Christian Arnsperger: My colleague Dominique Bourg (also from the University of Lausanne) and myself have just released a new book in French, entitled Ecologie intégrale: Pour une société permacirculaire(translation: Integral Ecology: Toward a Perma-Circular Society), published in Paris by Presses Universitaires de France. It’s the culmination of a two-year effort we engaged in between mid-2014 (when I arrived at Lausanne) and mid-2016 to spell out (a) what sustainability really means and (b) what the social, cultural and political conditions for the emergence of a genuinely sustainable society are. It’s during this period that we published our article, “Vers une économie authentiquement circulaire: Réflexions sur les fondements d’un indicateur de circularité”(“Toward a Genuinely Circular Economy: Reflections on the Foundations of a Circularity Indicator”), in which we first coined the word permacircularité. (In French, we don’t hyphenate it. I’m thinking of soon going over to that spelling convention in English as well – since the related word “permaculture” has no hyphen either.)

Our basic intuition, which we started out by developing in a series of articles, was that a genuinely sustainable society requires a circular and regenerative economy which, as a result, needs to give up growth as it guiding and regulating principle. We adopted the insights discovered by the French engineer François Grosse, who has posted previously on this blog and who contributed a short text to our book. You can see the book’s webpage and order it at https://www.puf.com/content/Ecologie_intégrale.

For English-speaking audiences, I need to add immediately that the way in which we use the word “integral” in our book’s title is rather different from the meaning that word has acquired, in the USA in particular, over the past decade. The philosopher Ken Wilber coined the term “Integral” in a specific sense, meaning an all-encompassing perspective on reality that combines inner and outer perspectives on the individual and the collective. For Wilber, all of reality is constantly mobilizing an “It” dimension (the outer-individual), an “I” perspective (the inner-individual), an “Its” perspective (the outer-collective) and a “We” perspective (the inner-collective). I have worked on, and with, Wilber’s model quite a bit in the past, attempting to apply it to economics in my book Full-Spectrum Economics: Toward an Inclusive and Emancipatory Social Science (Routledge, 2010). Sean Esbjörn-Hargens and Michael E. Zimmerman have attempted to use Wilber’s approach to understand the multiple perspectives on, and facets of, ecological issues, in their book Integral Ecology: Uniting Multiple Perspectives on the Natural World (Shambhala, 2009). In our book, Dominique Bourg and I use the expression “integral ecology” in a rather less ambitious but nevertheless relevant sense, meaning an approach that “consists in considering that ecological and social problems are like the two sides of the same sheet of paper, with inequality linking them indissolubly” (p. 12).

Our integral perspective is therefore mostly socio-political, but it lends central importance to cultural change. A perma-circular economy and society, we argue, is going to require a basic thrust of Western cultures toward forms of chosen frugality or voluntary simplicity. Such forms aren’t new and have existed in all spiritual traditions. Our central contribution to the the debate on ecological transition is that we seek to understand how it could happen within a pluralistic, democratic society of free citizens. Rejecting any notion of ecological dictatorship or environmental authoritarianism, we argue that if the right institutional changes are introduced (a step we assume, probably all too optimistically, to be within the power of most modern democratic societies), a perma-circular world could be attained gradually through the free adoption, by every citizen, of ways of thinking, ways of producing and ways of consuming that have a one-planet ecological footprint.

The main arguments of the book will be familiar to the readers of this blog are familiar with: reduction of material flows, genuine circularity, the need for income support and a new way of creating currency, and the need for a culture of perma-circularity that sees “progress” as something altogether different from the illusions and traps with which techno-optimists and “spaced-out” industrial ecologists have wanted to fool us. Perhaps the main aspect of the book which this blog hasn’t yet developed so much is how to make perma-circularity compatible with a pluralistic democracy.

As we say in French, bonne lecture!

Illustration by Richard Register

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The conclusion is that systemic change is required.

Last week I went a restored paper mill in a tiny village in the middle of Sweden. I was there (*) to meet a bunch of people who’ve been given a uniquely challenging task: make the bedroom and bathroom products sold globally by a famous home furnishing giant – – sustainable.When I say that their task is “challenging”, think of it this way. I learned from the Flat Pack Wardrobes – or ‘PAX’ – team, that if you were stack one year’s production of their preassembled wardrobes onto flat bed trucks, the line would stretch, nose-to-tail, from Sweden to Beijing. That’s a lot of wardrobes. And spare a thought for the poor guy in the Beijng car park frantically trying to assemble them all.

