Can we grow the economy without making more useless junk?

Somewhere, my worn-out running shoes from college are likely sitting in a landfill, thousands of miles away from me and my apartment in Brooklyn. If the shoes haven’t been incinerated into toxic fumes yet, then forever chemicals and other pollutants are probably seeping from the electric green polyester-blend cloth — poisoning the land and water for the low-income communities living near the landfill. It’ll continue to do so for decades, or even centuries, to come.

I had dropped the shoes off years ago in one of those donation bins in the basement of my dorm. From there, they likely went to an apparel-specific bulk collector and then shipped overseas in bales to a sorting facility or to some informal group that decides whether something is good enough to be resold to a secondary market, either by quality or by need. Maybe that year, neon shoes were doing really well in Colombia. If not, according to the several waste experts I spoke with, the shoes were sent to yet another country to rot away in a landfill.

I didn’t know it at the time, but there was no guarantee that my donation would actually help anyone. Only about 15 percent of textiles in the US gets reused or recycled each year.

The problem of textile waste is mind-bogglingly massive. The US throws away about 11.3 million tons of clothing a year, which equates to 81.5 pounds per person that gets dumped in landfills in the US or shipped to places like Chile’s Atacama Desert, where the textile waste is visible from space. In Ghana, the regularity of shipments that arrive there even has a moniker: dead white man’s clothes. And every day, the cycle continues.

Americans and other wealthy countries continue to buy more stuff and, just like that, throw it away. It doesn’t help that the majority of what we buy these days is of lower quality, as I’ve previously reported.

What I’ve just described is the linear economy we live in now. But what if there’s a world where the polyester and nylon threads of my lime green shoes could be separated from each other, undyed, and then transformed into something brand new, like a rain jacket? And when that rain jacket was made, the company responsible for producing it created a plan for the end of the jacket’s life as detailed as the plan it made for selling it?

In this alternative world, the company factors in the ugly external cost of disposal into the price of the jacket. Intentionally designing the jacket to be efficiently recycled might make it slightly more expensive, but it can help extend the value of the jacket. Not only are buyers more likely to take care of items they pay more for, but designing a product to be recyclable also literally extends that product’s use — exponentially so. That jacket could be taken back for repairs or company resale. Or it could be transformed again and again and again through innovative recycling processes, ensuring that the material in the jacket is no longer seen as disposable.

If it costs money to throw something away, just as it would to make something new, well, hopefully you would choose the option that doesn’t require so much extraction of new materials and waste. Instead, you’d opt to reuse the materials you already have.

This is one way a circular economy — an economy where waste is designed out — might work.

When I first heard about the idea of circularity, I thought it was a load of hogwash, a lofty buzzword that corporations across several industries have latched onto to sell their latest products or trick consumers into believing they’re operating ethically for people, animals, and the environment. As my colleague Sam Delgado reported for Vox, voluntary corporate social responsibility programs are notorious for being vague about the actual impacts of their supply chains (and lately, some companies pledging to be more environmentally friendly have abandoned efforts to do so). International regulation certainly isn’t where it needs to be to ensure the rights of workers and those who bear the burden of living near factories and landfills.

Yet according to industry experts, designers, activists, and even the United Nations, a circular economy would help separate consumption from some of its ills and get us back on track to meeting key climate goals. (About 3.3 percent of global emissions originate from the waste sector, but that’s not including the emissions during the production process in the textile, plastics, and technology industries. Textiles, for example, are responsible for about 2-8 percent of emissions, according to the UN.)

It’s not a far-off idea, either: There are government-led initiatives and programs dedicated to solving how circularity would work. Scientists are figuring out how to recycle synthetic fabrics and lithium batteries and all sorts of materials. Brands are trying to design products that take end-of-life into consideration.

These are all steps in the right direction. There’s just one question: Is this really possible?

I like to think of the circular economy as a jacked-up “reduce, reuse, recycle” system. The hope is to keep materials in use for as long as possible with minimal waste, and to do so on a much wider scale.

