The Power of The Circular Economy: How Businesses Can Embrace Sustainability and Drive Innovation

Please welcome back guest blogger, Katie Brenneman who provides this site with many future-focused business stores to share. This is her 14th contribution to the 21st Century Tech Blog.

Businesses impact the environment and have a responsibility to make sustainable changes to reduce the adverse effects of poor environmental performance. This is a 21st-century mantra likely to become the way businesses operate and sustain themselves shortly and beyond. Either adoption of circular economic principles will happen by choice or government and societal pressure will compel them to act.

With this in mind, adopting new economic principles encouraging circular and sustainable best business practices is a game-changer and likely the key to survival. 

What’s involved? Specifically, strategic planning, circular supply chain management, cost management, logistics, and research and development are examples of areas where circular economic practices can drive businesses toward innovation and sustainability. 

In this article, we’ll look at each of these strategies, but first, a definition of what is a circular economy. An article in The Guardian that appeared in 2016 provided ten things to know about a circular economy. Simply put, circular economies reuse and regenerate materials or products so that things are constantly being cycled back through the business to create more sustainable practices that leave a small environmental footprint.

The How-Tos of Becoming an Eco-Friendly Business

A primary benefit of adopting a circular business model is that it drives innovation. There is economic value in adopting sustainable practices through the revamping of policies and processes. Sustainability practices also help reduce carbon emissions, improve energy conservation, and provide more efficiency in the use of resources. 

In other words, a business helps protect the environment and helps itself. One company, Ginkgo Sustainability, develops living roofs and living walls that use plant power to lower energy use in buildings while improving inside air quality. Using its systems makes a business site eco-friendly and more sustainable. Living walls is better for those working within them. And green roofs don’t contribute to heat island effects. 

As I have previously written in postings to this site, financial benefits come from adopting eco-friendly business models. Increasingly, consumers are demanding more eco-friendly goods. So going green attracts the more eco-conscious. And then there are the tax benefits and incentives, rebates and tax breaks that governments are offering businesses to get greener.

The How-tos of Adopting a Circular Business Model

Circular business models are about building and rebuilding the overall health of a business. They are based on the idea that the economy is like an ecosystem with co-dependencies that need businesses, organizations, and individuals to do-no-harm in their interactions. 

Circular business models involve adopting the following practices: 

1. Use More Sustainable Materials

One of the primary sustainability concerns is the overconsumption of materials. So instead of procuring or developing new material sources which use up dwindling resources and contribute to waste, businesses find ways to use what they already have such as using recycled plastic, for example, instead of using new plastics, or in building projects using sustainable construction materials such as recycled wood, bamboo, or faux wood made from recycled plastic. 

2. Reuse and Recycle Products and Materials

It is important to establish ways to recycle and reuse the materials and products a business has already created and put into circulation. For example, some companies offer programs that enable consumers to return products when done with them so the materials can be reused or refurbished to create new products. Another example is to use everything that comes onto a factory floor for creating a product. This means scraps left over that in the past would be thrown out, instead get used in innovative ways rather than being thrown out. 

3. Eliminate Waste and Reduce Pollution

Continuing with the topic of waste, implementing more sustainable waste management processes is essential to circular business models. Landfill sites are significant contributors to pollution producing greenhouse gas emissions that are bad for the climate and damaging to human health.

Companies can find ways to reduce waste output by being more mindful of reusing and recycling materials. They can make operational changes as well that reduce waste and pollution through the adoption of automated technologies that optimize energy consumption, and eliminate the wasteful use of single-use plastic and paper. 

4. Avoid Non-Renewable Resources

Changing consumption habits covers more than materials. It also includes energy a business uses. If electricity comes from fossil fuel-burning power plants which release greenhouse gas emissions that’s a no-no to sustainability. It is crucial for businesses adopting circular economic principles, therefore, to find other energy sources such as utility providers that use wind and solar. Roofs can become energy generators by installing solar panels. Where once there were many barriers to achieving zero-emission energy access to 100% renewable sources today is far more attainable. Costs have dropped and government tax incentives make implementing this attractive. 

In Summary

Though going green and adopting a circular business model is much easier today, businesses still face challenges. But the more companies make sustainable choices and changes the more they will drive down sustainable resource costs making the move self-reinforcing. At the outset, there may be higher cost outlays as a business transitions to circular economic principles. But the long-term financial benefits and the benefit to the environment and society will be worth it.