These PAX guys are obsessive in their search for ways to reduce the resources used in their products. It’s cause for celebration, they told me, when someone discovers a laminate that’s a few milligrammes lighter, per running meter, than the one it replaces. One of the PAX-men explained their missionary zeal: a milligram here, a milligram there – they really add up by the time you reach Beijing.

I heard similar stories from the mirror team, too: they source three million square metres of the stuff a year. So, too, with the bed team, and the mattress team. They’re all are united in their search for lighter, cleaner, products and materials.

It doesn’t stop with the staff in Sweden. The firm requires each of its suppliers to follow a strict code of conduct – and we’re talking hundreds of firms in over 50 countries. 85 auditors carry nearly a thousand inspections every year – most of them unannounced. If a supplier does not conform – even a big one – they’re out.

The company’s products are only part of the story. Every new store, office, distribution centre, or factory, that the company opens, is located, equipped and operated to be the most sustainable facility of its kind, in the world, at that point in time. 150 of the firms’s megastores will soon be powered by solar panels. Every cup of coffee served in every store is certified organic.

This company-wide effort has been accelerating for 20 years. They’ve taken the lead out of the mirror glass. They’ve removed the chromium from table legs. They’ve taken toxins out of the paint. They’ve replaced the PVC in wallpapers. No more formaldehyde is used in its textiles. The paper in their catalogue is now chlorine-free. They’ve even taken volume out of the mattresses for goodness sake; (they roll them up, to economize on shipping). We’re talking hundreds, thousands of improvements. They’re all recorded on the company’s ‘list without end’.

But there’s just one thing they have not done – and that’s take the keys out of those flat bed trucks. Quite the contrary. The company, which is already huge, is on course to double in size by 2020. The number of customers visiting their giant sheds will increase from from 650 million a year, now, to 1.5 billion a year.

Growth on such a scale is hard to visualize. That line of trucks, stretching all the way to Beijing? By 2020, the line will be twice as long again as it is now. The return line will arrived back to Sweden again. The trucks will be double-parked all over Stockholm. And that’s just the wardrobes.

The senior manager bearing this news put this growth into context for her colleagues.“With this growth we’ll achieve the economies of scale needed to reduce costs” she explained; “we want our products to be available to the many, not just the few”. Growth is needed above all, the manager explained, “to finance the sustainability improvements we all want to make”.

Now there’s a problem with this narrative, and it’s best explained if I talk about wood. The company sells 100 million pieces of furniture every year; it’s thought to be the third largest user of wood in the world. It takes the he sustainability of its supplies very seriously. By 2017, it has promised, half of all the the wood it uses – up from 17 percent now – will either be recycled, or come from forests that are responsibly managed and avoid the excessive use of chemicals and of water.

Wow. 50%.That‘s a vast increase in the percentage of responsible wood in the company’s resource flows. But it begs the question: what about the second half of all that wood? As the company doubles in size, that second pile of wood – the un-certified half, the unreliably-sourced-at-best half – will soon be twice as big as all the wood that’s used today. The impact on forests, of one company’s ravenous hunger for resources, will be devastating.

Together with similar teams in most of the world’s major companies, the committed and gifted people I met last week in Sweden have to live with an awful dilemma. However hard they work, however many innovations they come up with, the negative net impact of their firm’s activities, on the world’s living systems, will be greater in ten years event than it is today.

And all because of compound growth.

This chilling prospect is not the fault of wicked owners. This company has healthy trees almost literally in its blood. Its founder grew up on a farm surrounded by trees. He was born in the same village as Carolus Linnaeus, the father of modern botany. His company’s products are named after the lakes, rivers, and bays he knew as a boy.

There’s no way that this man, or the people who work for him, would mindfully do harm to the land they love. The only explanation is that thoughts, deeds, and experiences have become disconnected on a company-wide scale.

Standing outside that old factory, I tried to imagine myself in the founder’s shoes. How would I react when told of protests that my company was clear-cutting old growth forests in Russia? What would I feel about complaints that rare species of lichens, mosses and other plants were being endangered by my company’s activities?

