Circular Economy and new year’s resolutions: 6 Things to Start Today
By: Bruno Jean
Tags: Recycling, Environment, Circulareconomy, Bpifrance Le Hub

Over the past year, I’ve picked up a sudden and intense interest with what is called “Circular Economy” (in a broad sense, that is including its link to Social and Solidarity Economy, as well as its connections to our well-being and health.)

As part of our mission in Bpifrance Le Hub — where we focus on fostering the French start-up economy — we have released a mapping of 200+ start-ups that form the backbone of the start-up activity in this area. The mapping itself as well as a few explaining notions can be found here.

This article is a supplement to this work, where I share a more personal perspective on this matter, and my suggested short list of pragmatic actions a relative beginner such as me could initiate today.

N.B.: most of the material I’m referring to is written in French, however I have no doubt that a live translation service will do the trick.

Stop buying new things for a while — Take on the “Rien de neuf” challenge

If you read the above-mentioned article or a similar one, you are familiar with the macro-drivers of the circular economy, such as use of second-hand products, more systematic approach to repairing used goods, sorting and recycling of trash, etc.

The “rien de neuf[Nothing New]” challenge is based on the idea that, if you need a bike for instance, there are probably millions of them you can use (sitting in a garage, basement, dumpster) — with maybe a little repair or dust off needed, before you get into the trouble of extracting a few more kilograms of aluminium, copper, rubber, plastic, etc., plus the associated manufacturing and transportation effort, to eventually create a brand-new bike.

Thus, the challenge motivates you to put circular levers to action and provides a platform to track and calculate your impact (leveraging the work of the ADEME national agency for input on how much resources a Tee-shirt costs).

Maybe this year, on top of the traditional quit-smoking and exercise-more resolutions, the “Rien de neuf” challenge can bring a refreshing perspective!

Dig up and recycle that one box full of old Electronic devices and wires

Electronic and Wires are so prevalent and so cheap in our modern world that we forget that you need to move 10+ tons of land to extract 1 kilogram of copper. Same goes for aluminum or rare-earth elements that make up large portions of our electronic devices. At the same time the networks and facilities that allow an almost complete recycling (95%+) of these materials are already up and running. So, there is really no reason to hold on to these obsolete devices. If you suspect that some (cameras, phones) might still be usable by someone, visit one of the many reconditioning websites to see if they are eligible — you might even make a revenue out of it.

Apart from that, go to your nearest collection point (most likely a retailing store) and drop off the whole box — remember that every charger that you recycle is another 1t of land that a Caterpillar truck will not need to shake up.

Streamline your closet — Save a cotton bulb

So now we know that the cotton industry is among the most polluting and damaging activity there is (ecologically, ethically in particular — here is a quick and powerful explanation why). Unfortunately, our society has grown into believing that clothes such as tee-shirts are the ultimate commoditized products that you can wipe your feet on: it is ok to have a bunch of them sitting at the bottom of your closet, and ultimately ok to use this ugly shaped commercial tee-shirts to mop the floor and dump it in the trash. It is also ok to print out 200 tee-shirts for literally any commercial event or occasion (those are the one sitting at the bottom of your closet). Secondly, we are somehow convinced that we must update our wardrobe every year, if not every quarter. While I don’t subscribe to this imperative, I understand that this may be part of the pleasure of life to experiment new looks and so on. In any case there is a simple way to combine these opposing imperatives: make sure that for every new piece of clothing you buy, you release one back into the world — for someone else to wear if appropriate, or at least to give its fabric a second life. Remembering also, if you need a repair, that tailors have been around for 200+ thousand years .

Get your animal-based protein consumption straight (No one said: “stop eating meat”)

Somewhere along my process I’ve come across one of these apps that asks you a bunch of questions on your life and gives you a quantitative picture on your impact to the planet (here if you want to try)

On the food section particularly, my survey brought up something I didn’t expect, namely how the dairy products put a burden on my footprint. I was already expecting that meat (and red meat in particular) would be very resource-intensive; however, it is relatively easy to identify when you’re having a big juicy steak, and maybe decide to cut back.