The material recirculation and a move towards recycling with high quality are critical to developing a circular economy; systemic adjustments along value chains are also considered necessary, fundamentally altering production and consumption patterns (Laouar et al., 2019).
Water covers two-thirds of the world, but only 1% of it is suitable for human use. On Earth, there are 326 million trillion gallons of water. The remaining 97 per cent is saltwater, which is unfit to drink. Freshwater makes up 2.5 per cent of the total, but most of it is locked in the poles or deep below. This leaves us with about 0.4 per cent to distribute among the 7 billion people on the planet.
Nowadays Circular Economy is mostly linked to anything, at the centre of many international debates, but what is it specifically?
Despite our actual Linear Economy, where production systems end with the disposal of dangerous waste, a Circular Economy aims to reduce most of the waste, converting it into an available resource that can be reused as secondary raw material in the production process. Every product or output, from the moment it is manufactured to the moment of its actual use, is optimized until the end of its life cycle. In this way, it is possible to recover and reuse all (or almost) the waste material as a starting point in another production chain.