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3 Things You Can do Today to be Circular

We have a choice, despite what is in front of us, to purchase consciously and behave responsibly. We should value good choices highly because their impact will last longer than we will.

The responsibility isn’t solely yours. Everything you buy could and should be made from waste, designed to last for years and be easily recycled. But whilst we wait for the big wheels of government and industry to turn there are some immediate things, we all could be doing today.

It is very often the small things that make big things happen.

1. Take less so we make less and waste less. REDUCE YOUR CONSUMPTION.

Look after our planet’s natural resources. We are taking far too many materials from nature, making them into things that we use, sometimes only once or for a very short time and then throwing them away and not thinking what happens to them after this. This is called a linear economy model:

TAKE > MAKE > WASTE

  • Avoid pointless plastic and single use items.

  • Ditch your disposable habits.

  • Value the materials that you have – reuse them, repair them, keep them in use for as long as possible.

  • Buy less.

2. Stop Wasting Waste. TRULY RECYCLE.

Whilst you wait for all products to be made from waste, start seeking out those that are.

And those that can be fully recycled at the end of their life.

One of the main reasons we find ourselves in this waste and resource crisis is a fundamental misunderstanding of what ‘recycling’ actually means. Nothing is truly recycled until it is actually reused and / or repurposed into something new.

Today, within our linear economy we are only reusing around 2% of what we put into our recycling.

Creating demand for products made from recycled materials will unlock the value in otherwise worthless throw away materials which in turn stimulates economic investment in ‘waste’ by recycling facilities and industry. Helping to turn the big wheels of change even faster!

3. Choose challenge over convenience.

INSPIRE OTHERS.

Join our call to action that challenges public, government and big industry’s attitudes towards waste and change thinking about how we are misusing our planets finite natural resources so that we can stop these resources from running out in our children’s lifetime and last beyond them for future generations.

Tell your stories about businesses you find and the products you like that are made from waste or that are designed to be repaired for life.

Show how they work in your world, what responsible choices you have had to make and always, always celebrate good design.

It is our consumption that is the main driver of increased material use, more so than population growth.– source: UN Report 2016

What will happen if we don’t think in circles?

In 1970…

…we took 22 billion tonnes of natural resources from our planet a year.

In 2010…

…we took 70 billion tonnes
a year.

By 2050…

…it is estimated that we will take 180 billion tonnes
a year.

– 2016 United Nations Report on “Global Materials Flows and Resource Productivity”.

To give this some scale, this is roughly the same weight as 1.1 billion Sydney Opera Houses*. If you built them all next to each other you would need the equivalent land mass of 2.5 times the size of Australia.
And this is just one year!!

*Sydney Opera House weighs 161 tonnes and covers 4.5 acres.

If we keep taking resources at this rate then we are going to run out. The planet cannot cope. The environmental impact this will have on our society, oceans and land will be devastating.