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Welcome to Circular Economy For Dummies!

This is a book about materials and waste, but it’s also a book about design and business and how these elements are connected. At its heart, this book is about rethinking how we humans can create food, buildings, fashion, and other products without destroying Planet Earth and burying the world in waste.

To safely provide for the needs of billions of people in an ever-warming world, we need to change the situation dramatically. Every manufacturer, designer, and producer of goods needs to rethink their industrial approach to how products are made. Instead of the old take-make-waste approach to manufacturing, where natural resources are extracted from the earth to make stuff that ends up rotting in a landfill, we need to explore a new model. That’s the definition of the circular economy.

Although you’ll find a lot of information about the impact of waste in this book, it isn’t a book about trash. Nor does the book focus only on how to reduce plastic, even though that’s a part of the story. At its core, the circular economy focuses on how to redesign everything so it can be made and remade over and over again. It turns out that doing good can also be beneficial to a business’s bottom line.

The planet is swimming in trash. Though the industrial revolution transformed the quality of life for everyone, it also produced billions of tons of plastic waste, nearly all of which ends up in the oceans or in a landfill. At this rate, the oceans will contain more plastic than fish by 2050. If we want to save the planet from a terrible waste, resource, and climate crisis, we have to transform our way of making things.

The environmental problems we humans need to solve aren’t trivial or easy to fix. Though it’s true that we understand far better the impact that humans have had on the environment, we still have a long way to go to be truly circular in terms of the entire economy. Rethinking our approach, reimagining our businesses, and redesigning our products is a huge challenge, but it’s also a huge opportunity.

We wrote this book to be the definitive guide to the circular economy. Though the circular economy has been gaining mainstream adoption in Europe and the United Kingdom, it’s still largely a new concept in North America. This book is for anyone who runs a business and has an interest in making better products, services, or approaches for their customers. It’s also intended for anyone who wants a clear framework for how to create a truly sustainable product or material.

In our daily lives, we both work on improving the sustainability, health, and impact of buildings, and we’re driven to help show people how to have a positive impact on the planet. This book — which reflects our hope for a better and brighter future — shares the lessons we’ve learned from working with thousands of businesses, institutions, and government agencies to help them create vibrant, healthy, and waste-free buildings.

Circular Economy For Dummies is the first comprehensive reference and how-to book that gives you the knowledge and tools you need to transform your business from a linear (wasteful) model to a circular (sustainable) one — and to impact the lives of everyone in the world for the better.