Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CCXL

We’re Saved! A Circular Economy.

On the heels of my last We’re Saved! Contemplation (see: Website Medium Substack) that deconstructed the idea that solar photovoltaic panels are “fully recyclable”–as many of its supporters argue–I believe it’s logical to take this the next step to the broader concept of a “circular economy”. This is a useful stress test for my evaluative lens, as the circular economy is often presented as a panacea for sustaining our societies and their many complexities, particularly in the economic realm and especially by ecomodernists.

As I interpret it, a circular economy aims to redesign fundamentally our current “take-make-waste” system. Instead of a linear flow that begins with resource extraction and ends with the landfill, a circular economy aims to keep resources in use for as long as possible, extract maximum value, then recover and regenerate products and materials at the end of their life.

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Its main promises fall into a handful of major categories:
1. Decoupling economic growth from resource consumption.
This is the core economic promise. By designing for durability, reuse, remanufacturing, and recycling, economic activity can expand without a corresponding increase in virgin material extraction and environmental impact. Growth comes from the value created by circulating materials and selling services, not from selling more disposable products.

2. Eliminating waste and pollution from the outset.
Waste isn’t just managed better—it’s designed out. Products are conceived to fit into technical cycles (where materials like metals and plastics are recovered and reused safely) or biological cycles (where biodegradable materials safely return to nature). This eliminates the concept of “end-of-life” and drastically cuts the pollution that would otherwise leak into air, water, and soil.

3. Regenerating natural capital.
A circular economy shifts from extracting finite resources to rebuilding natural systems. By returning safe, organic nutrients to the soil, improving biodiversity, and replacing fossil fuel inputs with renewable energy, the model promises to restore ecosystems rather than simply degrade them less.

4. Enhancing resource security and resilience.
By circulating materials domestically and reducing dependence on volatile global commodity markets, countries and companies become less vulnerable to supply shocks, price spikes, and geopolitical risks. Securing a stable, local supply of secondary raw materials becomes a strategic advantage.

5. Unlocking significant economic opportunities and jobs.
The circular model creates new markets for reverse logistics, repair, refurbishment, remanufacturing, and advanced recycling. It also shifts business models toward leasing and “product-as-a-service” (where a manufacturer retains ownership and customers pay for access), generating longer-term customer relationships and higher-value skilled jobs in local service and maintenance sectors.

6. Addressing climate change and broader systemic challenges.
Around 45% of global greenhouse gas emissions come from how we make and use products and food. By keeping materials in use, preserving the embodied energy in products, and eliminating waste, a circular economy is a critical piece of the climate puzzle—promising to cut emissions from heavy industry, agriculture, and transport far more deeply than transitioning energy alone can achieve.

In short, the circular economy promises a restorative, economically-attractive system where society thrives without consuming the planet.

Sounds wonderful, right? The solution to our polycrisis.

It is, of course, far too late for solutionism. The ecological overshoot that now guarantees a hard landing was locked in decades ago, and no amount of clever looping will negotiate with the laws of thermodynamics or the momentum of a global industrial metabolism. But that does not mean all responses are equally valid. Some paths reduce harm and build resilience; others simply prolong the illusion and deepen the eventual wreckage. The question is which category this one falls into.

Perhaps if large human complex societies had followed this circular approach some 6,000+ years ago when they arose, humanity would not be currently in the predicament of ecological overshoot. But before we embrace this societal-saving vision, let’s run these promises through the four-part stress test I apply to all such techno-fixes. I assess proposals through four interconnected lenses: the story they tell (Narrative), their physical feasibility (Biogeophysical Reality), their economic independence (Viability), and their effects on power and society (Social Aspects). To be clear, this critique is aimed squarely at the global industrial model; the low-tech, local practices that genuinely embody circular principles are a different matter entirely, as we’ll see.

