“This speech is about the state of global circularity”, Martijn Lopez Cardozo tells the audience at the outset of his DLD Circular 23 talk. The CEO of Dutch NGO Circle Economy then shares insights from the latest Circularity Gap Report and suggests actionable strategies to foster a circular economy.
The numbers he presents illustrate the massive use of materials, low circularity rate, and breaching of planetary boundaries.
“Each year, we use more than 100 billion tons of materials”, Cardozo notes. This is more than in the entire 20th century.
Transitioning to a sustainable economic model will require reducing material waste, using more renewable energy, and shifting to high-value recycling, he explains.
Watch the video for more findings from the “Circularity Gap Report”, which the NGO has published annually since 2018.
“People talked about circularity almost like a religion”, Cardozo says. “We had a lot of vagueness around it and was not grounded in science. So what we tried to do is make a map of the whole world: what’s flowing in, what’s being used in a productive way – and what are the big, high-level interventions that you could use.”