The founder’s first reaction, I surmised, would probably be indignation. He would be indignant at the complainers’ ignorance of all the work done – over 20 years – to make our products greener. Indignant, too, that the immense effort needed to put certification procedures in place was not being acknowledged.

The founder’s second reaction, I guessed, would be a nagging suspicion that these problems were probably real. The founder would probably reflect that a certification process on its own – in the far-way interior of a dysfunctional state – was unlikely to be effective when so much money was at stake for so many people.

And then? What wood the founder think then?

At this point, I made a mental wish – that that the founder would get angry – angry that the company he had built seemed to have taken on a baleful life of its own. I wished that he would say: Enough! Stop the cutting! We’re going to find another way!

That other way would not be all that hard. No need to fire people. No need to hire consultants. No lectures. No training. One simple step would be effective: Give everyone in the company the opportunity to spend time quietly in an old-growth forest. Allow them to experience the natural energy of a living system that has evolved over many human lifetimes. Leave them to discover the diversity of species, and the wide variety of vegetation on the ground.  Ponder the slow decomposition of dead wood, and let the realisation dawn that dead wood is the life of the forest.

Very lightly, one would help people learn about forestry practices that restore ecological diversity; to respect nature’s timeframe; to experience directly, as does the forest, a connection with the land. Reconnected with the lived reality of the earth’s ecological systems, and its non-industrial time frames, the very idea of destroying the earth in the interests of the economy would become – literally – inconceivable.

(*) I was invited and paid to speak at the seminar in Sweden.

[Photography courtesy of  Marc Adamus] The article was adapted by John Thackara from a previous talk at the Global Design Forum in London.  

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“Nobody has the slightest hint as to how to render viable a world economy that would be structurally de-growing while ensuring social balance, individual and collective satisfaction, and peace between the large states. Even the slow-growing economy (at a less-than-1% growth rate) that results from my earlier demonstration remains an unsolved challenge, since we still don’t know how to ensure employment, innovation, useful investments, and even democracy at such a low pace of economic growth. Just think back to the social structures and the kinds of international relations that prevailed across the world before industrialization. Even recommending that we create a perfectly clean and quasi-infinite energy source – so that we could gradually replace every negative externality with energy solutions that are neutral for the biosphere – would be less irresponsible than promoting de-growth. I don’t think it’s at all realistic to bet on this, but I suggest that the science we have now is much closer even to designing such an energy source than to inventing a stable de-growth economy. We can’t live with negative growth for any length of time. De-growth as a solution is a fraud; let’s drop it.”

Instead we argues we must strive for ‘quasi-circular growth’. He explains that:

“There’s no room for doubt and no possible escape: If the consumption of raw materials grows above 1% per year, or if the global addition to stocks lies above 20% of global consumption of any material, then there is no sense in recycling. And if we don’t soon become technically capable of recycling at least 60% to 80% of all the raw materials we’re using, then let’s not get all excited about changing this industrial world of ours into a sober one: our recycling efforts won’t have much impact on the future. The only way to have an impact is to do three things at the same time: slow growth, light accumulation, and high recycling. This is what I call “Quasi-Circular Growth.”

But how to do this ?

Unfortunately, “We still have no clue about this. Actually, the issue isn’t just raw-material production and recycling; it’s not just about how to engineer one global closed loop for each raw material. Earlier, I only discussed the global flows of non-renewable raw materials, but a circular economy needs to purposefully minimize retrieval and irreversible impacts for every material and biological resource locally, globally, and sustainably, while maximizing the benefits to mankind under that constraint. It’s a systemic challenge, including loops at every scale – like in a fractal system. When looking for solutions, it’s appealing to single out individual responsibilities within the system: managers seeking profits, engineers planning obsolescence, marketeers stimulating consumers’ greed, etc. All of this is, or may be, true. But merely pointing it out won’t help.

In the end, our individual experience – at least for most of us – is that today we usually still enjoy better health technologies, larger schools for our kids, a larger house, a more powerful mobile phone, etc. As the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard wrote in his 1970 book La société de consommation, “there is no limit to the ‘needs’ of man as a social being.” Making our society sustainable begins with imagining and reflecting on how our socially constructed needs could gradually be made to fit into the biosphere; and that’s only the beginning, not the point of arrival. Let me suggest a very first step, though: What if we began by regulating the minimum amount of recycled materials inside every new product?”

