According to the Circle Economy Foundation's 2024 Circularity Gap Report, the share of materials cycling back into the global economy fell from 9.1% in 2018 to 7.2% in 2023. This decline happened during a period of unprecedented investment in circular economy programs, an explosion of circular economy legislation, and corporate circularity commitments filling sustainability reports across every major industry.
We are investing more in circularity and getting less of it. That is not a resource problem or a shortage of ambition. It is a thinking problem.
The circular economy, as most organizations practice it today, treats material flows as an engineering puzzle solvable at the product level. Design for recyclability. Extend product lifetimes. Recover materials at end of life. These are sensible objectives. They are also radically insufficient, because they operate at the object level while the failures occur at the system level.
When we optimize objects within a system, we leave the system itself untouched.