The Circular
Economy
16
Overconsumption is, in my opinion, one of the biggest problems in today’s society. We want and we want and we want, more and more to fit our ever more demanding lifestyles.
As the song in Rent goes, ‘when you’re living in America (read: most of Western society), you’re what you own’. It’s pretty self explanatory - we live in a ‘consumerism culture’ where people define themselves by their possessions - the freshest Yeezys, the latest iPhones and the fastest Segways Oh wait. Segways are so last year.
This constant renewal of short-lived trends might provide temporary happiness but are soon forgotten about in the minds of the consumers, whilst leaving a permanent footprint on the rest of the world. The culture of extractivism (large-scale of removal of natural resources from the ground), processing of these natural resources into consumer goods, and filling our landfill with obsolete goods can’t go on for much longer. The world today is rife with exploitation of cheap labour, disasters such as that in Rana Plaza (where 1000 Indian garment stitchers were killed when their factory building collapsed) and factory conditions so bad that factory owners in China have to place netting around their roofs to prevent workers from jumping to their death; which are all a result of our mindless consumerism, perpetuated by successful marketing.
Dame Ellen MacArthur, a retired English sailor and founder of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, has a solution to this problem. Sick and tired of our current linear ‘take, make, dispose’ model, MacArthur wanted to champion a restorative and regenerative economic design.
Enter: the circular economy. In theory, it’s a pretty simple concept of recycling valuable resources as opposed to extracting raw materials to make new products.
The components of the circular economy are:
1)
… by controlling finites stocks and balancing renewable resource flows. This includes things such as legally restricting the amount of material that can be extracted from the Earth.
Ragavi Thayananthan