The End of Throwaway Thinking
The solution, it seems, is something called the circular economy. It’s a fancy term for what our grandparents would have called common sense. Instead of a straight line to the landfill, it creates a loop where today’s waste becomes tomorrow’s raw material. The global economy chews through over 100 billion tonnes of materials each year, yet a paltry amount, less than 9%, is ever recycled. To me, that doesn't just sound wasteful, it sounds like a colossal business opportunity being left on the table.
This isn’t about virtue signalling. It’s about hard-nosed industrial logic. Why pay to extract, ship, and process new resources when you have perfectly good ones sitting in a pile, waiting to be reused? The companies that figure out how to do this efficiently could be sitting on a goldmine. Or, more accurately, a plastic-mine, a metal-mine, and a glass-mine all rolled into one.