MARCH | FROM THE EDITOR
The Promise of a
Circular Economy
BY SUSAN GOLDBERG PHOTOGRAPH BY LUCA LOCATELLIIMAGINING
‘THE END
OF TRASH’is not entirely new. Environmental-
ists have espoused the reduce, reuse,
recycle ethos since the 1970s. For
generations, in Prato, Italy, old wool
sweaters have been reduced to their
yarn and rewoven into new clothes.
And for decades, copper was extracted
from church bells and statues; today
it’s more likely to come from iPhones
and flat-screens.
We sent Kunzig and photographer
Luca Locatelli to document where the
new circular economy is taking hold.
They found a lot of examples. In New
York, fungi filaments are used to create
compostable packaging. In London,
researchers are feeding beer waste to
insects, which are made into animal
feed. In hotel kitchens around the
world, chefs are reducing food waste
with AI garbage cans that measure it.
The idea that we might put an end to
trash may seem far-fetched—and it is,
but in a good way, Kunzig told me. “It
reminds me of a line in Diner, a movie
I love: ‘If you don’t have good dreams,
you got nightmares.’ The circular econ-
omy is like that—it’s a dream we have
to try to make real.”
Thank you for reading National
Geographic.WE FEEL BAD when we throw out things
that shouldn’t have become trash (like
uneaten, past-its-prime produce) or
expend resources needlessly (like leav-
ing lights on when we’re away). This
guilty feeling is deeply ingrained; the
origins of the expression “waste not,
want not” can be traced to the 1500s.
But we do waste, in ways big and
small. The result is this shocking fact:
Of the minerals, fossil fuels, foodstuffs,
and other raw materials that we take
from the Earth and turn into products,
about two-thirds ends up as waste. And,
more likely than not, that waste is part
of a larger environmental problem.
“Plastic trash drifted into rivers and
oceans; so did nitrates and phosphates
leaching from fertilized fields. A third
of all food rotted, even as the Ama-
zon was deforested to produce more,”
writes senior environment editor Rob-
ert Kunzig in “The End of Trash,” the
cover story in this issue. And the biggest
waste-caused problem? Climate change
is what happens when “we burn fossil
fuels and scatter the waste—carbon
dioxide—into the atmosphere.”
What if we could recapture waste
and turn it into something else? This
concept, called the circular economy,At this Prato, Italy, facility,
bundles of discarded textiles
will be processed and used
to create new clothing—
an example of the circular
economy in action.