The image of “spaceship earth”, a spaceship that travels through universe with a limited amount of supplies, is a powerful way of explaining the challenge humanity faces. To be sustainable a limited amount of resources must be shared with a quasi-unlimited number of future generations. The only logical way to reconcile this tension is to use the same resources over and over again. This is what the circular economy promises to do. By closing all resource loops “spaceship earth” can fly on forever. Anything less than perfect circularity would eventually lead to resources running out eventually and would logically be unsustainable.
The concept of the circular economy is intuitively appealing. The literature, both academic and professional, calls for nothing less than perfect circularity. Perfect circularity is desirable in theory. But is it possible in practice?
It is these kind of questions that we deal with in our publications. We are convinced that the only way to make the circular economy happen is to critically engage with both the linear and the circular economy.