Ken Pucker offers a welcome and much-needed critique of the naive enthusiasm that currently surrounds the circular economy (CE). If anything, his critique doesn’t go far enough.
Let us first remind ourselves that CE is a rebranding of the two environmental strategies of reuse and recycling. These practices are as old as the modern environmental movement itself. More than 50 years of experience and research in reuse and recycling already exist, but CE enthusiasts are either unaware of that fact or don’t credit any of it. Consequently, lessons from past failures are not being learned.
I am glad Pucker reminds us that fashion’s jejune version of CE is yet another promise of decoupling environmental impact from economic growth (called “eco-efficiency”) by relying entirely on market mechanisms (called “win-win”). Eco-efficiency and win-win have been the prevailing corporate sustainability paradigms ever since the CEO-led World Business Council for Sustainable Development popularized them at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. By pretty much any measure, however, the global environment continues to degrade. For example, annual global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels have increased by more than 60 percent since the Earth Summit and are still rising. It is high time to admit that relying entirely on eco-efficiency has failed us. In addition, the track record of win-win has been so dismal that even corporate sustainability professionals and scholars are now pleading with us to abandon it. It is thus unclear to me how a company could still issue the dual goals of doubling revenues and halving CO2 emissions while keeping a straight face.
Even Pucker’s two examples of circularity successes look more like failures upon closer inspection. The US recycling rate of PET bottles, called the “superstar of plastic recycling” by Plastics News, hovers around 20 percent—meaning that four out of five PET bottles never get a second life and end up incinerated, in landfills, or in the environment. The US recycling rate of aluminum cans, which media company GreenBiz calls “America’s most successful recycling story,” has dropped from more than 60 percent in the 1990s to 45 percent today. If these are aspirational numbers for the fashion industry, it’s because circularity is all but nonexistent there.
Contrary to Pucker’s statement that environmental analysis of circular systems is lacking, data and environmental assessments of reuse and recycling strategies abound and offer important and actionable insights. For example, aluminum recycling’s low cost and even lower greenhouse-gas emissions are well documented. It therefore does not bode well that we cannot even close the loop on the can. It is also clear that the potential environmental benefits of recycling are typically much lower than those for aluminum. Post-consumer-recycled synthetic fibers, for example, still have 60 to 80 percent of the carbon footprint of their virgin counterparts.
Pucker mentions resource conservation as significant motivation for circularity, but data show that running out of resources is the least of our concerns. We will have wrecked the natural environment and the climate long before we run out of metal ores or fossil fuels. The most important insight from existing circularity research is that the sole environmental benefit of circularity is to reduce virgin-production activities. Yet we can increase reuse and recycling without reducing virgin production and consumption—a phenomenon I and management and sustainability scholar Trevor Zink have called “circular economy rebound.” Since CE’s environmental purpose is to reduce virgin production, the single most important CE metric is virgin-production levels. But, as Pucker correctly observes, they are still rising in fashion and other industries.
It is rather wonderful to hear a corporate sustainability expert like Pucker say that the most important corporate sustainability action is to reduce overconsumption, which will require robust regulatory support. He deduces this need from the obvious: Single-minded reliance on eco-efficiency and win-win strategies has not delivered, and will not deliver, sustainability. The sooner the CE community and the fashion industry accept this, the greater the hope for more meaningful circularity efforts across sectors. Embracing regulatory action and letting go of the win-win paradigm also enables us to see that the true economic barrier to circularity is not the cost of reuse and recycling but the cheapness of virgin materials and new products, since all their environmental and social costs are still completely externalized.
Pucker, like virtually everyone else, omits one important sustainability lever: labor. Labor—people’s time and skill—is the only supply-chain input that has no environmental impact, which is why environmental assessments of products ignore all labor inputs. One reason repair, reuse, and recycling have lower environmental impacts than virgin production is that they require fewer material and energy inputs but more labor. The fashion industry could decrease its environmental impact by shifting its sources of revenue from material and energy to labor. This transition can be achieved by paying apparel workers more, since most of them have yet to earn a living wage. This strategy would also help to achieve the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals of no poverty, zero hunger, decent work, quality education, and reduced inequalities. Truly increasing environmental and social sustainability at the same time—now, there’s a win-win I can get behind.
Read more stories by Roland Geyer.