Deadline for your business model

The keyword is circular economy. So far, the idea of completely closing material cycles - among other things by using waste as valuable "new" resources - is purely a vision. However, the majority of experts agree that this must become reality. The difficult path to this more sustainable economic order requires far-reaching systemic changes. After all, circular economy is much more than improved waste management and technically optimised waste management. In the future, innovations that produce durable, repairable and fully recyclable products will play a central role.

And in order to be able to implement the basic idea of "second sourcing" as comprehensively as possible, a clearly upstream step is also required: the subsequent recycling of the products or individual product components must already be taken into account in the design, i.e. not only at the end of the life cycle. For this goal, raw material producers, product designers, trade, consumers and waste management will have to work together on optimised solutions instead of focusing only on "their" elements of the supply chain.

In addition, fixed procedures and rules for setting and monitoring reuse rates need to be established. There is currently no reliable database for this. A blessing and a curse at the same time: the development of a reliable factual basis is made difficult in this country by the large number of very well-established individual reuse paths and the actors involved in them. Other approaches to action also include individual producer responsibility, the prevention of illegal waste exports and concentrated interdisciplinary research on the implementation of the circular economy.

These courses of action for a more sustainable economic order alone reflect the enormous complexity of this socio-political task. At the same time, it means a fundamental reversal from the previous thought model of "produce-use-throw-away" and thus for many companies a fundamental change in their current business basis with an unpredictable future.