We are all reliant on the daily movement of raw materials in the supply chain: metals, minerals, timber, biomass, plastics, aggregates, chemicals, and construction materials. Materials are used to manufacture buildings, vehicles, electronics, packaging, energy systems, infrastructure and products for our everyday consumption.
Some nations are dependent upon imported materials to drive these systems.
This creates economic, environmental and strategic vulnerability. A sudden price hike, supply chain disruption or export restriction can lead to exposure of industrial dependency on overseas sources of materials. In addition, the impact of raw materials and minerals extraction can lead to pollution, habitat destruction, water stress, and social tensions.
While this happens on one hand, huge quantities of valuable raw materials are also being wasted in landfills, downcycling, and discarded within a short use phase of the materials after a use phase.
Circular economy policy provides an alternative option.
It aims to keep products, components and materials at their highest useful value for the longest possible time. So, can circular economy policy help to mitigate the dependency on imported raw materials?
This is possible, but circular economy policy must be broader than mere recycling.
Circular economy: using less to meet needs
The most direct approach to reducing dependency on imported raw materials is by reducing unnecessary materials demand.
This will not necessarily involve lowering quality of living. Rather, it can involve the development of alternative systems and services that provide the same services using less virgin materials. Building materials can be used more efficiently, the lifetime of products can be extended, use of packaging can be reduced, and products, vehicles, electronics and other appliances can be designed for repair and reuse.
Public procurement policies can encourage the development of goods that last longer rather than having shorter cycles of replacement.
At this point, resource use and waste policy becomes very important. Waste policy should not just be focused on what happens when you dispose of products. Rather, it should focus on how we can design products, production systems and consumption patterns to reduce material and energy requirements throughout their life cycles.
A circular economy is not just what happens when a product is disposed of, but how fewer products can end up being thrown away in the first place.
Recycling: necessary but not sufficient
By recycling and recovering materials for use, we can reduce the demand for raw materials, mainly metals, paper, glass, plastics, and some construction materials. We can also reduce landfilling, and reduce the resource and environmental impacts of materials extraction.
However, recycling will not be sufficient.
Some materials are more difficult to recover from their use phases, some are mixed and some get contaminated. Some are difficult to collect, some decrease in quality when recycled, and some recycling processes have very high energy costs or are economically challenging.
We should not expect a circular economy that is based only on recycling to be enough to address raw material dependency.
Instead, it needs to be part of a strategy that prioritises using less and using materials more durably, followed by reuse, repair, and remanufacturing, with recycling as the final resort for material recovery.
Recycling remains essential, but it is not expected to solve the design and consumption challenges.
Product design is a strategic area for action
Many products are still designed without consideration for their future life cycles, making them difficult to maintain, upgrade or recycle.
They may be challenging to fix, complex to take apart, constructed from composite materials, reliant on proprietary components, or simply short-lived, reducing the potential for value recovery and increasing the risk of valuable materials being lost.
So policies should focus on design standards. Products should be more repairable, upgradable, reusable and recyclable. Spare parts should be available. Information on materials should be provided. The use of hazardous substances should be minimized and components should enable valuable materials to be recovered once the item has reached the end of its useful life.
This ties circular economy policy to rules, standards and implementation. Voluntary commitments have an important role to play, but they are unlikely to drive market transformation alone.
Robust product standards have the potential to make circularity the norm, rather than the exception.
Repair and reuse have a low import profile
Repair and reuse are typically overlooked since they do not have the same profile as recycling or new industrial developments, and yet they have great potential to decrease material requirements.
The longer that a phone, appliance, machine, vehicle or building component can stay in use, the fewer raw materials are required to replace it.
Furthermore, repair helps boost employment and skills at the local level, since it often takes place at closer proximity to the end consumer than material extraction or manufacturing.
Supportive policies can facilitate repair by ensuring that spare parts can be accessed, by reducing digital barriers to repairs, by improving product information, removing tax hurdles to repairing, and by providing support for the operation of reuse centres.
This also sits within the context of the economic case for circularity. Circular policies support employment and can help to reduce waste, exposure to imports, and foster greater resilience at the local level.
There is arguably no material that is lower risk than the material that does not need to be imported in the first place.
A cleaner energy transition depends on minerals
In the clean energy transition, a huge amount of materials will be needed, including copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, rare earths, and aluminium. These are used in batteries, wind power generators, solar panels, electrical grids, electric vehicles and digital technologies.
These critical materials might not always be sourced from a resilient and secure set of supply chains. They are often concentrated in a few countries, are expensive and take a long time to extract and process from new reserves, or present significant environmental and social concerns.
Circularity will therefore be a crucial part of the climate and energy transition if we hope to meet the necessary targets.
This includes recycling batteries and reclaiming metals from electronic waste to reduce the need for extraction and to re-employ components and products. It can also help by enabling us to extract fewer critical and valuable metals from the environment, including when clean-energy technologies are designed with disassembly at the end of life in mind.
Circularity will not mean an end to mining, but it has the potential to slow down the need for further extraction and to improve material security.
So clean-energy policies should factor circular economy considerations into their plans, and should not wait until the very last moment before considering circularity.
Circularity can prevent more environmental damage
Importing raw materials may generate environmental impacts that go unseen by end-consumers in importing countries.
Mining might harm water bodies and forest areas, destroy biodiversity and harm communities. Timber extraction can also have significant impacts where there is inadequate forest governance. Using biomass can sometimes come into conflict with food production or the protection of ecosystems, while exporting waste can export environmental pressure to other countries, where regulations are often weaker.
Circular economy policies can alleviate these external pressures by reducing the need for new extraction and by increasing responsibility around materials.
