Is the circular economy a rational utopia? 

Although the idea is much older, the cir­cu­lar eco­nomy concept was pop­ular­ised at the turn of the 2010s by the Ellen Mac Arthur Found­a­tion (EMF). The lat­ter was instru­ment­al in pro­mot­ing the cir­cu­lar eco­nomy glob­ally, intro­du­cing the concept in a main­stream report with McKin­sey in Dav­os in 2012¹. This report had an imme­di­ate impact on all sec­tors (eco­nom­ic, polit­ic­al and social). In France, a Nation­al Insti­tute for the Cir­cu­lar Eco­nomy (INEC) was cre­ated in 2013 and Ademe pub­lished a first report on the sub­ject that same year². But it is the FEM’s scrip­ted story that has undoubtedly made its mark. For this occa­sion, the Found­a­tion drew up a mobil­ising story, which would make people dream while appear­ing real­ist­ic, based on dia­grams, fig­ures, and quan­ti­fied scen­ari­os. A sort of ration­al utopia.

The cent­ral point of this story, which con­trasts the old mod­el of the lin­ear eco­nomy with the desir­able mod­el for the future of the cir­cu­lar eco­nomy, is built on the idea of cir­cu­lar­ity rep­res­en­ted by the image of the circle, a sym­bol of etern­ity in all civil­isa­tions. Applied to the cir­cu­lar eco­nomy, cir­cu­lar­ity means that after their death, products and waste can find a new life in the form of recycled mater­i­als, recon­di­tioned or repaired products… and this, while cre­at­ing mil­lions of jobs and eco­nom­ic wealth estim­ated by the European Com­mis­sion at 1% of addi­tion­al GDP growth! In France, the first cir­cu­lar eco­nomy con­fer­ence, organ­ised in 2014, was an incred­ible suc­cess. Politi­cians, busi­ness lead­ers, eco­nom­ists, eco­logy advoc­ates, social and solid­ar­ity eco­nomy act­ors, and pub­lic act­ors all gathered to cel­eb­rate this new uto­pia! Unfor­tu­nately, this is a very sim­pli­fied scheme… 

First, it is not pos­sible to reuse everything, or to recycle end­lessly. Mater­i­al inev­it­ably degrades, and if you recov­er it to make some­thing new, you must add new mater­i­al, and/or energy to obtain a new product. The same goes for products: you can main­tain and repair them but, at some point, they will have an end of life. This is the prin­ciple of entropy. Secondly, many products have a “dis­pers­ive” use, like fer­til­isers that are spread on farm­land or paints on walls that are irre­triev­able. It is also impossible to col­lect all waste. Some is lost in nature or gets mixed with oth­er waste because it is too small to be sor­ted and ends up in land­fill when it could have been recycled.

But even if you were to recov­er all the mater­i­als, primary and sec­ond­ary, from the products you make through future tech­no­lo­gies, it would not be enough to fuel a grow­ing eco­nomy. To make the 1.5 bil­lion smart­phones sold world­wide in 2022, com­pared to “only” 680 mil­lion in 2012, almost 2.5 times as much met­al had to be extrac­ted in ten years! Recyc­ling can only meet part of the needs of a grow­ing eco­nomy. Schemes based on an infin­ite cir­cu­lar­ity where we would no longer need primary resources are there­fore wrong in this grow­ing world. A recent report by the European Envir­on­ment Agency (EEA)³ points out that there has been no decoup­ling of the mater­i­al foot­print from GDP growth over the last 30 years. In oth­er words, the con­sump­tion of non-renew­able resources has grown at the same rate as the increase in eco­nom­ic wealth.

Yes, many ini­ti­at­ives are inter­est­ing, but scal­ing them up is very dif­fi­cult. To recov­er value, one must first recov­er, then sort, then pos­sibly clean up, then recycle or repair – all this with­in the frame­work of well-organ­ised chan­nels. If a link in this chain is miss­ing or fails, the cir­cu­lar­ity loop no longer works. Waste sort­ing centres, for example, have dif­fi­culty recruit­ing employ­ees since they are noisy, smell bad, there are risks of fire, etc. In short, the work­ing con­di­tions there are not good enough for them… Moreover, illeg­al chan­nels thrive because they take what is valu­able in the products and throw away the rest without bear­ing the costs of clean­ing up.

