A New Circular Vision for Electronics – How about making the stuff to be reused from the start?  There’s the answer!

Bio-based and Biodegradable Industries’ David Newman says he is a ‘circular economy sceptic’. Here, he looks at the 2021 Circularity Gap report, which he says suggests the world’s economy has become ‘more linear, not less’. I have long been a sceptic on the circular economy. The core of my argument has been that the continuously declining real value of raw materials, and in general of manufactured goods, has meant that repurposing them, reusing them, recycling them or even (in the case of food waste) composting them, has cost more than producing new products from virgin raw materials sources. It has been cheaper to throw them away. This is the Jevons Paradox of course; increased production efficiency and consumption of a product will cause its price to fall. Scarcity has rarely been at play in recent economic history.

They are sold as a convenient, eco-friendly and very modern way to negotiate congested towns and cities.   There are up to a million e-scooters on British streets – even though, in the vast majority of cases, it is actually illegal to ride them on public roads or pavements.  But that’s a mere technicality to a growing army of enthusiasts.  They conjure up a futuristic world in which we trundle between coffee shops at speeds so sedate that riders and pedestrians alike are safe from harm.  E-scooters conjure up a futuristic world – but high street cowboys are making them unsafe.  Machines taking part in an official nationwide trial of e-scooters for rent are restricted to 15.5mph, for example.  There is talk of new laws limiting private e-scooters to 12.5mph.  Yet the reality is quite different – and such limits meaningless.

As part of the company’s new sustainability strategy, new climate targets have been set based on…