Strategy is a clean thing that happens in rooms with air conditioning and glass walls and it usually involves a deck of forty slides that show arrows moving in a perfect circle. We believe that if we draw the circle then the circle will exist and we tell ourselves that the waste of the past is just a design flaw that we have solved with better words.

But the truth is that the circular economy is often a lie told in bullet points and it is a way to hide the fact that we are still just moving heavy trash from one place to another and hoping someone else deals with it. The people who write the strategy documents do not usually have to lift the things they buy and they do not have to watch them rot and they certainly do not have to stand in the rain at a municipal depot and try to figure out why the recycling center just sent a truckload of old benches back with a rejection slip.

Nordine’s Rain-Sodden Reality

Nordine stands in the middle of the yard and he looks at a pile of gray planks that used to be the pride of the waterfront promenade. He was at the all-staff briefing three years ago and he heard the director talk about the new vision for the town and the director used the word circular seventeen times in ten minutes.

The director showed a slide of these exact benches and he said they were made of sustainable composite materials and he said they would never need painting and he said they were part of a closed loop. Now the benches are broken because the salt air and the teenagers and the sun have done what they always do and Nordine is the one left holding the contradiction.

The planks are a mix of wood fiber and plastic resin that have been bonded together under high pressure and this makes them very strong for a while but it also makes them impossible to separate. The wood recycling plant will not take them because the plastic ruins their pulp and the plastic recycling plant will not take them because the wood ruins their melt and so the closed loop is actually a dead end.

The Smell of Scorched Carbon

I learned about the reality of these lines while I was trying to cook dinner and talk to a procurement officer on the phone and I ended up burning the chicken until it was a black puck of carbon. The house still smells like a scorched bird and my throat feels like I swallowed a handful of ash and it reminds me that things do not just disappear when you are done with them.

“You can always see the truth in the hands.”

– Pierre M.-L., Court Sketch Artist

Pierre spends his days drawing the faces of people who have been caught in the machinery of the law and he tells me that you can always see the truth in the hands. The lawyers use big words and they talk about justice and rehabilitation and the grand arc of the law but the hands of the person in the dock are usually shaking or they are balled into fists because they are the ones feeling the weight of the moment.

The Original Circularity

Strategy decks are like the lawyers and the depot workers are like the hands and there is a massive gap between the two where the reality of our material world falls through. This gap exists because we have forgotten the history of how things were actually reused before we turned sustainability into a corporate department.

In the middle of the nineteenth century there were people called rag-and-bone men and they moved through the streets of London and Paris and they collected everything from old rags to animal bones to bits of iron. They were the original circular economy and they did not need a strategy deck because they only took things that had a specific and known value.

A rag could be turned into paper and a bone could be boiled for glue or ground for fertilizer and a piece of iron could be melted by any blacksmith. The system worked because the materials were simple and they were pure and the person collecting them knew exactly where they were going next. We have replaced that simple clarity with complex mixtures that look good on a balance sheet but fail the test of the scrap heap.

The Un-annullable Marriage

The problem with the benches in Nordine’s yard is that they were designed to be sold but they were not designed to be handled. When a local council buys furniture they look at the price and they look at the green credentials on the brochure and they think they are doing the right thing.

They buy a composite material because it sounds like it saves trees and it sounds like it uses up waste plastic but they are actually buying a chemical marriage that cannot be annulled. After five years the sun breaks down the surface and the wood fibers start to swell with moisture and the bench becomes a heavy and soggy mess that cannot be fixed.

It sits in the depot and it takes up space and it waits for a landfill opening while the next strategy deck is being written about how the town is becoming a leader in the zero-waste movement.

Asking the High-Vis Expert

We need to start asking the people at the end of the line what they can actually do with the things we buy at the beginning of the line. If you ask a depot manager what he wants he will tell you that he wants things he can fix with a wrench and things he can spray with a hose and things he can eventually throw into a specific bin without getting a fine.

He does not want a miracle material that requires a specialized chemical plant to process and he does not want a product that requires a secret password to recycle. He wants a mono-material that is what it says it is and he wants to know that when the bench finally reaches the end of its life it can be ground down and turned back into the exact same thing without losing its strength.

The Solid Material Revolution

This is where the idea of the loop actually becomes real and it is why the technical specifications of a material matter more than the marketing adjectives used to describe it. When you look at

recycled plastic urban furniture from Bio Jardins

you are looking at something that has been engineered to solve the Nordine problem.

These pieces are made from solid recycled plastic that does not rot and does not splinter and does not absorb water and most importantly it is not a composite. It is a single type of material that can be identified and processed and returned to the manufacturing cycle at the end of its life.

It turns the circular economy from a vague promise into a practical instruction for the guy in the high-vis vest who has to decide which pile the old bench belongs in.

Feeding the System

If we want to stop burning our metaphorical dinner and actually feed the system we have to be honest about the cost of maintenance and the reality of decay. A wooden bench is a beautiful thing but it is a high-maintenance guest that requires constant attention and paint and eventually a burial.

A cheap metal bench is a temporary solution that will rust and flake and end up as a jagged hazard on the sidewalk. A composite bench is a ghost that haunts the depot because nobody knows how to lay it to rest. But a solid piece of recycled plastic is a workhorse that stays in the field for decades and then quietly goes back to the factory to become a workhorse for the next generation.

The Final Question

Nordine does not care about the forty slides and he does not care about the director’s vision for a green future. He cares about the fact that his yard is full and his budget is tight and his back hurts from moving benches that should never have been bought. He wants a solution that respects the reality of his work and the reality of the material world.

We have spent too much time listening to the people who draw the arrows and not enough time listening to the people who have to follow them. The next time a council sits down to plan their urban landscape they should bring a depot worker into the room and they should show him the furniture and they should ask him one simple question.

If he does not have an answer then the strategy is not a loop it is just a very expensive way of making more trash. The burned chicken in my kitchen is a reminder that good intentions do not matter if you do not pay attention to the heat and the timing and the physical properties of what you are working with.

We are currently cooking our planet with a lot of good intentions and a lot of bad materials and we are wondering why the air smells like smoke. We have to move past the brochures and the buzzwords and get back to the basic honesty of the rag-and-bone man who knew that if a material had no clear future then it had no real value.

We have to buy things that can be born again and we have to make sure that the circle we draw on the slide is a circle that a man like Nordine can actually close with his own two hands. He is still standing there in the rain and he is waiting for us to stop talking and start buying things that actually work in the world he lives in every day.