Use Circular Design To Reverse Harm

Today when we manufacture things, we use what is called a *linear economy*. First, we go and get the materials, and this often requires using big machines to mine the Earth for the materials, or maybe if it's biological materials, we have to have big farms or big growing areas where we grow the materials we're going to use. Then we go into the manufacturing plant where we have to prepare the raw materials

to be usable. And that creates a lot of waste and it takes a lot of power and emits a lot of stuff into the atmosphere and the land and the ocean. And then we actually have to manufacture the thing we care about – again, more waste. And then we have to transport it to the place where it's purchased and used and during the usage, more waste, and then afterwards, what do we do? We usually throw them away, or we sometimes try to recycle.

But recycling is actually not an answer to the problem because it's very expensive to recycle the materials that we use today and quite often it costs more money to recycle and to reuse than to use brand-new materials. So, recycling is not very sustainable. It doesn't mean we shouldn't do it, but it's not the answer to the problem. Remember what nature does. Here, nature provides a very convenient package.

Look – I can take it home this way from the store; I don't need a plastic bag. It's robust, it's pretty protective, and it is reusable. First of all, I eat the stuff in the middle – the banana. And, second of all, I throw away the peel, but if I throw it away into a compost pile, it becomes great nutrients or even if I just throw it into the ground where there are plants, it takes a bit longer for it to decompose this way,

but it will eventually decompose and  be useful material for the growing of plants. And nature does this. Almost everything in nature is reusable. Our bodies themselves are reusable. How could we manufacture in ways that  are like that? Well, this requires us to manufacture *differently*. And it's going to require a different model for business. But the model has to be *circular*.  That is to say, the first time, yes,  

I take out raw material from the Earth  and I manufacture and I make an object.  But when I resell it, when I give it to people to be used, then the circle begins, because if it breaks, we repair it; if it runs out of power, we have a device that easily recharges. Well, suppose it's a cell phone and a new  technology comes about that gives us higher bandwidth – do I have to throw away the cell phone or the mobile that I have?

No. I should be able to open it up and maybe replace the wireless component with the new component, that gives me the new skills, the new technology. Or if the cameras get better – I've had the phone for five years and now the cameras are much better – I would like to upgrade the camera, I can open it up to pull out the old camera and put it in a new camera. Why can't I continually upgrade this equipment that we have instead of buying a new one?

So, what do we do when a product has reached the end of its life? What do we do to complete the circle? Well, there are companies that are already doing that – making things so that when it's reached the end of its useful life, we can take it apart and reuse the components. One example is Canon, the company  that makes cameras, and in this case laser printers for your computer, have already done this with the toner,

the material within the laser printer that makes the dots on the paper, the colors and the black and white that makes the pictures and the words visible. Every laser printer has in it a bunch of cartridges that contain the toner. And when the toner is empty because we printed so many pages, what do you do with this cartridge? Canon says, 'Oh, buy a new one and take it out of  the box

and take the old one and put it into the box.' And we insert the new cartridge back into the printer and we take the old cartridge and we mail it back to Canon, and Canon even pays the postage. And Canon says, "We have designed these cartridges so that every part of it can be reused either in a new cartridge or in other things that can use the very same parts." And they advertise that we have  no waste in recycling, reusing, repairing.

That's the circular economy – designing things so that in the end *everything can be reused*, if not for the same product, then for other, similar or even different  products. Remember the paper cup used for coffee. It can't be reused because it has a plastic  lining inside, and that is very difficult to remove.

But what if it didn't have a plastic lining? What if we could make a paper cup   that was actually okay to put in hot liquids? Now, it turns out there are ways of doing this and there are some companies doing this already. If that were the case, this would be completely circular. We get the material from trees  or plants to make the paper; we make the coffee cup. When we're finished with a coffee cup, we discard it, but it can be reused.

We can shred the coffee cup and use the pulp to make another coffee cup and another coffee cup and another coffee cup. It simply requires thinking hard about materials and making sure that they can be reused. One of the problems with modern manufacturing and modern design is that in the attempt to make something that's so small and so thin and so lightweight, it's that we've made it so that it is basically impossible to reuse

because we've taken many, many different kinds of materials and bonded them together in a way that is difficult or even impossible to separate. We've made wonderful devices that are wonderful to feel, wonderful to touch, wonderful to look at because they're made out of multiple materials, put together in a way that, well, each of the materials alone could be reused, but when they're combined together, it's  impossible or too expensive to take them apart. We have to stop that; so, here's where  design plays a very important role.