Berlin, August 2024
Felipe Schmidt Fonseca
The world is full of things. Many of those things were made by humans, using materials sourced ultimately from nature. But such materials won’t always return gracefully to where they came from. The process is typically as follows, in a very simplified description: “raw” materials are removed from their original setting through mining, harvesting, or similar processes. They are then transformed through the use of energy, tools, equipment, and knowledge. The results are products to be sold to consumers, or combined with other products to assemble more complex ones that will be sold to consumers.
Some materials come from so-called renewable sources. That does not imply that they are necessarily devoid of impact, or that they will be always sustainable. Producing and exporting organic compounds in the form of crops or harvested materials has a profound effect on the health of ecosystems, as the south border of the Amazon Forest shows with its vast fields of (arguably renewable) soybeans. What is happening there is largely similar to the centuries-old colonial practice that transformed a great part of another ecosystem, the Brazilian Atlantic Rainforest, in a “green desert”: nutrients being extracted from the soil and exported as commodities, generating a metabolic rift quite challenging to regenerate.
In the case of minerals, the tension between finiteness, use, and regeneration is even more visible. With the type of technology we have available today, there is no way to affordably generate massive amounts of new gold, iron, or others. In some specific cases such as aluminum and copper, the recycling rates can exceed 50%. But that does not extend to all types of minerals used in current industrial production. For this reason, materials are continuously extracted anew to be moved globally. Curiously, mounting pressure for electricity-based decarbonisation generates even more demand for critical materials, and consequently increases even further the need for minerals extraction.
Fortunately, there are significant developments toward better ways to design products that favour reincorporation of their basic elements to natural settings or to industrial processes at the end of product use life. This is the basic tenet behind proposals to re-frame product design and manufacturing, such as Cradle-to-Cradle, created by Braungart and McDonough. It is also the groundwork for the notion of a circular economy.
The Ellen Macarthur Foundation describes two simultaneous paths for circularity in its Butterfly Diagram. The Biological Cycle suggests measures to increase the circularity of products that are consumed, rather than used. The Technical Cycle focuses on products that are used instead of consumed. The two cycles differ basically in the products’ material composition: they are made respectively from renewable and finite materials.
Lately, such visions have been gradually getting more accepted and adopted in product design, manufacturing engineering, as well as the collection and management of waste. Significant advances have been made in terms of legislation, policy, research, and higher education. Combined with growing public awareness about the effects of climate change on society and the planet, there is a fertile scenario to innovate and promote positive transformation.
Those perspectives place a strong emphasis on both poles of a product’s use cycle: beginning and end. Obviously, if society is to transition to more appropriate manufacturing practices, there is an urgent need to intervene in how things are designed and produced. Likewise, new processes must be created to ensure that the end of the supply chain is prepared to reincorporate the materials of circular products. That means inserting them back into industrial production, easing their reintegration into natural settings, and mitigating the effects of their final deposition.
One question remains, though: while we are building and evolving those systems, what is to be done with the vast quantity of products being manufactured every day, to which processes of disassembly and reintegration are not yet clearly developed or documented? Further, even in a highly hypothetical possibility of complete success in materials engineering where 100% of materials would be made circular, it would still take us years to reach global coverage. Granted, the current path of innovation in both ends of the industrial life cycle must obviously be sustained and accelerated. Meanwhile, however, humanity needs to cope with the growing volume of things being discarded or kept unused.
To an epic narrative of the circular economy, the reuse of products that were not designed as circular is seldom mentioned. That perspective frequently focuses on producing even more new things, ignoring those that are already piling up out in the world. And the crucial initiatives doing something about it are usually depicted as merely cute, albeit not scalable or impactful enough. This text disagrees with that vision, and draws attention to one particular part of such initiatives: the distributed assessment of reuse value.
A crucial role: the circular valuer
The activity of sorting through diverse types of goods and materials and deciding the best destination for each is one whose importance has often been overlooked. Such tasks are often performed by staff members and volunteers in scrap shops, recycling facilities, repair cafés, reuse centres, charity shops, and upcycling studios. In many cases, these agents mediate potential cooperation between non-profits, entrepreneurs, manufacturers, artists, educators, makerspaces, and others. Theirs a highly situated creative role with concrete social and environmental benefits.
