CIRCULAR ECONOMY, SUSTAINABILITY AND BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES
Introduction
Humans exist only on this planet earth and heavily dependent on natural resources and ecosystems. According to some scientific estimates, humans inhabited the earth for about 300,000 years, and the human civilizations dated back to 4,000 BC (Victor, 2018). For most of human history, they have lived sustainably and pretty much in harmony with nature. However, industrialization accelerated the pace of humans controlling nature for their lifestyle. Industrialization also catalyzed the linear economy in which take-make-use-dispose culture is accentuated. In the last hundred years, the rapidly growing as well as urbanizing human population is excessively consuming the planet’s limited resources and polluting the ecosystems. This is also contributing to the extreme weather conditions and rise in sea levels.
This calls for a transition from our current unsustainable linear economy to a more sustainable circular economy. This change is appreciated only when it comes with a promise of positive outcomes for all stakeholders. In this article, we have explained how a circular economy is beneficial to humankind for a sustainable future in the long run. The transition also requires investments in infrastructure facilitating circularity of materials, production of clean energy, and innovations to redesign the processes and services.
Circular economy and sustainability have become a burgeoning consciousness in recent years. To standardize the concepts, the International Standards Organization (ISO) formed a new circular economy technical committee. According to the ISO, a circular economy is one where it is restorative or regenerative. Also reuse/reutilization should lead to reducing waste by careful evaluation of resources.
The ISO also defines sustainability as a state of the global system, which includes environmental, social and economic subsystems, in which the needs of the present are met without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It’s evident from ISO’s vision that circular economy and sustainability are intricately connected and will feed on each other.
The authors define that circular economy is a way of living in harmony with our ecological systems and restoring them. To do so, we advocate the use of Life-cycle Analysis tool, nano and digital technologies empowering Industry 4.0 with the 3Rs - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. The authors also suggest that the change to circularity and sustainability will be better appreciated and embraced by every individual when it becomes a part of our education curriculum across the globe. This should drive inter-disciplinary innovations to foster sustainability (Murray et al., 2017).
Cities and Linear Economy
Rapid industrialization in the 20 century provided a major impetus for global urbanization. This led to the development of cities around industrial areas contributing largely to the socio-economic progress around the world (Gollin et al.,2016). Cities turned into centers of education and employment for a significant portion of the growing population. To date, people are continuously migrating from rural to urban areas in pursuit of opportunities and a better lifestyle. However, this economic growth came at a huge cost of undesirable effects on the environment as well as human health. Urban areas being densely populated and packed with industries consume more than two-thirds of the total energy consumed (mostly derived from fossil fuels) and accounts for over 75 - 80 % of global greenhouse gas emissions (Satterthwaite, 2008). The industrialization has also resulted in