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The only circular economy worth looking at is the perma-circular one. Over any horizon longer than 50 or 75 years — which as of today encompasses the lives of our children and certainly our grandchildren — we have no use for a pseudo-circular metabolism that is actually a steadily widening spiral: circling, yes, but spinning slowly out of control nevertheless, in ever broader circles of ever-growing circumference. We need a genuinely circular metabolism, and that can only be a self-maintaining circle — one that doesn’t spiral outward.

Absolutely essential point, excerpted from Christian Arnsperger:

“At this point I want to tell you about a very important man. His name is François Grosse. He is French and initially comes across as the epitome of the soft-spoken, serious, rigorous engineer which the French grandes écoles are famous for producing. An unassuming man, he’s very discreet about the momentous discovery that led him to change his own career path after having worked for a long time for the giant company Veolia. During a sabbatical, he was asked by the then-CEO of Veolia to analyze the business opportunities of the circular economy, and of recycling in particular. With characteristic earnestness, Grosse set out to understand how intensive recycling could help a business like Veolia do well economically while also doing good environmentally. Surely, he believed, generalized recycling would so strongly modify industrial metabolisms that over time, and with enough technological innovation, raw material consumption curves would become flatter — perhaps even plain flat or, why not, downward-sloping.

After several long months of pondering, doing calculations, re-doing them, and re-doing them again to really make sure, François Grosse had to come to terms with a result that shook his own convictions pretty deeply. He showed it to the CEO of Veolia but, most importantly, published it in a series of scientific articles in French and English. It’s a result that carries deep wisdom — and, as such, seems self-evident with the benefit of hindsight — but rocks the foundations of the whole mainstream circular-growth-economy establishment.

Here is how he summarizes his findings (in an article entitled “Quasi-Circular Growth: A Pragmatic Approach to Sustainability for Non-Renewable Material Resources”, published in S.A.P.I.E.N.S., vol. 4, no. 2, 2011):

“The influence of recycling on resource preservation is negligible for any raw material with a greater than 2% per annum increase in world production. It is only if the annual raw material consumption growth rate is below 1% that recycling has a significant positive impact. It can then provide over one hundred years of respite. However, … a growth rate in total material consumption below 1% is insufficient on its own, and, in addition, requires a very high recycling rate (more than 60 to 80%) in order to delay significantly the resource depletion rate. The time shift for cumulative consumption is highly sensitive to the growth rate of total material consumption (primary + secondary). The slower the growth, the more recycling contributes to ‘buying time’ before resource depletion. Recycling has a higher impact if material residence time in the economy is short; conversely, its impact is smaller for a long residence time. Finally, the impact of recycling must be analysed in relation to present economic parameters (as trends), not on the basis of an assumed future slowing down of consumption. As a whole, the relative impact of cumulative present-day recycling becomes negligible after a few decades in view of global production growth.”

So even provided recycling rates are very high (which they’re not in most cases at the moment) and materials cycle through the economy very quickly (which they don’t in most cases at the moment), recycling can only offer a general solution to the “clean growth” problem, as promised in “cradle-to-cradle” or “upcycle” approaches, if the sum of primary and secondary raw material consumption practically grinds to a halt — with a less than 1 percent annual growth rate. Could efficiency gains really ever be so huge (factoring in the resource costs the new efficient technologies would generate upstream and downstream from their localized use) as to allow for a financially desired growth rate of — say — 5% or 7% and a growth is sales volumes of — say 4% or 5% — while generating only a 0.5%, or even 0%, growth rate in global, planet-wide raw material use? Extremely unlikely, to say the least. Why?

Because that would represent a truly astronomical efficiency performance and because, as Grosse very correctly emphasizes, our modern economies are intrinsically geared towards consuming more per person — more goods but also, in general, more resources, raw materials and energy:

“… our consumer society, far from being exclusively a society of disposable objects, is just as much a society of accumulation: increased wealth not only serves to consume what is short-lived, or intangible, but also to add significantly to our individual and collective ownership of material goods.”

