The Brief History of the Circle

By any account, moving from line to circle is an idea that developed in collaboration spanning decades. As far back as 1966, Kenneth Boulding, one of the most remarkable economists of the 20th century, introduced the idea of circular material flows as a model for the economy in his paper imaginatively titled The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth. Two unorthodox architects entered into conversation in the late 1970s working independently but thinking very much alike.

In California, John Lyle, a landscape architecture professor, challenged his graduate students at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona to imagine and design a community that ran all of its daily activities within the limits of available renewable resources without any resource repletion or environmental degradation. This simple challenge grew into the concept of regenerative design, whereby products and services have infinity built in from the blueprint on. Thirty years of Lyle’s work found their home in his 1994 book Regenerative Design for Sustainable Development, which went largely unnoticed by the business community.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, at around the same time, Swiss architect Walter Stahel offered a vision of a closed-loop economy and its impact on job creation, economic competitiveness, resource savings, and waste prevention. Stahel referred to this “closed loop” approach as “Cradle to Cradle” (as opposed to the “cradle to grave” reality of the linear economy)—an expression that stuck. Twenty years later, Stahel built upon his idea further with a rather novel idea: what if we were to sell all goods as services? What if we were not selling shoes but rather renting them? That would ensure control over precious resources put into each shoe, as at the end of the rental agreement the worn shoes would come back ready to be reused. Insisting that this was the most efficient strategy of the circular economy, Stahel described the approach in his 2006 book The Performance Economy, illustrating it with hundreds of business examples, but the book didn’t make much of a splash within the business community.

Building on Lyle’s and Stahel’s ideas, German chemist Michael Braungart and American architect William McDonough continued to develop the Cradle to Cradle idea. The result of this collaboration—the 2002 book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things—put forth a crucial point: considering the way we make things, one circle is simply not enough. In fact, to transform the line productively, we need two of them.

Imagine the entire flow of products and services we call “industry” as one giant metabolism—where every resource serves as an important nutrient. Some of these nutrients can be processed and recycled (literally!) by nature itself—where nature would take waste at the end of the use and process it into new resources. We call these types of nutrients biodegradable—a term I am sure you are familiar with. Yet human ingenuity produced a number of “nutrients” that nature has a hard time swallowing—it simply does not know whatto do with them, requiring hundreds, if not thousands, of years to process them into valuable resources again. For these types of nutrients (remember Shaw’s EcoWorx?), humans need to take care of the circulation—processing products at the end of their life into new products. Braungart and McDonough called these two types of nutrients “biological” and “technical,” whereby Cradle to Cradle design takes the safe and productive processes of nature’s “biological metabolism” as a model for developing a “technical metabolism” flow of industrial materials.

The book—which itself was an example of a “technical” nutrient, as it was made using Durabook technology, whereby the pages are not paper but rather synthetics created from durable, waterproof, and upcyclable plastic resins and inorganic fillers—created quite a stir in industry and academia alike.

And this is when things got interesting.