ABSTRACT

Circularity has been the base of life on planet Earth; water, CO2 and matter circulate in chaotic self-organised systems, which ignore time and monetary constraints and produce no waste. Early man lived in a Circular Economy (CE) of scarcity. Waste was luxury. The post-industrial CE is one of abundance, an ‘economy in loops’ focused on managing stocks of manufactured objects in order to preserve their value. It needs the personal motivation of consumers to become users, and of economic actors to develop business models selling utilisation in a Performance Economy, to decouple wealth from resource consumption.