Stop for a moment and pay attention to the things around you. The clothes you’re wearing, the device you’re using, what you’re sitting on, the building you’re in. What are they made of?
The simple answer is “stuff from nature” — woods, metals, rocks, oils, and plants refined into things like furniture, batteries, bricks, plastics, and clothes.
In 2017, humanity’s total material footprint — which refers to the total amount of raw materials we extract to fuel our economies — was 92 billion tonnes. The UN predicts this will more than double by 2060 without a change to the current patterns of consumption.
Our insatiable appetite for more stuff threatens to exceed Earth’s limits. True sustainability demands shifting to a circular economy that reuses resources, cuts waste, and restores nature. Slashing carbon is just one piece of the puzzle.
Overeating
For one second, imagine the global economy as a giant belching monster. The beast likes to dine on vast quantities of minerals, metals, biomass, and fossil fuels. It devours these materials to fuel its growth — to build things like roads, buildings, and cars. What the monster doesn’t use becomes waste. Some of this waste comes in the form of farts and burps — aka greenhouse gas emissions.
That metaphor was a bit of fun, but the problem of overconsumption is very serious. The material footprint of the average person stands at about 12 to 13 tonnes per year, almost triple what some scientists estimate to be the sustainable limit.
While we often talk about carbon footprint, the impact of our material consumption — resource depletion, habitat destruction, and pollution — is just as critical. And ironically, decarbonisation efforts could even be fuelling the problem.
The race to net zero is driving demand for everything from EVs and solar panels to semiconductors and batteries. All of these climate technologies require heaps of materials, including vast amounts of rare earths like lithium, cobalt, and nickel. In the current economic system, this means more mining, exacerbating ecological degradation and inequality, particularly in many of the world’s poorest countries.
Cutting down
In her groundbreaking book Doughnut Economics, Kate Raworth presents a vision for a world where humanity operates within a “safe and just space for all.” The outer ring of the doughnut represents the planetary boundaries — the ecological limits we cannot exceed without damaging Earth’s life-support systems. The inner ring represents the social foundation, the minimum standards for human well-being. The goal is to live in the “doughnut’s sweet spot,” where everyone’s needs are met within planetary boundaries.
In our rush to green the global economy, we are running the risk of breaching Earth’s outer ring. Cutting carbon emissions is critical, but we must ensure that this transition doesn’t exacerbate existing environmental and social crises.
Reaching Raworth’s “sweet spot” means breaking with our linear take-make-waste consumption habits and making them circular. In a circular economy, products are designed to be reused. When they are no longer useful, instead of becoming waste, they then become a resource for something new, just like in nature. Afterall, “waste” is just a resource in the wrong place.
Doing more with less
The first step toward a circular economy is ramping up recycling. Currently, the bulk of the critical materials used in clean technologies, as well as the products themselves, aren’t recycled. However, rising costs and skyrocketing demand for everything from lithium to steel is opening up a burgeoning new market for recycled materials.
One company cashing in on this boom is German startup Cylib, which recently broke ground on its first industrial-scale battery recycling plant. The factory is expected to process 60,000 EV batteries a year once operational, scheduled for 2026. This would make it the largest such facility in Europe.
However, recycling should only be a final resort. We need to prioritise sharing, maintaining, reusing, redistributing, refurbishing, and remanufacturing. Keeping stuff in circulation for as long as possible will dramatically reduce the need to mine new resources.
Take the example of BikeFlip, recently founded by five students from Utrecht University. The startup refurbishes abandoned and neglected kids’ bikes in the Netherlands and then offers them on a subscription model for a fixed monthly fee, including the maintenance and repair of bikes. When the child outgrows the bicycle, the customer chooses a new one and returns the old one, so BikeFlip can deliver it to another customer.
Transforming waste into new, better products is called upcycling, and it’s a pillar of circularity that companies like Papershell are turning into profits. The Swedish startup sources craft paper made from waste lignin and cellulose from the timber industry and turns it into “wood metal” — an ultra-strong, fire-resistant material that can replace aluminium, fibreglass, and plastics. Papershell is even experimenting with using mycelium to break down the high-tech wood once it reaches the end of its life — returning it to the soil and fostering biodiversity.
Other ventures are working on reusing entire buildings. Buildings consume about 30% of all the natural resources we extract from the environment, so there’s a big push to make them more circular.
Berlin-based startup Concular has developed software that captures and stores information about the components of a building — from bricks and beams to tiny screws. In this way, when a building reaches its end-of-life, its pieces can be broken up, advertised on a marketplace, and sold for use in the construction of new structures.
Last year, Dutch architecture firm MVRDV completed Matrix One — a six-storey, energy-efficient, office and laboratory block constructed using over 120,000 reusable components. Almost everything, from the doors and windows to ceilings and furniture, is fully detachable and reusable. Even the floors are made from prefabricated concrete slabs with no fixed connections — they can simply be unscrewed and removed.
To return to our analogy, instead of acting like a resource-addicted glutton, we need to change our diets. A healthy society uses natural resources efficiently and sustainably, much like a well-functioning body. It extracts resources at a rate that allows nature to replenish them. It minimises waste and reuses materials whenever possible. In this system, waste and emissions are kept low, pollution is controlled, and energy comes from renewable sources. It’s a delicate balance where society thrives without depleting or damaging the environment, ensuring future generations can meet their needs too.
Circularity will be one of the key themes of next year’s TNW Conference. Discover the innovations powering the drive towards true sustainability. Early birds can now buy 2-for-1 tickets for the June event.