This connects to broader global resource pressures. The consumption of resources in one country can cause harm in another location. Circularity allows this to become more transparent.
Similarly, circularity relates to biodiversity and ecosystem services, given that extraction and land-use changes can lead to habitat destruction, disruption to water flows and the decline of biodiversity.
Public procurement can drive demand
A factor hindering circular products is that, at the market level, they are not always prioritised.
Recycled, reused, repaired or remanufactured items can face an uncertain level of demand. Companies will be unwilling to take on a circular economy model where customers simply purchase the most short-lived product available.
Public procurement can help shift this dynamic.
From buildings, vehicles and furniture, to electronics, infrastructure, uniforms, packaging and other services, governments purchase a vast number of goods and services. By adopting circular procurement policies, public authorities could help create demand for longer-lived and repairable products and those containing reused and recycled content.
This can create certainty and stability in the demand for secondary material flows and circular business models.
Public authorities should not look solely at the lowest purchase price. They should instead consider the whole-life cost of goods and services, as well as their ease of repair, durability, materials content and end-of-life management.
Waste systems must improve in quality
Circular economy policies need to build on a waste collection system that is capable of extracting materials in a suitable form for reuse or recycling.
If collection and sorting is poor, if materials are dirty, contaminated or difficult to use, recycling quality will fall and valuable materials will be lost. This will reduce the competitiveness of secondary materials and keep firms importing virgin goods.
Better waste systems will require more investment across waste collection, materials sorting, monitoring and data, treatment facilities and public awareness campaigns.
Better systems will also require greater clarity around who is responsible for material recovery and treatment, including producers and importers.
Extended producer responsibility can be a solution to this, by imposing a greater financial responsibility on producers in terms of the waste management of their products at the end of their life.
However, if fees are not carefully set to reward better product design, this may simply be used to fund the waste management of goods without any improvement in design.
Circularity requires waste systems capable of providing signals back to designers and producers.
Industrial policy plays a key role
A circular economy is an environmental agenda, but it is also an industrial policy.
Countries that seek to reduce their dependence on raw material extraction require industries capable of repairing, remanufacturing, recycling and processing secondary material flows. They require the relevant standards, expertise, infrastructure, financial resources and regulatory clarity to do so.
This includes industries such as batteries, electronic and electrical equipment, vehicles, construction, textiles, packaging and machinery.
Circular industrial policies should also be cognisant of industrial pollution and chemical risks. Recycling and resource recovery must be undertaken safely, without exposing workers and nearby communities to the risk of harm from toxic chemicals.
Improperly managed recycling and waste management can simply move environmental damage from one place and one part of the economy to another.
Circularity must be a clean economy as well as an efficient one.
Biomass use needs close scrutiny
Circular economy policies frequently include materials of a biological nature, such as timber and paper, agricultural crops and food waste, alongside other biomass.
These material flows can be of value. They can underpin the use of composts, soils, bio-based products and a limited amount of energy. But we should not assume they are limitless.
A choice to deploy biomass in one direction may mean it is less available for another. Crop residue can sustain the health of soils; timber can lock in carbon in long-life products; food waste ought to be averted before being channelled into energy. The land that produces these biomaterials could also be required for food production, habitats or storing carbon.
This is why the assessment of sustainable biomass availability is critical.
Circular economy policy should be predicated on one main principle: the use of biological resources where their greatest long-term value is generated, not where there is a belief in the material’s infinite availability.
Land and water are part of the material story
Raw material dependence is not confined to minerals and metals alone.
Land and water resources are equally in the dock for the extraction, production and disposal of waste, with mining potentially contaminating whole catchments, forestry harming habitats, agriculture degrading soils and water quality and industrial waste tainting the land for decades.
Circular economy policy should thus connect with land as an environmental resource and with freshwater and aquatic ecosystems.
Cutting the demand for materials can reduce pressure on these land and water systems. Circular activity, too, must be managed to ensure it does not worsen the problem or shift it to a different location. Recycling plants, waste and recovery sites must all meet proper standards and be subject to enforcement.
The aim here, again, is to reduce environmental pressure, not move it from A to B.
What effective circular economy policy looks like
The circular economy can reduce dependency on imported raw materials when it is applied across the entire material system.
This means:
- Reducing unnecessary demand for material;
- Designing for durability, repair and recycling;
- Encouraging repair, reuse and remanufacturing;
- Improving the quality of recycled material;
- Establishing markets for secondary materials;
- Deploying public procurement strategically;
- Extending the responsibility of producers for impacts at the end-of-life of products;
- Backing circular capacities in industry;
- Increasing awareness on material flows through data;
- Integrating circularity policy with climate, trade, industrial and environment goals.
It goes way beyond waste management.
It is to do with getting less material into our economy, moving that material around more efficiently and ensuring it stays in the economy longer.
Circularity builds resilience
The circular economy will not mean nations are free from all reliance on imported raw materials. The world economy will still demand some level of imports, especially of specialised materials and materials for building clean energy infrastructure.
But circularity can reduce these exposures. It will lower the demand for virgin raw material, reduce waste, bolster localised repair and recycling capabilities, drive more efficient production and reduce the impact of exporting nations.
It can also build resilience into economies: a state that wastes fewer materials, generates more value from materials it has and designs longer-lasting products will be less vulnerable to shocks around raw materials.
The circular economy is not an attempt to shut countries out of global trade. Rather, it seeks to achieve less material dependence.
There will remain a place for imported raw materials in the modern global economy. But policies around the circular economy can reduce unnecessary dependencies, improve resource security and ensure activities within an economy fit with wider environmental constraints.
The circular economy then becomes not only an environmental policy, but also a strategic economic policy.
