From Global to Local by Finbarr Livesey

Author:Finbarr Livesey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-09-19T04:00:00+00:00

The sailor turned campaigner has claimed that her experience of sailing alone around the world gave her the perspective she needed to see the world as finite, itself a kind of boat floating in space. MacArthur was obsessive about planning, ensuring she had properly prepared her meals and medical supplies so that they would last the trip. If she ran out of powdered milk there wouldn’t be a convenience store to restock from—she had to make the best use of whatever she took on the boat with her.

This hard, finite limit to her resources for her circumnavigation stuck with her. You can see how easy it is to extrapolate from her journey to that of the planet circumnavigating the sun every 365 days and running out of materials at a shocking rate. The Global Footprint Network, an international think tank, calculates when each year we have used more resources than the earth can regenerate.18 That day has been creeping forward ever since it was first calculated in 2006. Then overshoot occurred in October. By 2016 it had moved back to the middle of August.

Having taken time to step back and think about what she wanted to achieve after claiming the record, MacArthur brought together B&Q, BT/Cisco, the National Grid and Renault to be the founding partners of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. Its mission—to accelerate a transition to a circular economy.

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THE SIMPLE CARICATURE VERSION of making products has manufacturing run in a fairly linear fashion. Take some raw materials out of the ground, put them together in some process that may or may not be hazardous or polluting, and then once that product is either unwanted, obsolete or broken, bury it in a landfill. At that point the assumption is that as it’s run out of use for the consumer and has been thrown away it doesn’t have any other value and so we need more resources to make more things. A conveyor belt moves from extraction through making and use and on to disposal, with nothing used more than once.

This is, of course, the extreme version of unsustainable production and use, but unfortunately it appears to not be far from reality. According to Annie Leonard’s work for the Story of Stuff,19 for many products the amount of the materials used to make that product that are still in use six months after it is bought is 1 percent.20 Just make sure you’ve thought about that—99 percent of the materials that were used in the making of the product are not in use half a year after you bought it. They have been used, wasted, binned or whatever phrase you want to use.

This linear version of making—summarized as take, make, dispose—is contrasted to the circular version of the economy.21 Conceptually, the circular economy is easy to understand. Instead of buying a new car, refurbish the one that you have. At the end of your laptop’s life, instead of just throwing it all into a landfill, strip out the useful components and recycle the materials as much as possible into other products and other industries.

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