Efficiency gains rarely, if ever, contribute to the advent of sufficiency. On the contrary, they become themselves the “raw material” for generating new economic growth thanks to lower raw material requirements — and, therefore, lower production costs — per unit produced. Efficiency does not serve as an economizing tool: In our type of economic culture, it is mainly a tool for marketing, that is, for increasing sales volumes after having economized on the resource intensity of the existing volumes. This is the basic dynamics of our economies, and it explains why the circular growth economy attracts so much enthusiasm among businesspeople and industrialists: The mirage is that of perpetually expanding markets along with perpetually contracting raw material consumption. A delusion indeed, especially when placed (as it is in many arguments by mainstream circular-economy enthusiasts) within a purported ethical framework in which the capitalist dynamic is seen as the privileged tool to ensure equal living standards for all human beings on the planet.

Against this delusion, François Grosse (in the same article already cited twice above) offers a rather sobering outlook:

“Material growth must be less, or even considerably less, than 1% per annum (growth rate of global production of each raw material, primary + recycled). The recycling efficiency rate must be greater than 60%, or even 80% (proportion of material contained in waste which is actually recycled). The rate of addition to stocks must be less than 20%, meaning that the economy must discharge as waste at least 80% of the quantities of each material it consumes. The path is narrow and challenging, demanding a strict balance between three fundamental parameters, failing which it would simply become impossible to find a solution to the problem of sustainable management of non-renewable resources.

… The richer countries therefore, as regards resource management, can and should consider and implement a ‘quasicircular’ growth: an economy with a very low level of material growth, accumulating as little as possible, and therefore proportionally generating a large quantity of waste which is largely recycled.

… a ‘permanently sustainable’ economy cannot, to be perfectly honest, rely essentially on material growth. … our analysis [acknowledges the need] to work on a transition towards a sustainable economy and to set environmental limits on human activity, in the shape not of theoretical criteria, but of criteria related to the economy’s statistical values.”

Please note: “… a ‘permanently sustainable’ economy cannot, to be perfectly honest, rely essentially on material growth.” You can’t be any clearer than that. Circularity will have to be compatible with low or no growth, or it will just be a time-buying, ultimately hypocritical gimmick that a handful of industrialists can use to tinker with their “symbioses” and “closed-loop human ecologies” at the micro level of a single plant or an industrial park, while leaving the long-term, global future of our planet pretty much as bleak as before — and perhaps even bleaker for our having delayed action through false promises and not having addressed soon enough the genuine sustainability problem that is facing humanity as a whole.

There is indeed deep wisdom in this exceptionally open-minded engineer’s insights into the perverse effects of a growth-driven economy when it comes to the alleged virtues of circularity. He shows us rather precisely how we can begin to discriminate between the well-meaning but ultimately false promises of unsustainable pseudo-circularity and the genuine and truthful, but more sobering, prospects offered by a sustainable circularity. What François Grosse has done with his notion of “quasi-circular growth” is nothing less than to revive the much-needed reflection on stationarity and sufficiency in our modern economies. He can therefore be seen as the father of perma-circularity. (I prefer “perma-circularity” because, contrary to “quasi-circular growth”, it puts the very notion of growth outside the main frame, thus making economic growth into a secondary, residual phenomenon entirely subordinated to the necessities of genuine circularity.)

In a sense, once we own up to François Grosse’s scientific findings, the only circular economy worth looking at is the perma-circular one. Over any horizon longer than 50 or 75 years — which as of today encompasses the lives of our children and certainly our grandchildren — we have no use for a pseudo-circular metabolism that is actually a steadily widening spiral: circling, yes, but spinning slowly out of control nevertheless, in ever broader circles of ever-growing circumference. We need a genuinely circular metabolism, and that can only be a self-maintaining circle — one that doesn’t spiral outward but, rather, promises to keep the same circumference for as long as our beautiful planet remains alive in its orbit around the sun.

So to come back to the questions posed at the outset of this post: No, a perma-circular economy isn’t some sort of neo-primitivist pipe dream; it’s, in fact, the epitome of modernity. And yes, we really do need to reduce; it’s, in fact, the epitome of rationality and has strong scientific foundations. “Perma-circularity” needs to become a pleonasm, and “circular growth economy” an oxymoron.”

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