Circular Economy

The circular economy is an economic model designed around continuous reuse rather than disposal: products are designed for repair, components are recovered and re-fed into manufacturing, materials cycle through multiple lives rather than ending in landfill. The contrast is with the "linear economy" of extract-make-use-discard that has dominated industrial society. The aim is not zero impact but minimal new extraction at each turn of the cycle.

The term was popularised in policy debates from the early 2010s, particularly through the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, though the underlying ideas are older — biomimicry, William McDonough and Michael Braungart's Cradle to Cradle (2002), and the longer tradition of industrial ecology. Implementation runs across product design (modular, repairable, disassemblable), business models (leasing rather than selling, take-back schemes), and infrastructure (urban mining, material passports, deposit-return systems). EU policy has adopted it as a strategic framework, with concrete legal instruments on right-to-repair and eco-design.

For the parallel society, the circular economy is the material-flow counterpart to the appropriate-technology and conviviality traditions: not a substitute for changes in scale or political control, but a precondition for any production system that does not depend on cheap continuous extraction. It connects directly to distributed-manufacturing (local loops are easier to close), open-hardware (designs that allow repair), and the broader commons thinking. The risk it shares with all sustainability framings is corporate capture: the language of circularity can decorate practices that are still linear at every meaningful step.