About
Circular & Sustainable follows one question: what happens to the things we make? We publish curated news, analysis, summaries of significant reports, and data on sustainability and the circular economy.
The aim is to be readable without being shallow. No jargon where plain words exist, no press-release optimism, no doom. Every factual claim points at a source you can check for yourself.
What sustainability actually means
The word has been diluted to the point of near-meaninglessness — it now appears on bottled water. The original definition is more demanding and still the most useful: in 1987 the Brundtland Commission described sustainable development as meeting the needs of the present without undermining the ability of future generations to meet theirs.
Two things follow from that. It concerns needs, not consumption in general. And it is fundamentally about time: a practice is unsustainable precisely when it cannot continue.
What the circular economy means
Most of the modern economy is linear — extract, manufacture, use, discard. Materials make a single pass through the system and leave it as waste or emissions. A circular economy is the attempt to design that one-way flow out of existence.
The framing in widest use, developed by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, rests on three principles:
1. Eliminate waste and pollution by design
Waste is not an inevitable by-product of making things. It is a design outcome. A device that cannot be opened, repaired, or separated into recoverable materials was decided that way years earlier, on a drawing, by someone optimising for thickness or unit cost.
2. Keep products and materials in use at their highest value
There is a hierarchy here that often gets flattened. Repair beats refurbishment; refurbishment beats remanufacturing; remanufacturing beats recycling. Recycling is the last resort, not the goal — and much of what is called recycling is really downcycling, where material drops to a lower grade and gets one further pass before landfill.
3. Regenerate natural systems
Returning biological materials safely to the biosphere, and leaving ecosystems in better condition than you found them, rather than settling for doing less damage than before.
Circular is not a synonym for sustainable
This distinction matters and is routinely lost. Circularity is a strategy; sustainability is the goal. They usually align, but not always. Recycling a material can consume more energy than producing it new. A product built to last a century can be worse than a short-lived one if it locks in inefficient technology. The useful question is never simply is this circular? but does this reduce total harm?
Why this matters right now
Global material extraction has more than tripled since 1970 and is still climbing, according to the UN's International Resource Panel. The share of material inputs coming from recycled sources sits below 10% and has been falling — not because recycling got worse, but because consumption grows faster than recovery can keep up. That gap is the entire problem expressed as a single number.
The consequences are not confined to landfill. The UN International Resource Panel's Global Resources Outlook 2024 attributes more than 60% of planet-warming emissions to resource extraction and processing. Biomass alone — agriculture and forestry — accounts for 90% of land-related biodiversity loss and water stress. Which means climate policy that ignores materials is addressing a fraction of the problem while believing it has addressed the whole.
Politics
Almost every circular measure that has measurably changed industry behaviour arrived as regulation rather than as voluntary commitment. That makes policy the main lever, and worth watching closely.
The European Union has moved furthest: ecodesign requirements, extended producer responsibility, right-to-repair law, and digital product passports that will oblige manufacturers to disclose what is inside a product and how to service it. The United States has no equivalent federal framework, so the action sits at state level — repair laws and producer-responsibility schemes advancing state by state. China has had circular economy legislation since 2008 and controls much of the processing capacity the rest of the world quietly depends on.
None of this is settled or uncontested. There are real arguments about who bears the cost, whether repair mandates raise prices, whether material requirements function as trade barriers in disguise, and whether wealthy countries shipping waste to poorer ones should count as recycling at all. We cover those arguments rather than pretending they have been resolved.
Technology
Technology is where both the most investment and the most overstatement are concentrated.
Genuinely promising: modular design, materials engineered to separate cleanly, traceability systems, automated sorting, and remanufacturing at industrial scale. Frequently oversold: chemical recycling, carbon offsets bolted onto material claims, and any announcement where the pilot plant has been two years away for five years running.
The recurring failure is treating technology as a substitute for using less. It rarely is. We treat technology will solve this as a claim requiring evidence, not as a conclusion.
Science
Underneath the policy and the engineering sits measurement, and it is less settled than it appears. Life-cycle assessment is the primary tool, and its results shift substantially depending on system boundaries, assumed product lifetimes and the electricity mix used in the calculation. Two honest assessments of the same product can reach opposite conclusions. Knowing which assumptions were made matters as much as the headline figure.
Thermodynamics also imposes limits that enthusiasm cannot route around. Materials degrade as they cycle. Some dissipate entirely — tyre particles, zinc coatings, brake dust — and cannot be recovered at any price. No amount of recycling closes a loop that physics holds open. The planetary boundaries framework puts numbers on how far several of these systems have already been pushed past safe operating limits.
How we cover it
- Curated news. What actually happened, why it matters, and what it does not mean.
- Analysis. Longer pieces on how the pieces connect.
- Reports, summarised. The significant studies run to hundreds of pages. We read them and tell you what is in them.
- Data. Figures with their provenance attached, because a number without a source is decoration.
Global by default
Most English-language writing on this subject proceeds as though the United States and the European Union are the whole story. They are not. The largest material flows, the fastest-growing consumption, and a disproportionate share of the consequences are elsewhere — China, India, Southeast Asia, across Africa and Latin America. A waste problem solved in Rotterdam frequently reappears in Accra or Karachi.
We report from wherever the evidence is, and we always say where a figure came from.
Who writes this
Standards
Claims link to primary sources. We name the organisation behind a report and, where it is relevant, who funded it. Uncertainty gets stated rather than smoothed over. When we get something wrong we correct it visibly: every correction is listed permanently in our corrections log, and a notice appears on the page that carried the error.
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