The roots of circular economy thinking go back to at least the 1960s, when researchers at M.I.T. developed a computer model called World3. The effort was intended to simulate the long-term consequences of things like population growth, industrialization and the use of natural resources. In their 1972 book, “The Limits to Growth,” the researchers warned that unless humankind changed the way it used and consumed material goods on a global scale, civilization would likely collapse before 2070. That, along with the first images of Earth from space and Rachel Carson’s iconic 1962 book, “Silent Spring,” inspired an environmental ethos based on understanding the planet as one big system.
Around the time that “The Limits to Growth” came out, a young undergraduate at Dartmouth named William McDonough began pursuing architecture. Later, while designing a day care center, he observed the way children put everything in their mouths and began to consider the materials they were exposed to. He connected with a German chemist named Michael Braungart. The two collaborated for years, and in 2002, they published their ideas in a book called “Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things,” in which they argued that biological materials, which can be composted, should be kept separate from minerals and metals, which could be reused. The book became a touchstone for a certain kind of forward-thinking architect.
In part, they were responding to the increasingly complex nature of materials. In the early 20th century, the oil and gas industry began to use the chemical byproducts of their refining processes to develop things like plastic polymers. Insulation, varnishes, sealants, piping, pigments, fireproofing material — all contain such compounds; nearly 20 percent of plastic goes to the building industry. Jessica Varner, a historian at the University of Southern California’s Society of Fellows in the Humanities, has studied how petrochemicals have infiltrated construction in the United States. She found that the industry lobbied to shape local building codes and encourage architects and engineers to incorporate new composite materials into their designs. “How do you separate when everything is embedded with the fibers, coatings and pigments from essentially oil and gas derivatives?” Ms. Varner said.
The nature of modern building materials is one of the trickiest parts of implementing circular ideas. In many cases, refurbishing things is so expensive, demanding time and expertise, that it is cheaper to simply buy new. “Part of the problem is that so many of the materials that get used in conventional construction in the U.S. in particular are laminated, they’re multiple assemblies,” Paul Lewis, a principal at LTL Architects in New York, said. “Insulation is a foil-backed polyurethane foam, right? So those become their own inhibitors to take it apart and reuse productively in another life.” So far, much of material reuse in construction is limited to boutique, aesthetically driven choices like selling weathered wood from old barns to use as interior cladding in hip coffee shops. And there are the additional expenses of finding somewhere to store stuff while it awaits its next life and upgrading old components to meet new demands and requirements.
As a result, in many quarters, the emphasis has shifted to designing structures whose components can be disassembled and developing new, bio-based materials that can eventually be composted. “We should design man-made objects and products in such a way that we’re not destroying the resources, but that we’re basically borrowing them for a certain amount of time,” Dirk Hebel, a professor of sustainable construction at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, said. “And that we can take them out in their pure form and put them back into the system.”
Circularity advocates also say it’s not just about materials, but about how the overall economy is structured. A British economist and Oxford University professor named Kate Raworth, who took aim at traditional economic growth models in her 2017 book, “Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist,” has argued that it is impossible to achieve structural change without also rearranging basic assumptions of how production and consumption are incentivized. She is now working with Amsterdam officials on the city’s circular plan.
These views might have remained at the fringes of environmentalism if not for the efforts of a British yachtswoman named Ellen MacArthur. In the late aughts, Ms. MacArthur, who broke the record for a solo circumnavigation of the globe by sailboat, started a foundation to promote the lessons she had derived on her trip, including the need to plan for resource reuse. In 2012, she presented a study,conducted with McKinsey & Company, at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, arguing that circular design could save E.U. manufacturers $630 billion per year. Directed to company executives, the report concluded that reusing materials could be profitably incorporated into a capitalistic economic system. Companies, the report suggested, were missing out on a big opportunity to develop new kinds of products. But the world won’t be saved by bamboo straws alone, and the foundation has also argued for creating new business models that lead to better design. What if, for example, manufacturers could make more money by leasing, rather than selling, their products?