MYP Design The Circular Economy and Waste Notes

Take, Make, Dispose Was a Decision, Not a Law of Nature

1. The linear economy runs in one direction: take the raw material, make the product, sell it, throw it away when the owner has finished.
2. It assumes raw material is endless and that somewhere to put the waste is free, and neither assumption has held up.
3. It became normal after 1950 because mass production made a new item cheaper than a repair, so throwing things away turned into the rational choice for the buyer.
4. The cost does not vanish, it moves to landfill sites, incinerator chimneys, rivers and the countries that import other people's rubbish.
5. Every linear product has a design decision buried in it, because somebody chose the glue, the laminate or the sealed battery that made recovery impossible.

What Changes When the Loop Closes

1. The circular economy designs so materials keep going round through reuse, repair, remanufacture and recycling instead of ending as waste after one use.
2. Its founding claim is that waste is a design fault, so a material with nowhere to go at the end means the design is unfinished.
3. The loops are ranked, and the tightest loop wins, so keeping a product in use beats reusing its parts, which beats melting the whole thing down.
4. Business models shift with it, and a firm that sells lighting as a service while keeping ownership of the fittings has a direct financial reason to make them last.
5. Remanufacture sits between repair and recycling, where a used engine or printer is stripped, cleaned, given new wear parts and sold again with a warranty.

Technical and Biological Cycles Must Not Be Mixed

1. The circular model splits every material into one of two streams, and a product that blends them blocks both.
2. The technical cycle holds materials that never break down safely in soil, such as metals, polymers and glass, so they must be recovered, cleaned and remade.
3. The biological cycle holds materials that can return to the soil, such as untreated timber, cotton, wool, paper and food waste.
4. Mixing them wrecks both, because a cotton shirt stitched with polyester thread cannot be composted and a wooden handle glued into a plastic body cannot be cleanly recycled.
5. Composting only works on material genuinely free of coatings, synthetic dyes and plastic thread, and industrial composting needs the heap held above about 55 degrees for days.
6. Choose one cycle per part, then design the joint between parts so they can be pulled back apart at the end.

Recycling in Practice Is Messier Than the Symbol Suggests

1. Kerbside recycling runs as a chain: collection, sorting at a materials recovery facility, baling, then reprocessing into feedstock a factory will buy.
2. Sorting uses magnets to lift steel, eddy currents to throw aluminium sideways, near infrared scanners and air jets to split polymers, and human hands for whatever is left.
3. Contamination breaks the chain, so a greasy pizza box or a half full yoghurt pot can downgrade an entire bale that was otherwise sellable.
4. Metals recycle best because melting restores the same material, which is why a steel can can become a steel can again with no real limit on the number of cycles.
5. Glass recycles well when it is separated by colour, though mixed colour cullet can only become green glass or road aggregate.
6. Polymers downcycle, because every melt shortens the polymer chains, so a clear drinks bottle becomes fleece fibre or drainage pipe rather than another clear bottle.

Why Some Materials Never Come Back

1. Plenty of materials are technically recyclable and almost never actually recycled, and the reason is nearly always mixing or money.
2. Composites cannot be pulled back into their ingredients, so carbon fibre set in epoxy and a crisp packet made of plastic bonded to aluminium both stay mixed forever.
3. Thermosetting polymers such as melamine and epoxy cannot be remelted at all, because the cross links formed during curing are permanent.
4. Small light items drop through sorting machinery, which is why bottle caps, straws and thin film are pulled out as rejects rather than recovered.
5. Price decides the rest, since aluminium scrap is worth enough per tonne to be collected everywhere while mixed plastic is often worth nothing and costs money to handle.
6. Local collection has to exist as well, because a material stamped with a recycling symbol is still landfill if your council will not take it from your bin.

Upcycling Adds Value Where Downcycling Loses It

1. Upcycling reuses a material or object for something worth more than it was before, without melting or shredding it first.
2. Freitag, working in Zurich since 1993, cuts used lorry tarpaulins, seatbelts and bicycle inner tubes into bags that sell for more than equivalent bags made from new fabric.
3. It works because the material's history becomes part of what the buyer is paying for, and no two pieces come out identical.
4. Downcycling does the opposite, pushing the material to a lower grade job such as mixed plastic pressed into park benches, which is still one more use before landfill.
5. Upcycling stays small scale because supply is irregular, and you cannot promise ten thousand identical bags when the tarpaulins turn up in whatever colours they turn up in.
6. For a school project it is a strong route, since the material is free, the constraint is real and the story behind the object is true rather than invented.

E-waste Is the Fastest Growing Waste Stream on Earth

1. E-waste is discarded electrical and electronic equipment, and the world now produces well over 50 million tonnes of it a year.
2. It matters because it carries hazardous lead, mercury, cadmium and flame retardants alongside valuable gold, silver, copper and rare earth elements.
3. A tonne of circuit boards holds far more gold than a tonne of mined ore, which makes proper recovery genuinely profitable when it is done in a real plant.
4. Much of it is shipped abroad and taken apart informally, where cables are burned in the open to reach the copper and the people doing it breathe the fumes.
5. The WEEE rules put the cost of collection and treatment on producers, which is why the crossed out wheelie bin symbol is moulded onto electrical goods.
6. Design choices feed it directly, since a glued in battery, a screw head no ordinary driver fits, or software support that stops at four years all shorten a working device's life.

Extended Producer Responsibility Sends the Bill Back Up the Chain

1. Extended producer responsibility makes the company that put a product on the market pay for collecting and treating it once it is thrown away.
2. The logic is simple: the producer is the only party who can change the design, so handing them the disposal bill gives them a reason to design for recovery.
3. Modulated fees sharpen that by charging more for packaging that is hard to recycle and less for packaging that sorts easily.
4. The UK packaging scheme charges producers by material and by recyclability, so a mixed laminate pouch costs its maker more per unit than a plain card carton.
5. Deposit return schemes attack the same problem from the other end, adding a refundable deposit to each container, and Germany's system brings back over 90 percent of them.
6. A designer feels this as a line on a cost sheet, because switching a pack to a single material can cut the fee the company pays on every unit it sells.