principles of the circular economy now rather than later as the best approach to minimizing disruption down the road (even if, for some, it’s a somewhat bitter pill to swallow). Most of these industrial giants have had their moment of realization and acknowledge the opportunity behind turning waste into wealth.
Takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’
“They don’t make ’em like they used to.” Raise your hand if a grandparent shouted out that phrase every time a car or an appliance (or even you, when you somehow managed to strike out during T-ball) didn’t perform as expected. Although it’s a phrase we commonly use to mock older generations, unfortunately it’s incredibly accurate. Products are no longer designed and manufactured to last, and durability is rarely a performance priority for common products like plasticware. If you had a dollar for every plastic fork you have broken, you’d have enough to buy an actual silverware set. Though some products — like the plastic fork — are designed to be extremely cheap to make in order to maximize revenue, for other products, the lack of durability is deliberately a leading design influence. When you design products that can’t last, they won’t last and you’ll find yourself in a position where buying another one is the only option you have available. If products were built to last, what reason would the consumer have for acting as a repeat customer? They wouldn’t have one.
Designing a product that’s built to last — like Ford claims its vehicles are — will lead to happy clients, but designing a product with planned obsolescence built right into the product will lead to repeat clients if they lack better options to choose from. Planned obsolescence is the act of intentionally designing a product to have a limited lifespan and/or manufacturing a product that will eventually fail. There are many reasons a company would decide to minimize the durability of a product and instead focus on limiting its lifespan; here are a few examples:
The materials used to make the product are extremely cheap and allow the company to make a larger profit.
Tech support and spare parts may be made available for only a limited time and are eventually withdrawn for last year’s model.
The product might be updated with new features and technology that leave the customer with no choice but to purchase an upgraded product. One example is Apple and its infamous iPhone “Batterygate.” Apple found itself on the receiving end of public outrage when it revealed that the phone’s batteries had been designed to slow down as they aged. Apple claimed that this strategy was implemented as a means to preserve battery life, but customers weren’t satisfied with that answer. Because of this setting, Apple customers were indirectly forced to upgrade their phones to newer versions in order to maintain a high level of performance. Now, if users had been in a position to replace the battery themselves, this wouldn’t have been an issue. Unfortunately for the user, iPhone batteries can be changed only by Apple. This isn’t the only situation where the company has utilized planned obsolescence as a business strategy: The company’s sudden switch to the lightning charger made older-style chargers obsolete, which meant that if you bought a new phone, you also had to buy a new charger.
There’s no question why businesses choose to leverage the money-making abilities of planned obsolescence. Repeat business drives in the big bucks, and as long as you give the customer an enjoyable experience with a product, when that product fails, the customer will more than likely buy from the same company again because it’s familiar to them. But, unfortunately, the world is at the point where change needs to happen and the global economy needs to support products designed to be durable and to produce no waste, that can be repaired and used over and over again, and that can be controlled by their owners. The global economy needs to support products that can be rented rather than owned, remanufactured to be made new again, made available for those with low incomes, and constructed with materials that can be easily reintroduced into materials flows and made into new products. The circular economy can facilitate the development of this reality, but are companies and consumers aware of the value attached? Well, not all, but some do.
Durability and reparability policies
Improved durability