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Narrative

Does it discuss major drawbacks, or only benefits?
The story foregrounds benefits and ignores major drawbacks. Mainstream circular economy promotion (e.g., Ellen MacArthur Foundation, corporate sustainability reports) overwhelmingly foregrounds benefits. The dominant narrative is one of “win-win”: economic growth decoupled from resource use, new jobs, and restored nature. Drawbacks like the immense energy costs of high-tech recycling, the toxicity of legacy materials in the loop, or the rebound effect are rarely centred. More critical academic versions, however, do engage deeply with these limits; but these are few and far between, and do not receive the amplification that the others do.

Does it replace the destructive system, or add to total throughput?
The circular economy layers new loops onto ongoing extraction rather than replacing the destructive system. This is the Jevons paradox applied to materials. The story we are told is one of replacement: each reused smartphone means one not manufactured. The risk, hidden in plain sight, is addition: efficiency savings lower costs, spur new applications, and increase total material and energy throughput. There is no irrefutable evidence that absolute, global-scale decoupling of material footprint from GDP growth has occurred or can occur at the necessary speed and scale. In practice, circularity often layers a secondary raw materials market on top of a still-expanding primary extraction system.

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Are small-scale benefits disingenuously applied to a global scale?
Small-scale circularity is used to sell an unworkable global vision. A community repair café or a local organic farm cycling nutrients back to soil is genuinely low-impact and regenerative. Scaling this mental model to a global industrial economy—circulating complex, multi-material products through global reverse logistics chains—is a category error. The small-scale benefits of simplicity and relationship-based trust are lost when applied to a continental-scale remanufacturing hub. The promise of the bee is applied to the swarm, without acknowledging that the swarm’s metabolism is hydrocarbon-fuelled.

Biogeophysical Reality

Let’s begin with what actually goes into the loop, because the full lifecycle accounting is almost always missing from promotional claims–an assertion that can be applied to virtually every techno-fix.

Full lifecycle inputs considered?
The full lifecycle inputs are rarely accounted for. The focus is on the “use” and “reuse” phases. A rigorous analysis of a fully circular global economy must include: the extraction of virgin materials to build the initial stock and counter losses; the massive mining required for sensors, AI, and renewable energy for “smart” circular systems; the long-distance transportation of goods back to centralised remanufacturing hubs; the chemical or thermal energy needed to break down complex composites; and the infrastructure of a parallel reverse logistics system. The lifecycle is often shortened to “material loop” without the energy and infrastructure backbone.

Net energy return?
Net energy return falls well below societal thresholds. The material “loop” is actually a spiral that leaks, and each turn requires a new input of high-quality energy. Recovering a dispersed gram of rare earth metals from millions of discarded devices, or chemically recycling plastics back to monomers, has a vastly lower Energy-Return-on-Investment (EROI) than the initial virgin extraction (when deposits were rich and accessible). While a full system EROI calculation is likely impossible, it’s highly probable that many high-tech circular processes fall well below the 10-14:1 societal maintenance threshold, potentially struggling to even meet 3:1 if the hydrocarbon-fuel subsidy for collection, transport, and processing is fully accounted for.

Finite materials and ecological blind spots?
The model suffers from carbon tunnel vision and depends on scarce, finite minerals. A high-tech circular economy is utterly dependent on the metals of the periodic table—cobalt, lithium, rare earths, platinum group metals—for sensors, batteries, and catalysts. These are already facing severe supply chain bottlenecks and depletion of high-ore-grade deposits. It exhibits severe carbon tunnel vision, obsessing over embedded CO₂ while ignoring overshoot of other planetary boundaries: biodiversity loss from the initial mine, freshwater ecotoxicity from the chemical recycling plant, and novel entity pollution from microplastics shed during extended use and reprocessing.

