TEDxLoodusele - Ken Webster - Circular economy. sEnsE & sustAinAbiLity - Educating for a circular economy.pdf. Materials Cycles and Critical Thinking. It’s a tough world for business when oil prices rise.
In the soft drinks industry packaging often uses oil based PET – and according to plastics information provider PIE Europe, its prices have risen by about a third since August 2010, with the biggest increase coming last month (Feb 2011). Prices now stand at between €1500 and €1800 a tonne depending on the volume of the order. Its around 5% of the costs the manufacturer faces. So the big companies such as Coca Cola and Pepsi have been looking around for alternative sources to do the duty of the polymers in PET. Prosperity, money and the circular economy. What we know.
In a circular economy energy flows through, but is increasingly based on current sunshine rather than fossil stocks; materials cycle as nutrients and by design; capital is rebuilt, whether this is the soils or upcycling materials or recovering what was earlier waste, communities recover. For modelling purposes there are insights from living systems to help the design process, and living systems also reveal the crucial importance of feedback and what feedback does to enable adaption and how surviving organisms fit the system as a whole.