Right now, there are two main reasons why a lot of what we recycle doesn’t ever actually get made into new things: It’s either prohibitively expensive to do, or we just don’t know how to recycle that material yet (like most plastics). A circular economy also would aim to prevent waste from happening in the first place by designing products made to be recycled.

“At the end of the day, it’s very much a system infrastructure change because you need to demonstrate resources, reverse logistics, and all these things,” said Hilde van Duijn, managing director of the Circle Economy Foundation, a nonprofit that aims to double global circularity by 2032. “The most tricky part about the transition to surface is the mindset.”

Consumption, or the purchasing of new goods to satiate some need or desire, is a cornerstone of the modern economy for privileged countries and especially for the US. When quality of living goes up, so does consumption. And the production of consumer goods, for many low-income countries, allows for a chance of upward mobility through wages, at least in theory.

In practice, however, the speed at which goods are made today has normalized cutting corners in quality and in wages for the people who make these items possible — all while the average consumer becomes trained to expect that a shirt should cost less than a dollar or a pillowcase should sell for $3.78. This dynamic is what helped push the US to become a top producer of garbage.

“Consumption is like a drug,” argued Peter Majeranowski, the CEO of Circ, a materials innovation company. “It’s a very tough thing to change because you’re working against psychology and you’re working against, frankly, very good marketers.”

If the circular economy is going to change this pattern, then there are four areas for it to address: extraction, production, consumer use, and waste, with each area requiring different approaches and bringing up different questions. What would it mean to slow down extraction in place of reusing existing materials? What happens to the displaced labor? How are things (or energy) made? Who makes them? Can we design things to be efficient, long-lasting, and desirable? How can products be made so that they can be recycled? Where do you even start?

The most obvious approach to see — but the most difficult for governments to implement — is to pass regulations that ensure compliance for labor and the environment. Every company that produces would have to adhere to some kind of law that outlines how the waste and the extraction of new materials should be handled. Governments would also have to invest in infrastructure to make it possible to meet those tougher rules, whether that’s scaling up recycling facilities or providing subsidies for innovators to solve a complex recycling problem.

One public policy idea that’s gaining traction is extended producer responsibility (EPR), which shifts the end-of-life management of products away from consumers and governments back to the corporations that sell those products.

Right now, you and I likely pay taxes to our municipal and state governments to handle trash and recycling. EPR laws would require companies to front money for the products they sell into a responsible entity — like a nonprofit organization or government agency — that helps pay for recycling infrastructure, collection, sorting, processing, and sale of recovered materials. (EPR can also look like voluntary take-back programs, where consumers can return their used stuff to the company to recycle into other things.)

That said, government regulations take a long time to come to fruition — more on these hurdles in a minute. Basically, we still don’t have a clear sense of what regulation should look like in terms of balancing enforcement, penalties, and incentives.

“But we understand that this is a doable thing,” said Deb Chachra, a materials scientist and author of How Infrastructure Works. “It is a goal that we want to reach for because if we’re trying to transform everything that we have, then we want to do it for that reason alone.”

A few months ago, I flew out to Copenhagen, a city renowned for its design and eco-friendly initiatives. Because most of the circularity projects in the US have been company-led in the form of snazzy fabric made from recycled water bottles or take-back programs that turn jeans into housing insulation, I regarded the circular economy skeptically. At the time, my stance had been that these so-called circular initiatives, like brand-operated resale, were a distraction from the problem of overproduction. We make too many things too fast. So, I went to Copenhagen’s Global Fashion Summit — a conference for the behind-the-scenes nerds who make fashion possible — to gauge how seriously key players are taking circularity.

It turns out that my initial impression was wrong. To my surprise, industry experts are genuinely clamoring for some semblance of change to the current race to the bottom, mainly because there will come a time when extracting new materials will become expensive due to scarcity. According to Majeranowski, this scarcity will create a “huge opportunity in circularity” for interested investors.

The summit hosted panels on reverse logistics, global regulation, ending oversupply — all incredibly unsexy topics, but necessary ones. Sustainability teams from luxury and mid-market brands were in attendance, alongside European and Latin American policymakers, nonprofits, material innovation startups, lawyers, activists, and even the Queen of Denmark Mary Elizabeth.

