The legacies of a century of fossil-fuel based development and
overconsumption, of treating the environment as a waste sink for industry
and agriculture, have left devastating impacts on the earth’s air, water and
land, and these are directly implicated in Climate Change. In response, a
number of global institutions and nations, including the European Union
and China, have committed themselves to the development of a ‘circular
economy’. This will require a transformation of today’s ‘linear economy’ of
‘make, use and dispose’ as the market dictates, into a Circular Economy. 


The aim of the Circular Economy is to decouple economic growth from
resource and energy use through iterative, systemic social, economic and
technological reform. This book presents new theoretical and practical
insights into this concept, based on case studies from both the developing
and developed world, with an emphasis on economic and material
transformation, design for reuse and waste reduction, industrial ‘symbiosis’
(the planned circulation of resources and energy within an industrial setting),
and social innovation and entrepreneurship. 



Four central themes emerge through the essays presented here: the
importance of ‘restorative design’ in transforming resource flows through
both production and consumption, the value of understanding and
enumerating wastes in more detail to enable their reuse, the central role
of advancing technology and applied science to further this transformation
of materials for reuse, and finally, a reconfiguration of design, consumption
and retail, so that the present ‘linear’ economy of ‘make, use and trash’ can
be replaced with a more ‘circular’ model.