THE CIRCULARITY ARGUMENT

A circular economy can help India achieve its developmental aspirations while following the low-carbon pathway. It will also help address the challenges of waste management, pollution and overexploitation of natural resources. Industries are already innovating to reuse high-volume wastes and have shown that the transition can usher in both environmental and financial windfalls

- NIVIT KUMAR YADAV, SHOBHIT SRIVASTAVA, ISHITA GARG AND SHREYA VERMA

STRAY PAPER hangs on every bush, flutters in every tree, is caught flying by the electric wires, haunts every enclosure. Since Charles Dickens wrote these words in Our Mutual Friend, published in the 1860s, the world's waste problem has changed in both scale and composition. These days, sprawling rubbish mountains have altered natural landscapes; toxic chemicals have invaded ecosystems; pollutants like black carbon have choked the ambient air. These ever-increasing loads of wastes are harming people and the environment, rendering farmlands barren, and endangering species.

A large chunk of the wastes are by-products of industrial activities, vital to modern economies and technological progress. In other words, these wastes are the fallout of the way our economies have evolved-in a linear fashion, where manufacturing extracts the limited natural resources from the environment and turns them into products which are used and then disposed of into the environment, along with the waste generated during the making process. It does not have to be this way.

In the past decade, global focus has shifted towards a circular economy, which works on the principle that waste is not only a waste but a resource.

In Europe, where the quantum of goods recycled is as high as 70 per cent, the European Parliament defines circular economy as a model of production and consumption that involves circularity (sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing and recycling) of existing materials and products for as long as possible. The purpose behind this shift is multi-fold: it can eliminate waste and promote economic growth, while taking the pressure off natural resources and reducing carbon emissions across supply chains.