Can we grow the economy without making more useless junk?  We buy stuff. We throw it away. There’s a system to stop this toxic cycle.Vox Izzie Ramirez  Somewhere, my worn-out running shoes from college are likely sitting in a landfill, thousands of miles away from me and my apartment in Brooklyn. If the shoes haven’t been incinerated into toxic fumes yet, then forever chemicals and other pollutants are probably seeping from the electric green polyester-blend cloth — poisoning the land and water for the low-income communities living near the landfill. It’ll continue to do so for decades, or even centuries, to come. I had dropped the shoes off years ago in one of those donation bins in the basement of my dorm. From there, they likely went to an apparel-specific bulk collector and then shipped overseas in bales to a sorting facility or to some informal group that decides whether something is good enough to be resold to a secondary market, either by quality or by need. Maybe that year, neon shoes were doing really well in Colombia. If not, according to the several waste experts I spoke with, the shoes were sent to yet another country to rot away in a landfill. I didn’t know it at the time, but there was no guarantee that my donation would actually help anyone. Only about 15 percent of textiles in the US gets reused or recycled each year. The problem of textile waste is mind-bogglingly massive. The US throws away about 11.3 million tons of clothing a year, which equates to 81.5 pounds per person that gets dumped in landfills in the US or shipped to places like Chile’s Atacama Desert, where the textile waste is visible from space. In Ghana, the regularity of shipments that arrive there even has a moniker: dead white man’s clothes. And every day, the cycle continues. Americans and other wealthy countries continue to buy more stuff and, just like that, throw it away. It doesn’t help that the majority of what we buy these days is of lower quality, as I’ve previously reported.

What I’ve just described is the linear economy we live in now. But what if there’s a world where the polyester and nylon threads of my lime green shoes could be separated from each other, undyed, and then transformed into something brand new, like a rain jacket? And when that rain jacket was made, the company responsible for producing it created a plan for the end of the jacket’s life as detailed as the plan it made for selling it? In this alternative world, the company factors in the ugly external cost of disposal into the price of the jacket. Intentionally designing the jacket to be efficiently recycled might make it slightly more expensive, but it can help extend the value of the jacket. Not only are buyers more likely to take care of items they pay more for, but designing a product to be recyclable also literally extends that product’s use — exponentially so. That jacket could be taken back for repairs or company resale. Or it could be transformed again and again and again through innovative recycling processes, ensuring that the material in the jacket is no longer seen as disposable.If it costs money to throw something away, just as it would to make something new, well, hopefully you would choose the option that doesn’t require so much extraction of new materials and waste. Instead, you’d opt to reuse the materials you already have.

This is one way a circular economy — an economy where waste is designed out — might work. When I first heard about the idea of circularity, I thought it was a load of hogwash, a lofty buzzword that corporations across several industries have latched onto to sell their latest products or trick consumers into believing they’re operating ethically for people, animals, and the environment. As my colleague Sam Delgado reported for Vox, voluntary corporate social responsibility programs are notorious for being vague about the actual impacts of their supply chains (and lately, some companies pledging to be more environmentally friendly have abandoned efforts to do so). International regulation certainly isn’t where it needs to be to ensure the rights of workers and those who bear the burden of living near factories and landfills. Yet according to industry experts, designers, activists, and even the United Nations, a circular economy would help separate consumption from some of its ills and get us back on track to meeting key climate goals. (About3.3 percent of global emissions originate from the waste sector, but that’s not including the emissions during the production process in the textile, plastics, and technology industries. Textiles, for example, are responsible for about 2-8 percent of emissions, according to the UN.) It’s not a far-off idea, either: There are government-led initiatives and programs dedicated to solving how circularity would work. Scientists are figuring out how to recycle synthetic fabrics and lithium batteries and all sorts of materials. Brands are trying to design products that take end-of-life into consideration. These are all steps in the right direction. There’s just one question: Is this really possible?

Circularity, explained...... I like to think of the circular economy as a jacked-up “reduce, reuse, recycle” system. The hope is to keep materials in use for as long as possible with minimal waste, and to do so on a much wider scale. Right now, there are two main reasons why a lot of what we recycle doesn’t ever actually get made into new things: It’s either prohibitively expensive to do, or we just don’t know how to recycle that material yet (like most plastics). A circular economy also would aim to prevent waste from happening in the first place by designing products made to be recycled. “At the end of the day, it’s very much a system infrastructure change because you need to demonstrate resources, reverse logistics, and all these things,” said Hilde van Duijn, managing director of the Circle Economy Foundation, a nonprofit that aims to double global circularity by 2032. 
“The most tricky part about the transition to surface is the mindset.”Consumption, or the purchasing of new goods to satiate some need or desire, is a cornerstone of the modern economy for privileged countries and especially for the US. When quality of living goes up, so does consumption. And the production of consumer goods, for many low-income countries, allows for a chance of upward mobility through wages, at least in theory. In practice, however, the speed at which goods are made today has normalized cutting corners in quality and in wages for the people who make these items possible — all while the average consumer becomes trained to expect that a shirt should cost less than a dollar or a pillowcase should sell for $3.78. This dynamic is what helped push the US to become a top producer of garbage.

“Consumption is like a drug,” argued Peter Majeranowski, the CEO of Circ, a materials innovation company. “It’s a very tough thing to change because you’re working against psychology and you’re working against, frankly, very good marketers.” If the circular economy is going to change this pattern, then there are four areas for it to address: extraction, production, consumer use, and waste, with each area requiring different approaches and bringing up different questions. What would it mean to slow down extraction in place of reusing existing materials? What happens to the displaced labor? How are things (or energy) made? Who makes them? Can we design things to be efficient, long-lasting, and desirable? How can products be made so that they can be recycled? Where do you even start?.....read on  https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/370626/consumerism-circular-economy-single-use-recycling-landfill-garbage