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