Unilever and Veolia collaborate on plastic circularity

For the first time, RMI has examined the vast potential for resource recycling in China and shown how it can serve as an important component of reaching the nation’s zero-carbon goal. Growing the Circular Economy: Opportunities for Resource Recycling under China’s Carbon-Neutrality Target [PDF] quantifies the market opportunity across nine key segments, from scrap steel and plastics to biomass and EV batteries, finding a ¥2.8 trillion potential market in 2050. The report provides a qualitative analysis of each of these segments, looking at the current state of the market and addressing issues such as resource availability, existing policy supports, and the potential for greenhouse gas mitigation. It also explores how the development of resource recycling industries can help to shift business ecosystems towards a circular economy with greater efficiency, lower emissions, and reduced waste.

In a previous blog post, I discussed the Design Lifecyle as having three primary stages: Pre-Building, Building and Post-Building. I spent considerable time in the Pre-Building phase focused on the sourcing and manufacture of sustainable construction materials. In this installment, we’ll segue into the Building stage and plumb the depths of sustainable construction techniques.
In his 2011 book “Waste,” Mohamed Osmani estimated that construction waste produced on a typical job site is as much as 30% of the total weight of the building materials delivered to the site. So for every 100 pounds of construction material brought to the site, 30 of it will be wasted. That means that by 2025, the amount of construction waste generated each year will be over 2.2 billion tons.