Circular isn’t enough – why your business should be FAIR

For natural resources, regenerative agriculture is gaining ground (pun intended!). We mentioned the documentary Kiss the Ground in our Circular Insights #26 (January 2021). Narrated by Woody Harrelson, the first 20 minutes are tough going, with all the bad news we pretty much know about from industrial agriculture. After that, there are lots of inspiring stories and reminders of how easy it is to lock carbon back up into our soils, reduce water and nutrient run-off, and at the same time improve the health of all living things – including us humans! The film blurb says “by regenerating the world’s soils, we can completely and rapidly stabilize Earth’s climate, restore lost ecosystems and create abundant food supplies.” The film shows that “by drawing down atmospheric carbon, soil is the missing piece of the climate puzzle. This movie is positioned to catalyse a movement to accomplish the impossible – to solve humanity’s greatest challenge, to balance the climate and secure our species’ future.”

Regeneration International (RI) is a non-profit, with a blueprint for an international movement “united around a common goal: to reverse global warming and end world hunger by facilitating and accelerating the global transition to regenerative agriculture and land management.” RI engages with a network of more than 250 international partners and a growing number of Regeneration Alliances throughout the world, including in the US, South Africa, India, Canada, Belize, Mexico and Guatemala.

For ‘technical’ resources (metals, minerals, plastics and so on), we should be recycling what we already have instead of creating more destruction and pollution by mining new sources. Often though, we’ve buried things in landfill, or just allowed them to decay (eg microplastics from ‘biodegradable’ plastics). So regeneration might include ‘urban mining’ – recovering ‘lost’ resources from landfills and discarded waste.

This article from the Copper Alliance organisation, in 2020, summarises the benefits and some current limitations. A blog in Forbes Magazine explains how the Urban Mining Company in Texas, US, is recovering Rare Earth Elements that would otherwise by mined in China. And if you’ve listened to one of Catherine’s talks, you might have seen the example of extraction rates for gold… around 5 grams of gold from each tonne of ore for gold mining, and yet there are around 150 grams in each tonne of discarded mobile phones!

An article by Pure Planet Recycling says this approach can be far more profitable than traditional mining. It cites a study carried out in China, where academics found that it was about 13 times cheaper to extract metals from e-waste than it was to mine them, once all the additional costs are included.

In 2018, the BBC reported on an urban mining research project in Australia, where Professor Veena Sahajwalla’s mine produces gold, silver and copper from electronic gadgets. Professor Sahajwalla, an expert in materials science reckons her operation will become efficient enough to be making a profit within a couple of years: “Economic modelling shows the cost of around $500,000 Australian (£280,000) for a micro-factory pays off in two to three years, and can generate revenue and create jobs”.

We need to regenerate communities too – those communities that have lost their industries (mining and steelmaking in the UK), that have lost their agricultural self-sufficiency after being encouraged to focus on cash-crops, or that lose their ability to rely on soil, forests and oceans after over-exploitation of resources or ‘land-grabs’ by big corporations. Often, regeneration projects can produce multiple and transformational benefits. For example, the Loess Plateau regeneration project in China has improved the livelihoods of millions of local people since it began, back in 1995.

The Regenerative Communities Network (RCN), supported by the Capital Institute, was “launched as an urgent response to the Anthropocene — and the declaration of a Planetary Emergency by the Club of Rome and others. the RCN says we need a “profound response to:

• climate change and biodiversity loss;
• deteriorating ecological health at watershed, bioregional and biosphere scales;
• grotesquely unjust and ever-rising inequality;
• loss of linguistic and cultural diversity;
• and severe economic fragility as revealed by the Covid-19 crisis.”