We need to dis­tin­guish between weak and strong cir­cu­lar­ity. Most com­pan­ies prac­tice weak cir­cu­lar­ity: they do not change their busi­ness mod­el and are sat­is­fied with adjust­ments at the mar­gin. They optim­ise their pro­cesses, and pos­sibly carry out main­ten­ance and recyc­ling, but without giv­ing up growth in pro­duc­tion volumes. These strategies are there­fore not com­pat­ible with respect for plan­et­ary lim­its. We need to focus on strong cir­cu­lar­ity, based on the prin­ciples of sobri­ety and extend­ing the life of products and infra­struc­tures. For example, an elec­tric drill is used for an aver­age of 12 minutes over its life­time!⁴And who does­n’t have a raclette machine in their kit­chen that they only use a few times a year? The chal­lenge of strong cir­cu­lar­ity is not to reduce the pro­duc­tion of wealth, but to gen­er­ate it dif­fer­ently. It is based on two pil­lars: extend­ing the dur­ab­il­ity of products and intensi­fy­ing their uses, par­tic­u­larly through eco-design.

A good example is Fnac-Darty, which has a third of the mar­ket for elec­tric­al and elec­tron­ic products in France. With their long-stand­ing cus­tom­er ser­vice and a net­work of over 2,500 repairers that they train them­selves, they are able to inter­vene quickly any­where in the coun­try with a high level of ser­vice. Tak­ing advant­age of the intro­duc­tion of the repar­ab­il­ity index in the Anti-Waste for a Cir­cu­lar Eco­nomy law (AGEC law), the com­pany launched repair sub­scrip­tion pack­ages for all its products (Darty Max). After only one year, they had sold 500,000 of them. The com­pany’s goal is to sell 2 mil­lion sub­scrip­tions by 2025. At the same time, they are seek­ing to guide con­sumer choice and sup­pli­er offer­ings by estab­lish­ing a list of the most sus­tain­able products, and to nar­row down the offer­ing to the most sus­tain­able products. In this way, they intend to gradu­ally shift their busi­ness mod­el from the sale of products (which is cur­rently very com­pet­it­ive with plat­forms such as Amazon) to the sale of ser­vices, to build cus­tom­er loyalty.

The “eco­nomy of func­tion­al­ity”, which con­sists of selling a per­form­ance of use rather than the product itself, is anoth­er prom­ising mod­el, exper­i­mented with by a grow­ing num­ber of com­pan­ies. To devel­op this mod­el of ser­vices with less envir­on­ment­al impact, it is neces­sary both to have eco-designed products so that they can be eas­ily main­tained, repaired, and recycled and to set up net­works of tech­ni­cians in the regions to provide these ser­vices to cus­tom­ers. A his­tor­ic­al case is Mich­elin, which has developed the Tyres-as-a-ser­vice offer, which is pro­posed to pro­fes­sion­al cus­tom­ers (HGV and bus fleets, etc.) and which cov­ers tyre main­ten­ance, repair (re-tread­ing and regroov­ing) and end-of-life recycling.

The prob­lem is that pub­lic author­it­ies pro­duce con­tra­dict­ory injunc­tions. On the one hand, they pro­mote the cir­cu­lar eco­nomy and a cer­tain form of sobri­ety (e.g. AGEC law), but, at the same time, they encour­age the pro­mo­tion of “green” growth tech­no­lo­gies (elec­tric vehicles, off­shore wind tur­bines, mini nuc­le­ar power plants, “green” hydro­gen, etc.) which nev­er­the­less have a high mater­i­al foot­print and thus gen­er­ate pol­lu­tion trans­fers (e.g. France 2030 plan). In the “green” growth approach, the impli­cit assump­tion is that the growth in pro­duc­tion and con­sump­tion can be con­tin­ued indef­in­itely since “clean” tech­no­lo­gic­al solu­tions will have been developed. How­ever, a choice must be made between encour­aging high-tech tech­no­lo­gic­al solu­tions or ini­ti­at­ing a strong cir­cu­lar trans­ition, based on sobri­ety and the devel­op­ment of eco-designed tech­no­lo­gies, pos­sibly low-tech.

Interview by Marina Julienne