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.

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Circularity, explained

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.

Graphic titled “A Linear Economy, Recycling, and a Circular Economy.

Don Fullerton

“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.”

A Dalmatian dog on a wood floor next to a broken vase. The ad reads “Don’t worry, you can afford it. Ikea.

Ikea

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.”