Unmaking Waste in Production and Consumption: Towards The Circular Economy

Robert Crocker · Christopher Saint · Guanyi Chen · Yindong Tong

sept 2018 · Emerald Group Publishing

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The legacies of a century of fossil-fuel based development and overconsumption, of treating the environment as a waste sink for industry and agriculture, have left devastating impacts on the earth’s air, water and land, and these are directly implicated in Climate Change. In response, a number of global institutions and nations, including the European Union and China, have committed themselves to the development of a ‘circular economy’. This will require a transformation of today’s ‘linear economy’ of ‘make, use and dispose’ as the market dictates, into a Circular Economy.
The aim of the Circular Economy is to decouple economic growth from resource and energy use through iterative, systemic social, economic and technological reform. This book presents new theoretical and practical insights into this concept, based on case studies from both the developing and developed world, with an emphasis on economic and material transformation, design for reuse and waste reduction, industrial ‘symbiosis’ (the planned circulation of resources and energy within an industrial setting), and social innovation and entrepreneurship.
Four central themes emerge through the essays presented here: the importance of ‘restorative design’ in transforming resource flows through both production and consumption, the value of understanding and enumerating wastes in more detail to enable their reuse, the central role of advancing technology and applied science to further this transformation of materials for reuse, and finally, a reconfiguration of design, consumption and retail, so that the present ‘linear’ economy of ‘make, use and trash’ can be replaced with a more ‘circular’ model.

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Robert Crocker is Deputy Director of the China-Australia Centre for Sustainable Urban Development at the University of South Australia. Christopher Saint is the Director of the China-Australia Centre for Sustainable Urban Development, and Dean, Research and Innovation, of the Information Technology, Engineering and Environment Division at the University of South Australia. Guanyi Chen is Chair and Professor of Bioenergy and Environment, Dean of the School of Environmental Science and Engineering Director of the China-Australia Centre for Sustainable Urban Development at Tianjin University. Yindong Tong is Deputy Director of the China-Australia Centre for Sustainable Urban Development, and Associate Professor of Environmental Science at the School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Tianjin University.