Opinion: Why we’ll still need waste in a circular economy

Professor Julia Stegemann (UCL Civil, Environmental & Geomatic Engineering) and Dr Stijn van Ewijk comment on the idea of a circular economy and why waste is essential. Every year, we buy 30 billion tonnes of stuff, from pizza boxes to family homes. We throw out or demolish 13 billion tonnes of it as waste - about 2 tonnes per person. A third of what we discard was bought the same year. The extraction, use and discarding of so much stuff creates a large environmental burden, from the depletion of minerals to the destruction of rainforests. The idea of a circular economy aims to address these problems by rejecting the take-make-dispose model of production and consumption that governs our world. Instead, waste is "designed out" and materials are kept at a high value for longer through reuse, repair and recycling.