Can waste be safely managed in perpetuity?
Thermodynamics ensures that waste is at “best” deferred, not eliminated. The circular economy promises to eliminate waste, but the laws of thermodynamics make this impossible. Materials degrade, become contaminated, and dissipate. The “safe” biological cycle relies on a planetary sink that is already overloaded. The “safe” technical cycle produces toxic sludges, contaminated glass, and unrecyclable composite dust. These are long-term liabilities. The promise of zero waste masks the creation of low-grade, hazardous stockpiles that require perpetual management, effectively kicking the landfill-can down the road into a more distributed form.

Viability

Can it survive without massive subsidies and externalised costs?
It cannot survive without massive subsidies and externalised costs. The current linear economy is profitable because it externalises the costs of extraction, pollution, and disposal. A truly circular economy that internalises all these costs, plus those of reverse logistics and high-tech reprocessing, would be fundamentally more expensive from a raw materials perspective. It is entirely dependent on a mixture of massive government subsidies, stringent regulatory mandates (Extended Producer Responsibility), loan guarantees for unproven technologies, and the continued externalisation of its hydrocarbon-fuelled transport and reprocessing energy costs.

Does it require new, massively complex infrastructure?
It absolutely requires new, massively complex infrastructure. It necessitates building an entirely new reverse logistics infrastructure that mirrors and rivals the complexity of the existing forward supply chain. This includes collection networks, advanced sorting facilities using AI and spectroscopy, regional remanufacturing hubs, and chemical recycling plants—a duplication of the global industrial metabolism, all requiring a fresh round of resource extraction to build out.

Is it dependent on breakthrough technology?

It is utterly dependent on breakthrough technology for its high-tech vision to work. It relies on scalable, economic processes to separate blended textiles, recycle multi-layer food packaging, and recover all rare earths from circuit boards without creating toxic secondary waste streams. Most of these are in prototype or are economically unviable without cheap energy. The vision-solution is presented as already solvable, but in technique it is a massive, speculative bet.

Social Aspects

Does it challenge the infinite growth paradigm or enable it?
In its dominant corporate and policy form, it enables the paradigm. It is sold as the key to green growth—a way to keep consumption and GDP rising while asymptotically reducing material throughput. It provides a sophisticated, seductive narrative that allows the avoidance of any discussion of sufficiency, enoughness, or limits. It makes the idea of “sustainable growth” seem technically plausible.

Who promotes and profits? Concentration or distribution of wealth?
The primary promoters are large consultancies (McKinsey), philanthropic foundations (Ellen MacArthur), global corporations (Unilever, IKEA, Apple), and transnational institutions (WEF, EU Commission). It helps to concentrate power and wealth in the hands of those who control intellectual property for “circular design,” the platforms managing product-as-a-service data, and the capital-intensive reverse logistics infrastructure. A small farmer’s regenerative loop is not the same as a multinational’s leasing model for washing machines, which locks customers into a permanent service relationship and eliminates the market for independent repairers.

Does it challenge or reinforce status quo power?
It reinforces corporate control from cradle to grave—and beyond. It gives corporate incumbents a language to frame themselves as the solution while maintaining control of the product lifecycle from birth to rebirth. It does not challenge globalised, centralised supply chains; it extends them into the afterlife of the product. A truly circular economy for consumer electronics, for example, requires a globalised, centralised, and fragile reverse supply chain that only a few mega-corps can manage, crushing relocalised, community-based repair economies.

Does it shut down discussion of more fundamental change?
It most definitely shuts down discussion of more fundamental change. This is arguably its most significant social impact. By presenting a seemingly techno-managerial solution within the framework of capitalist growth, it actively depoliticises the ecological crisis. It allows governments and corporations to champion “circularity” while avoiding any conversation about degrowth, planned simplification, consumption reduction, or a managed, just transition to a lower-throughput economy. It has become the acceptable, anodyne alternative to more radical and systemic change.

Conclusion
The conclusion from applying this critical framework is stark: the circular economy, in its mainstream, industrial form, functions less as a genuine solution and more as a sophisticated narrative that enables the continuation of growth-dependent capitalism by promising what thermodynamics and ecology cannot deliver.