All the people I spoke with, during the conference and long after, emphasized that imagination is the first step. The real challenge is getting everyone on the same page — and then it’s a matter of clearing the hurdles. The circular economy has four key challenges to reckon with.

The first is scientific. According to Chachra, the materials scientist, it’s very energy-intensive to recycle certain materials. Because so much energy is required, materials that are more expensive to extract than recycle are the ones that are prioritized for recycling, like steel, glass, and aluminum.
Plastic is the opposite. It takes a ton of energy to recycle it — “to tear it, to take it apart, and put it back together again,” Chachra added. “So the main reason why we don’t get recycled plastic is because only a few kinds of plastic are amenable to mechanical recycling. It’s an enormous amount of energy. And if you have to pay for the energy by paying fossil fuel companies for every joule that you use, it’s never going to be economically viable.”

Second, the scientific challenge exists on top of an innovation and investment speed bump. It’s possible to transform water bottles into a synthetic fabric, but not so easy to take an existing fabric and recycle it into a new one. The same can be said for non-synthetics like cotton. In fact, one of the first major fabric innovators, ReNewCell, filed for bankruptcy back in February. While it had a robust supplier network of more than 100 companies like Levi’s and H&M, there weren’t enough orders from suppliers for the company’s recycled cotton “circulose” fabric for it to be financially stable. The former CEO Patrik Lundström has previously argued that brands were mostly all talk and were slow to move to circular alternatives. That could change if governments institute new regulations.

“If brands want to be in compliance with regulations or have an easier time getting compliance with regulations or not pay as high of an extended producer responsibility tax, they’ll need to secure this material early on,” Majeranowski said, arguing that ReNewCell showed key lessons to the industry. “But it’s about not expecting one company to do it all. You don’t want to bet on just one player. They should really be betting on all the players.”

The third challenge is political. For the most part, everyone agrees that regulations will be necessary to incentivize industry toward circular materials and systems. Famously, implementing industry regulations is difficult in practice — in the case of the US, arguably impossible if Donald Trump is reelected since he tends to favor deregulation for the environment. Federal rule-making through expert organizations like the Environmental Protection Agency, too, has been watered down by the Supreme Court. If circularity becomes touted as a climate solution alone, rather than building a more efficient consumer economy that benefits everyone, it risks becoming vulnerable to partisanship. Some industries may also still lobby against regulations.

Politicians will be keen for assurance, too. There has to be a consensus from economists and scientists that these laws aren’t going to set the consumer economy on fire. Then, proposed recycling systems have to work for the respective country they operate in.

We’d also have to guarantee that recycling changes from an expensive nuisance into an affordable way to acquire materials. For that, we need economic research, rigorous interdisciplinary innovation toward material recycling, and collaboration and open discussion between policymakers, experts, and corporations. Each industry and material has unique, specific considerations that policymakers and scientists have to account for. What works for plastic won’t work for wool or cobalt.

“I believe the only way to help reduce these problems, and I don’t mean solve these problems and I don’t mean achieve perfect circularity, is through some kind of government policy, whether it be federal, state, or local or international,” said Don Fullerton, an economist who studies circularity at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The circular economy, he argues, should be used as a tool to improve social and economic conditions — and because of that, we shouldn’t let perfect become the enemy of good. “Nobody’s happy about policymaking at the federal level. States can sometimes be a little better, but they’re not perfect either.”

The final hurdle is a social one and arguably the fuzziest and most subjective: Even if we pass regulations, would consumers even want these items? And how are we sure that we’re not creating some new system that perpetuates the same injustices as the old one, such as low wages or animal slaughter?

“Circular fashion without ethics is nothing interesting,” said Emma Hakansson, the founder of Collective Fashion Justice. “Like if we keep on having wool, that is technically a circular material, but we also keep on exploiting and slaughtering sheep. I don’t care for it, right? But the brands are not willing to engage with that.”

