Endless is More: The Circular Economy and Our Path from Values to Value

I see the circular economic model as one that continuously increases the economic, social, and ecological value of products and places. This is realized through the redesign, reuse, and regeneration of biological and technical resources while eliminating the concepts of waste and pollution.

The job of business is to support customers by producing benefits and assets for society, not liabilities and detriments. Especially in the last century, commerce has created a legacy of problems, the solutions to which are either deferred for generations or impossible within any reasonable number of human lifetimes. One might say our first industrial revolution linear production model, take, make, waste, has used unprincipled commerce as a weapon to wage unintentional war with the planet and all its creatures, and now, almost like a fearful retreating army, it is continuing to lay it all to waste. Any thinking person today recognizes the urgent calamity of climate change and pollution. Now is the time to fiercely and intentionally wage peace on the planet, with commerce, as the only human institution big enough, creative enough and fast enough to be the engine of principled prosperity and beneficial change.

Design is the first signal of human intention, and exchange is the second. If we consider how most products are conceived and marketed today, companies and regulators still refer to a product’s “lifecycle” and its “end of life,” which is often a short life story about sophisticated birth (attended by global supply chains) and crude, even hazardous death in the form of refuse piles, and burial in land, in rivers, at sea or by cremation in burn piles or even ‘waste to energy’ plants. These are old stories of “throwing things away: in a world with more than enough. But now, as we recognize the limited growth of constrained resources in a shrinking world, perhaps we can admit when seeing the Earth from space, “Away has gone away.”

In this context, then, as a designer, I think about the circular economy is a transition away from the take-make-waste paradigm of production. It is our chance to think about values and economic value at the same time. These are two different things but they are actually linked: What do we want, and how do we go about getting it? This is design, it is intention. Design is intention.

Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright’s mentor, said that “form follows function,” and this became a famous design instruction. This was an era of moving from stylistic to form following function: the evidence of the function could be manifest in the form, a powerful idea. Then Mies van der Rohe followed this with “less is more,” another instruction, this one associated with the Bauhaus and minimalism; it’s the meme of modern design. When I think of “less” and “more” I think about how being less bad is not being good. It is being bad, but less so. Less is less, more is more and less is more. But it has come to me lately that Endless is More™: We design for life to go on.

Business and social leaders who develop Cradle to Cradle Certified™ products and use circular economy thinking offer customers the perpetual, safe and beneficial harvest of sources and resources of materials, energy, water and, especially, the urgent curiosity of creative people. Such models replace the urgent thoughtlessness of planned short-term obsolescence in a world of limits and constraints with the urgent thoughtfulness of planned long-term use and reuse in a world of abundance, opportunity and new business models.

Cradle to Cradle-informed design and circular economy practices represent a fundamental shift in the first principle underlying the terms of commerce itself. They move us beyond the simplistic, self-centered question, “How much can I get for how little I give?”, the quantification of economic value in a shrinking world of limits and fear, and instead put first the richly informed and generous question, “How much can we give for all that we get?”, a new commercial qualification of human values in an ever-expanding world of abundance and hope.

We are pushing the World Economic Forum’s MetaCouncil on the Circular Economy to perform like a force of nature, driving circular economy growth into an upward spiral of expansion. We are endeavoring to call forth, celebrate, nurture, and grow a wellspring of endless resourcefulness, of clean materials, energy, water of course, but perhaps the first order of the human enterprise is the positive potential and endless resourcefulness of principled human creativity and generosity.