Circularity Now & How Oct 26
Net Positive Labs
Venture & Innovation studio focusing on Sustainability, Circularity and Regenerative Economics.
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What are we reading in the news?
“It’s the idea that garbage becomes gold,” Long says, who also directs the Biodesign Center for Sustainable Macromolecular Materials and Manufacturing. “How do we take these waste streams of plastic and spring them back to a feedstock that’s valuable? Right now, that is a really important area for research, not only for universities but for all the leading industries that manufacture plastics.”
Developing a viable plan for a circular plastics economy is the key focus of a National Science Foundation Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation, or EFRI, project Long is leading with an interdisciplinary team of researchers. This team includes ASU and Virginia Tech — two early university members of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a global hub and leader of advances to circular economies — in addition to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Adidas.
Recycling plastic materials "doesn't work" and "is not the answer" to threats to global oceans and marine wildlife, Boris Johnson has said. Answering children's questions ahead of the COP26 climate change summit, the prime minister said reusing plastics "doesn't begin to address the problem".Instead, he said, "we've all got to cut down our use of plastic".The Recycling Association said the PM had "completely lost the plastic plot".The association's Simon Ellin told BBC Radio 4's World at One programme Mr Johnson's comments were "very disappointing" and seemed to conflict with government policy.
The Textiles Circularity Centre (TCC) was the focus of £5.4 million in funding last year and is just one piece of the government’s much broader jigsaw, which will see a total of five state-of-the-art facilities erected across the country in a bid to reduce waste, boost recycling and promote circularity in industries including textiles, chemicals, construction and electronics.
“These new research centres will play a vital part in creating a cleaner and more sustainable economy, and help us to better protect the environment for the next generation,” noted Environment Minister Rebecca Pow. “Creating a more circular economy for our waste and resources lies at the heart of this government’s transformative agenda for the environment, and we are committed to going further and faster to reduce, reuse and recycle more of our resources.”
What publications we are (re)reading
Health professionals are well positioned to effect change by reshaping individual practice, influencing healthcare organisations, and setting clinical standards, argue Jodi Sherman and colleagues
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Achieving net zero emissions in healthcare will be possible only with radical and immediate engagement of the clinical community. The covid-19 pandemic has served as a wake-up call for high income health systems that resources are finite and globally interdependent, vulnerable to massive surges in demands and simultaneous infrastructure disruption, and that inequities in access to care threaten health and wellbeing for everyone.
During the first months of the pandemic, the medical community united at a historic pace, rapidly sharing information, redesigning models of care, conserving and innovating resources, and moving towards a circular economy. In comparison, the task of transforming healthcare culture and practice to halve healthcare emissions by 2030 as recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change seems entirely feasible.
Even if European legislation is proceeding in the right direction, a clear decrease in waste generation did not occur up to now. Unfortunately, waste generation represents a positive factor of economic growth. Basically, waste generation is a huge business and numerous stakeholders are not interested to reduce waste. More sophisticated incentives are required to decouple economic growth from waste generation.
Geopolitical and trade tensions in recent years, and the shift towards digital, service-led and low-carbon economies, have driven the rethinking and restructuring of traditional, efficiency-oriented, global production networks, even before the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic.This paper offers insights into how US and European governments can harness an array of public policy tools to protect strategic supply chains without sliding into protectionism and while managing resultant trade-off
This paper studies remanufacturing cost disruption in a closed-loop supply chain consisting of a supplier, a manufacturer and a retailer. Specifically, the proposed work compares supplier–remanufacturing and manufacturer–remanufacturing modes with respect to equilibrium strategies and chain members’ profits, and analyzes the impacts of different disruption cases on each remanufacturing mode. Stackelberg game is applied to acquire equilibrium pricing decisions of each disruption case and it is found that the manufacturer–remanufacturing and supplier–remanufacturing modes have identical robustness. In manufacturer–remanufacturing mode, when the remanufacturing cost faces negative disruption, the manufacturer prefers to elevate the acquisition price and remanufacture more to improve profitability. In this case, the supplier will set a relatively lower wholesale price of components due to the marketing competition from the manufacturer, and the retailer can obtain more revenues. In supplier–remanufacturing mode, since the remanufactured components may cannibalize new component sales, the supplier will forgo some profits from new components in order to extract more profits from remanufacturing activities only if the negative disruption of remanufacturing cost is large enough. These results can provide a new insight into supplier–remanufacturing with cost disruption in a closed-loop supply chain.
Lena Schielke