There seem to be three specific issues. First, it fails as a replacement system. Rather than displacing destructive linear throughput, it largely adds a secondary, energy-intensive materials loop on top of it, while ignoring the rebound effects that accelerate total consumption.

Second, it is biophysically unviable at global scale. The full lifecycle energy and material costs are rarely accounted for, the net energy return of high-tech recovery is likely far below societal thresholds, and it depends on finite minerals already under severe supply strain. It blindly charges past multiple planetary boundaries while obsessing over carbon.

And, finally, it is an engine for concentrated power. Promoted by and benefiting global corporations and consultancies, it reinforces centralised control, extends global supply chains into the afterlife of products, and actively sidelines more fundamental, egalitarian transformations such as degrowth and relocalisation.

In short, the high-tech circular economy is a techno-optimist fantasy that promises to sustain an unsustainable system. The genuine kernels of a true circularity lie not in global material loops and product-as-a-service apps, but in the far less glamorous, low-tech practices of local repair, sufficiency, and a cultural return to enough.

These practices won’t rescue industrial civilisation from the correction that Nature already has underway, but they represent the only honest posture left to us—one of resilience-building and harm reduction as the tide recedes.

The Pattern Exposed: Recycling, Circularity, and the Defence of More
Both the promise of “fully recyclable” solar photovoltaic panels and the wider vision of a high-tech circular economy operate as sophisticated salvation narratives. Under scrutiny, they reveal themselves to be techno-utopian enablers of the very system they claim to fix. Examined through the lenses of Narrative, Biogeophysical Reality, Viability, and Social Aspects, they share a common architecture of evasion: they spotlight laboratory-scale benefits while obscuring full-lifecycle costs, depend on unproven breakthroughs and permanent subsidies, and ultimately serve to legitimise continued material and energy growth rather than challenge it.

The recycling claim narrows the frame to an end-of-life ideal, ignoring the mining, toxic waste, and net energy erosion that pervade the solar panel lifecycle. The circular economy narrative does the same at a system-wide scale, promising to decouple growth from resource use while layering an energy-intensive secondary material loop atop ongoing extraction. Both accounts suffer from severe carbon tunnel vision, fixating on one metric while breaching multiple other planetary boundaries, and both rely on a dishonest scaling-up of marginal, often economically non-viable processes that cannot survive without heavy public subsidy and regulatory mandates.

Most significantly, neither proposal disrupts the infinite-growth paradigm; they reinforce it. By manufacturing an illusion of closed loops, they provide corporations, policymakers, and consumers with a comforting licence to avoid harder conversations about sufficiency, degrowth, and systemic simplification. Wealth and control remain concentrated among the same industrial actors who build and manage the capital-intensive reverse logistics, while truly resilient, low-tech, distributed practices—repair, reuse, local nutrient cycling—are marginalised.

Taken together, the essays expose a pattern: techno-circularity is not a route out of ecological overshoot but a rhetorical device that buys time for business-as-usual, offloading material and social debts onto the future. The honest work ahead is not a recycling miracle or a perfectly engineered material loop, but the courage to ask how much energy, how many goods, and what kind of complexity are truly enough—not because asking will avert the consequences already baked in, but because it is the only foundation from which meaningful resilience and harm reduction can be built.

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What is going to be my standard WARNING/ADVICE going forward and that I have reiterated in various ways before this:

“Only time will tell how this all unfolds but there’s nothing wrong with preparing for the worst by ‘collapsing now to avoid the rush’ and pursuing self-sufficiency. By this I mean removing as many dependencies on the Matrix as is possible and making do, locally. And if one can do this without negative impacts upon our fragile ecosystems or do so while creating more resilient ecosystems, all the better.

Building community (maybe even just household) resilience to as high a level as possible seems prudent given the uncertainties of an unpredictable future. There’s no guarantee it will ensure ‘recovery’ after a significant societal stressor/shock but it should increase the probability of it and that, perhaps, is all we can ‘hope’ for from its pursuit.

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