It is essential to better understand that kind of work, as well as exploring ways to describe what are their attributions and tasks, relative positionality, and expertise. In some parts of France, organisations involved with managing discarded goods have a professional role called “agent valoriste”. For lack of a better term, one could call them “valuers” in English. An alternative could be “valuing agents”, to reference the term in French. Or even expand further and call them “circular inclusive socio-ecological material valuers”. For the time being, let’s just stick with the expression “circular material valuers”.
Experiments in using technologies and AI to automate the kind of sorting performed by valuers is reportedly considered limited by experienced project leaders. While near future advancements can be certainly expected on that front, there are also risks to keep in mind. Firstly, biases based on the type of dataset being used to train the AI models. The potential for reuse of each good or material is highly contextual. It depends on variables such as the availability of repair professionals, local existence of second hand markets, cultural aspects of consumption, seasonality, storage space and conditions for transportation, among many others. In other words, there are many more factors to consider than only the physical and technical characteristics of things.
Second, and even more important to the perspective adopted here, automation can lead to a superficial understanding of the role of the sorter as a purely mechanical one, ignoring the deeper potential impact in social and environmental terms. Alongside pursuing the objective task of quickly analysing large volumes of materials and deciding whether each object should be sent to a solidarity shop, an online store or a recycling plant, valuers also play an essentially social role. Putting it brief, they generate social value through environmental mitigation and enable the development of situated innovation that can promote benefits to small businesses and social enterprises.
Projects in diverse global contexts describe the complexity of properly educating valuers. There are few structured initiatives to educate professionals who combine social sensibility, sense of opportunity, material expertise, and hands-on skills. That difficulty is frequently mentioned as one of the limitations to the expansion of reuse initiatives – in wealthy European countries as well as in nations of the global majority.
Recognising the relevance of valuers and of structuring their professional education requires attention to some potentially delicate aspects. The situation is similar to the implementation of recycling or circular economy projects. When done in a top-down way, such projects will increase inequality by replacing informal workers and local agents. Likewise, new professional valuers should not substitute those people already operating in some capacity on the field. It is best to create ways to improve and augment the working capacity of the latter. It should be developed through systemic understanding and commitment to a fair and just transition. New technology should only be created provided that those conditions are met. Again, not substituting but rather improving, augmenting, and expanding the current capacity of existing material valuers where they exist in one shape or the other.
Achieving circularity on a global scale
Reducing the impact of goods already manufactured requires activities to be adopted and improved at a global scale. In many contexts, such as the highly organised movement of waste collectors in Brazil, the concept of circular material valuation could improve the ability of their members to generate positive impact. To all effects, they already act as a type of valuers, albeit in a narrower sense. Waste pickers typically identify, collect and transport goods that can be sold to recycling plants. Other notions of value and modes of reuse are, however, not usually described as part of their attributions. To a public opinion biased by the point of view of big economy and profit-driven corporations, informal waste pickers are only considered worthy of attention when they help provide materials for industrial production. Not as social agents, but only gears in a global economic machine. Recognising and re-framing the broader reach of the waste pickers’ activities under a perspective of circular valuation would open up many possibilities. Here again, it’s not about replacing their work, but rather augmenting their abilities.
In other localities of the global majority, valuers don’t provide goods to but rather overtake the place of recycling. That can happen because of pressing local demand for second-hand goods, or due to the effective absence of local manufacturing capacity. In any case, knowledgeable valuers can make things stay in use for longer, by helping them get back into use. They can be the connectors between those who own something that can be reused and the appropriate repairspeople, second-hand resellers, upcyclers, educators, artists, and designers that can ensure such reuse. Many of those trades, by the way, do equally deserve to be upgraded with eyes on circular valuing. Together, they can weave thriving local ecosystems that divert materials from the waste stream, all the while generating economic opportunity, regenerating social bonds, and reducing the environmental impact of industrial production.
The Reuse City studio is starting to work on a curriculum for circular material valuers, to be built collaboratively and openly. It is the first step of a more ambitious goal: creating a collaborative School of Reuse. Learn more, engage your initiative and contribute here: https://reuse.city.