Consuming in Circles

This weekend at the CompostModern conference on sustainable design, I got to listen to many inspiring speakers.  Among them:  Jonah Sachs from Free Range Studios, the story-telling genius behind Annie Leonard's brilliant (though not uncontroversial) illustration of our prevailing linear consumption model.   If you haven't already, watch "The Story of Stuff", which you can find on our Design Principles resource page. 

The alternative to linear consumption -- circular consumption -- is a wonderful idea, but how does it work?  

One level of the answer comes easily to a City-dweller like me. I am lucky to live in a beautiful historic neighborhood nestled in an urban mecca of circular consumption.  Boutiques spring up monthly offering re-appreciated treasures to young professional shoppers. Meanwhile at home in a spree of clutter-reduction, my husband and I have easily: sold old devices on CraigsList, traded my daughter's wardrobe prunings for store credit at BuffaloExchange, toted no-longer-needed art supplies to SCRAP, and made a drop-off to Goodwill.  More treasured discarded items were carefully matched to holiday-visiting family members, and became well-received gifts under the holiday tree.  Meanwhile and always, food scraps and papers are conveniently composted, and bottles and cans are toted out to the recycling bin (and quickly snatched by the CRV entrepreneurs which cruise urban neighborhoods).  Our garbage can is the least utilized of our three Recology bins.  Very satisfying.  Very painless.

Another level of the answer is addressed head-on by CompostModern.  There, passionate design professionals from around the world come together to forward the practice of sustainabile design.  Through the design application of upcycled materials and cooperating systems, designers change our experience and our expectations, and move our taste for sustainability forward.

And yet, for true circular consumption to prevail, this reduce-reuse-recyle mindset must infuse our industrial consumption cycles as well as our personal consumption cycles, reaching far beyond the  scale possible through retail products and services.  With creative planning, the waste of one supply-chain can become a resource to the next.  With creative engineering, a carbon emission can become an industrial feedstock.  If we can do it at home, and we can do it in the design studio, we can also do it within industry writ large!

But how?  It all begins with collaboration, which our friends at Sustainable Silicon Valley work hard to make easy.  Check out their Sustainable Leaders Forum, their Eco-Council, and their new on-line information-exchange community, Eco-Cloud.  Begin to think of your colleagues there as potential collaborators or idea-sources, as you begin to think about creating consumption circles at work.  We've got a long way to go.  But many have begun the work, and together, we can find the way.