Circular Economy as a Solution to Ecological Crisis

Global business

TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1
MAIN BODY...................................................................................................................................1
Circular economy design............................................................................................................1
New business Models..................................................................................................................3
Reverse cycle..............................................................................................................................4
Enablers and favourable system condition..................................................................................6
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................8
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................9

INTRODUCTION
Circular economy presents the solution by reusing the unwanted products at places where
it can be used as a raw material or in production stages. Circular economy is referred to as the
effective economics system associated with the closed loops, Renewable energy sources etc.
Which is very useful in Extracting maximum value from the product. This study will highlight
on various case studies associated with the circular economy linked with new business models,
circular designs, reverse cycle, enablers and favourable system conditions.
MAIN BODY
Topic: Circular economy as a solution to ecological crisis.
Pushing limits to cut costs and minimize expenditure is the current trend of many businesses in
the contemporary market. This comes at the cost of being ecologically disruptive and poor waste
management which leads to increased environmental damage (Bocken and et.al., 2016).
The concept of circular economy comes of great help in overcoming this difficulty to a great
extent. Most of the ecological problems arise in managing and disposing by-products and waste
material. Keeping materials in a chain of usability and extracting maximum value from a
substance is the basis of circular economy. Rather than simply using and disposing things, in this
case closed pathways of wastes creates opportunities for businesses to utilize each other’s
products. By this the long term use and overall impact of a substance can be analysed to a much
greater extent than a simple economy (Geissdoerfer and et.al., 2017). Despite the humongous
benefits, its adaptation isn’t widespread as incorporation of circular techniques in the current
production workflows is time consuming and proves to be providing little value to the first party
companies. To overcome this setback it requires mandatory industry norms to be set that are kept
in place with circular economy in mind.
Circular economy design
Case study: BIOPAK single use food packaging
Single use plastics are the highest single contributors to linear economy as their daily use is very
high and they are very hard to recycle among other wastes. Also this process is labor demanding
and economically provides very little value (Lieder and Rashid, 2016).
Biopak aims at making compost from food articles that would generally be made from single use
plastic packaging. It has developed biodegradable food articles that are collected in specialized
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dustbins and then buried under soil for composting. This reduces the amount of plastic that
would otherwise end up in landfills.
Usually these recycling efforts would not be classified under circular economy itself. The reason
why Biopak qualifies as a circular economy is due to its collection and management service. The
packaging is made from plant based materials which easily decomposes rather than plastics
which have degrading periods of millions of years (Manninen and et.al., 2018). The service
requires people to throw their food articles in its collection green dustbins which are specialized
to collect only biodegradable food articles.
The workers then transfer these into land areas made for composting. The holes are specially
designed to have optimum decomposition. After a few days the compost is ready to be collected
in small quantities and packaged as fertilizers for farming.
This has proved to be particularly effective in developed countries like Australia and New
Zealand where the company has been operating since many years and the high costs of operating
can be accounted by the government.
A 2018 research showed that methane is produced in landfills which contributes to global
warming (Planing, 2015). Much of the waste in landfills is biodegradable but it cannot be done
properly due to contamination. This problem is greatly solved in this process.
Further, Biopak can also aim to bring more materials in this circular economy like other plastics
and packaging material. This will start chain networking of different products that can be
collectively be drawn under circular economy (Schulte, 2013).
Case study: Redesigning medium life heavy and bulky products from the scratch. A case
study on DSM Niaga.
One of the biggest challenge is that, medium life bulky products such as mattresses and
carpets are considered to be very difficult to recycle because it contains high amount of toxic
chemicals (Ellen Macarthur Foundation, 2020). Every year approximately 1. Million kgs of
carpets ends in incineration. DSM Niaga has developed 3 design principles which are
considered to be underpinned by the thinking of circular economy. This approach has resulted in
your production of technologies for development of new medium life products. The company
focuses on designing an adhesive approach. The modular design helps in supporting easy
maintenance of the meeting let the dogs which helps in easily recycling mono material
components (Korhonen, Honkasalo and Seppälä, 2018). The key benefit of this project is that
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