The Circular Economy is an economic system
that’s an innovation engine that puts the
re back into resources.
It allows for continuous benefit to be provided
to all generations by the reuse of things
of material, energy, water…
By designing things that can become useful
over and over again.
This is the largest business opportunity ever
seen by our spices and the leaders of our
economic future will be people who understand
that by design we can create perpetual assets
and optimize them to create businesses that
thrive and are joyed by people everywhere
all the time forever.
Why would we want to miss that?
We see two nutrient cycles today.
One is the biological nutrient cycle, which
is the ancient one of life itself, but the
other is probably about five thousand years
old, which is technical nutrition: when we
started, you know, chipping rocks or banging
metal.
So if we start with a biological nutrient
system, these are things that come from life
or go back to life.
So if we look at the biological cycle of fabric,
we can design it instead of what we saw in
the early nineties, where you saw wool and
ramie blends that would have their trimmings
declared as hazardous waste by the Swiss government,
and they had to be send to Spain for burial
or incineration because they couldn't be buried
or burned in Switzerland.
We can redesign that to eliminate the concept
of waste, so in the case of textiles we would
redesign the textiles to become trimmings
that are mulch for the local garden club and
grow strawberries and the water coming out
of the textile mill is as clean as Swiss drinking
water.
This reduced cost by twenty percent and allowed
a textile industry to stay in Switzerland.
That is design for the Circular Economy.
On the other hand there are technical nutrients:
the camera that takes this, the
computer that you're watching this on… these
are technical nutrients.
These are materials that we can design for
endless reuse.
A really fabulous example of technical nutrition
is aluminum.
In the last hundred and fifty years, pretty
much seventy five percent of all the aluminum
made by humans and used, is still in use.
So it is exactly what we have talked about
in technical nutrition; it could be a window,
it could be a piece of furniture, it's valuable,
it's collected, it's reused ad infinitum.
That's a great example of a technical nutrient.
Engaging with the circular economy by design
is fascinating.
If we look at different sectors we realize
that a lot of people will say, “this is
a very interesting theory but how does it
work in practice?”
A building for example, that I got to do because
I'm an architect, is the design the River
Rouge plant for Bill Ford, where we replaced,
you know, hard asphalt roofing with green
roofs, the largest in the world, but we ended
up saving Ford thirty five million dollars
in capital expense, day one, over conventional
storm water management.
For business people, this is a one minute
decision.
Another example would be in the furniture
industry, we see companies like Steelcase
and Herman Miller designing for disassembly
where all the materials are designed for reuse
because this way we harvest yesterday’s
products for tomorrow’s products.
In personal care and home care, we see companies
like Aveda and Method in personal care and
then soaps and things like that, where all
the materials are designed to be safe in the
water, as they're used, safe on your skin,
and even the packaging is considered as nutrients
for the cycle of packaging.
So we can add all kinds of products to these
lists and just about any company can engage
with these issues in a very profitable way.
Peter Drucker, a management consultant, pointed
out in 1984, in his book, The Effective Executive,
on page one that it's the manager’s job
to be efficient and do something the right
way, but it's the executive’s job to do
the right thing.
The executives can work from their values
to produce value.
And one of the problems as we see today, if
you only start with numbers and value, you
can go to tactics and strategies and set measurements
and goals, but you're bench marking and your
business may be changing while you weren't
paying attention and you're bench marking
against yesterday instead of advancing into
tomorrow.
So we find that it's very powerful for executives
to start with their values because you've
got beyond bench marking to what does the
future look like that you intend and how do
you design into it, and then we give it to
the engineers and produce the value.
So let’s say you're a CEO and you want to
join the circular economy.
What do you do?
Well the first thing is to take an inventory
and see what it is you're doing.
And understand which parts of it are not good
and which ones are good, and where you want
to go, and then we're going to articulate
what do want in the future, and you're going
to do both at the same time.
Let’s get rid of the things we don't want
and increase the things we do want, and my
goal is one hundred percent fabulous.
That is what executives can do, that's leadership.