This speaks to the need for a tailored approach to circularity: What works for one textile might not work for another material. And what is scalable in one country won’t work as a directive in another. It would be paternalistic for those in developed countries to dictate how things should be done in other countries, when you could make the argument that our overconsumption is employing thousands of people. That’s one major critique of degrowth, a movement that is critical of using GDP as a measurement for development and argues that economic growth should essentially stop. While I still believe that the fashion industry could stand to make less clothing, it’s still important that people have jobs and choices.

Van Duijn at the Circle Economy underscored the importance of including producer countries. Her team is doing research looking into the impact of the EU’s circular textiles policies on trade partners like China, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. “However, on the social dimension,” she said, “there’s a system already and you are going to change that. Do you really take into account that you might be cutting up the lifeline of some very vulnerable women in one of these destination countries?”

For people, planet, and animals, something has to give when it comes to the sheer amount of stuff we make. Shifting consumer behavior away from being accustomed to simply throwing away whatever we want, whenever we want is a huge ask. But it’s one worth pursuing — and it will take all of us.
Although every stakeholder has ideas or opinions on what circularity could look like, there is remarkably little cross-disciplinary discussion. It can’t just be fashion sustainability people or material scientists or designers or economists or politicians who are thinking about circularity in their own segregated silos. Knocking down barriers between different industries and fields could facilitate smarter, more effective solutions.

This progress is nothing to sneer at.

The needle is moving on investment and innovation, for instance. In July, Science Advances published a promising study that indicated that chemical recycling could break down combined cotton and nylon. Around the same time, the Biden administration announced a $14 million investment to increase domestic battery recycling.

As for regulations, extended producer responsibility (EPR) continues to spread. In the EU, the European Commission proposed a revision last year to its waste framework directive to mandate EPR initiatives within member states, whereas the US’s approach to EPR schemes has mostly been state-led. So far, a handful of states have proposed EPR for packaging waste, including New York, Tennessee, Illinois, and Washington. Only five have passed so far: California, Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, and Oregon. (Fun fact: Florida has EPR legislation but for post-consumer paint waste.) As it stands right now, EPR could have bipartisan support if packaged the right way.

Beyond EPR, lawmakers are also looking into regulations specific to industry. In New York, the proposed Fashion Act would create a standard for reporting sustainability and labor compliance (right now, it’s kind of a free-for-all as to what an “accountability” report should look like). It also would target apparel or footwear companies that have an annual global revenue of $100 million — as long as they are doing business in New York. The New York City metro area has the 10th largest global economy and is home to some of the best shopping in the world, so leveraging that could cascade into companies doing business outside of New York, too.

In Chile, the home of the notorious Atacama desert landfill, the government etched out a circularity roadmap that aims to create 180,000 new green jobs, increase material productivity by 60 percent, and recover 90 percent of sites affected by illegal dumping by 2040. Within the Ministry of Environment, the circular economy is worth designating positions over. Bárbara Peñafiel Durruty, the circular economy policy implementation coordinator, has been working on single-use plastic regulation, EPR, and collaborating with other governments, like Colombia.

“There we are with some collaboration and work to understand what they are doing, as well as what we are doing and how we can in some way learn from the experience of other countries,” she told me in Spanish.

With all these large-scale plans and projects, I actually feel a twinge of hope. More often than not, the overconsumption of stuff gets painted as a frivolous problem, ignored, and minimized. The best thing about circularity and all its various mechanisms is that it has the potential to force international cooperation and discussion on a long-neglected issue. From there, at least we can get off the treadmill of constant consumption.

Today, I have a different pair of running shoes. They’re white, stained with mud and who knows what else, but they still have a lot of time left before they give. Because my shoes were designed to be recycled, I have a different relationship with them — rather than paying $170 for a new pair of shoes, these are part of a $30 monthly subscription. There will come a time when their tread wears thin and training in them becomes painful. I could throw them away or donate them. Sure. But someday, my shoes — or composites of them — will live uncountable lives.

When I’m done with them, I’ll ship them back to the brand. The cloth uppers will be separated from the sole of the shoe and go through a fiber-to-fiber recycling process. The rest of the shoe will be ground up and, in this case, reconfigured into a new pair of running shoes. The shoes I bought and recycled back to the company could very well be used to make the pair of shoes they send me in the future.