How do we make consumption goods circular?

Consumption of consumer goods, such as mobile phones, clothing and furniture cause great impact on the environment (CE Delft, 2020). Therefore, it is crucial to close the raw material flows of consumer goods through circular economy. Fortunately, due to their prominent role in our daily lives and their diversity, there are many progressive initiatives in this area.

Opportunities

In order to seize the opportunities offered by circular consumer goods, the Consumer Goods Transition Team has published 38 concrete action points (Rijksoverheid, 2018). These actions focus on reforming the economy, actions for short-cycle products such as packaging, and actions for medium- and long-cycle products such as textile and white appliances.

Basically, there are three strategies to make consumer goods more circular:

• Design for optimal use, repair and recycling;
• Entrepreneurship with business models for circular use;
• Organising high-quality recycling.

There are many companies that apply these strategies to the production of a consumer good. Examples are described under several topics in this Knowledge Hub. To illustrate this, three examples are given below.

Mud Jeans

Less than 1% of all textiles in the world are recycled for new clothing after disposal. The Dutch clothing brand Mud Jeans aims to recover 100% of the textile from its jeans and recycle it for new jeans. To achieve this, Mud Jeans designs its jeans in such a way that the textile retains its value in recycling. In addition, the brand has set up a system where customers can lease jeans (Mud Jeans, 2020).

Swapfiets

Swapfiets, started its journey with 40 bicycles. Today, the company rents out approximately 180,000 bicycles with a subscription guaranteeing fast repair and service (Swapfiets, 2020). Swapfiets focuses on the design of solid and easily repairable bicycles to make its customers benefit from an always working bicycle through this business model. While the company is not yet betting on the circular potential of their bicycle rentals, this system offers many opportunities for closing down resources.

Patagonia x Bureo

According to the UN Environmental Programme, there are approximately 640 million kilos of abandoned fishing nets in our oceans. While a structural solution to this problem is needed, such as an effective ban on dumping nets or making them biodegradable, recycling is an alternative solution for this waste. Various sectors have therefore found a way to use fishing nets as a raw material.

Bureo, a company on a mission to clear the Chilean coastline and coastal waters of used and abandoned fishnets. In collaboration with the outdoor brand Patagonia, Bureo aims for a Net Plus effect in the production of caps, sunglasses and skateboards.

Hagelson

Economic and ecological gains

Due to the size of the sector, it is difficult to calculate precisely the economic and ecological benefits of circularity in this sector. According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, circular economy, globally, could be as much as US$ 700 billion per annum in materials savings. Those materials savings would represent about 20% of the materials input costs incurred by the consumer goods industry.

Closing these loops would also yield significant environmental gains. CO2 emissions in the sector alone would be reduced by 40% (Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2019).

The barriers

Despite the great opportunities and many initiatives for circular consumer products, there are still three major barriers that stand in the way of the transition.

Perspective on the design

The vast majority of consumer goods are still designed according to the “take-use-waste” principle of linear economy. This makes the products difficult to disassemble, repair and reuse components. As a result, broken products are thrown away and new ones are made. To break this trend, designers, companies and consumers need to adopt the “take-use-reuse” principle. This requires not only new physical designs, but also other earning models that make reuse and repair possible.

Unfair competition

Currently, mining and using virgin raw materials is often cheaper than high-quality recycling of raw materials. This unfair competition needs to be adjusted with policy measures (True Price, 2020).

Consumer awareness

Consumers influence the entire economy through their buying, using and discarding behaviour. Therefore, consciousness and making right choices of consumers are essential for the realisation of the circular economy.

Encouraging more circular behaviour requires two things. Firstly, market incentives must entice consumers to use goods in a circular way. Secondly, consumers can encourage companies to produce in a circular way.