Circular Economy

Promoted by organizations like the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMF) as designing out waste from the very beginning, abandoning the linear model in favor of a "cradle-to-cradle" approach where materials are conceived as either technical or biological nutrients that circulate at their highest value; the EMF's vision is based on three principles — eliminate waste and pollution, circulate products and materials, and regenerate nature. While the SDF supports this goal, it maintains a critical distance from the EMF's predominant focus on a market-based circular economy, which it perceives as risking the perpetuation of cycles of consumption. The book also warns that, in its current mainstream application, the concept "often falls into" the trap of temporal parasitism, since "much of what is called 'circular' is merely recycling, which only delays, but does not eliminate, the final burden of waste," and that approaches focused solely on recycling materials risk remaining trapped within fundamentally unsustainable industrial paradigms if they do not also challenge overconsumption, planned obsolescence, and reliance on fossil fuels.