The problem of cold-starting of the circular economy

We need new and well-fitting conceptual models that will allow us to redesign business, information and supply chain flows in the market.

All flows nowadays in business are linear and follow the ‘take, make, dispose’ route. There is no doubt that we need to open the path for the transition from the linear model of ‘take, make, dispose’ towards a circular model that supports ‘reuse, remake, recycle’ as equally important components.

However, this path is paved for the time only with good intentions: there are projects that aspire to offer solutions and generously define models that are of very limited usefulness and value: they have been designed to fit specific needs and every attempt to scale-up and transfer practices is problematic and any attempt to apply results on a wider scale will incur higher costs without promising any working solution.

What needs to be done is simple: we need to build a robust information infrastructure that shall allow for symbiotic solutions where linear and circular models will co-exist. For this we need a simple and robust information technology that shall support decentralized ecosystems to be formed and evolve.

This is how the Web was built — and this is how any success story takes place. We have been focusing on the solutions that circular economy may suggest, without having cared to establish a powerful space for defining the problems.

We need to model business flows, information flows, supply chains and value chains that are currently linear and come up with suggestions on how their transition to circular will take place.

We need to be able to quantify them before we shall test with their introduction in the real economy.

And we need to follow the triple bottom line principles from the early design and conceptualisation phases: circularity will have to be good for the society, good for the economy and good for the environment.

If this seems like an unsolved puzzle, you are right: the successful ERP system of this century will have to follow the triple bottom line principles.

It shall not be the technology that will be the key, but where we shall set the bar for the technology to solve problems (and no need to remind: create also lots of new ones!). This is what happened with the Web: many of the ideas, the protocols and the concepts were already there — it was their integration that unleashed the potential and created the value we experience nowadays.

For experiencing true circular economies we have to build the necessary framework that will allow their realization.

Same as we did with the double entry accounting system that was first introduced in Europe at the end of the 13th century, people may have worried about the complexity of its application and not about the moral implications of its adoption. Here we may be about to do everything wrong: we care for the moral implications of careless use of natural resources and aspire to achieve a zero-pollution, toxic free environment, while we are lacking the methodological means to make this happen.

We only need to take a few steps backwards and see that with no good paradigms for genuinely supporting the circular economy, every attempt shall have feet of clay. And to repeat the opening statement: we need new and well-fitting conceptual models that will allow us to redesign business, information and supply chain flows in the market.