The Circular Economy And Clean Energy’s Contribution To Sustainability – Companies in the energy, services and resources sectors have the potential to play a major role in the development of a circular economy. Several technological advances that could accelerate the cycle are within their scope of action. These include innovations in materials structure and efficiency, electrification, hydrogen production, biochemistry and synthetic chemistry, and carbon capture and utilization.

Jeroen van Hoof, Director of Global Energy, Services and Resources (Netherlands) explains why companies are adopting circular economy models in their business strategies. Read on to learn more about the good reasons behind this approach.

The Circular Economy And Clean Energy’s Contribution To Sustainability

“Circularity goes to the heart of many of the challenges posed by the global pandemic – the need to rationalize operations, build more local supply chains and build resilience. Applying them circularly as a guiding principle will benefit new business models that can add value and competitiveness. Deliver the benefit .”

How Circular Economy Can Help Store Solar Energy?

Five pressing global issues are fundamentally changing the way millions of people live and work: inequality, disruption, ageing, polarization and trust (our ADAPT framework). The global pandemic has now accelerated the need for change, and the circuit provides a way to push the reset button to solve many problems.

Climate issues are already putting pressure on traditional economic and business models of “pick up, make, away”. In contrast to these linear approaches, circularity separates economic activity from material and energy consumption by creating closed cycles in which waste is reduced or eliminated, and in which resources, including carbon, are recycled. Companies with inherently linear business models, such as oil and gas or mining, can also incorporate circular elements into their operations. Therefore, we look at what the circuit can offer companies in the energy, services and resources sectors.

The circle can be focused on three main principles (priority of renewable inputs, increased use of products, return of products by production and waste), which define ten related strategies. The diagram shows the continuous flow of resources in both the production/distribution phase and the consumption phase.

How Can Businesses Hasten The Transition To A Circular Economy?

Across the board, companies in the energy, utilities and resources sectors are reexamining the use of resources and trying to reinvent business models. Circularity provides a useful lens for considering strategic options, ensuring that resources are used more carefully and, whenever possible, considered as assets with cradle-to-cradle value.

Explore where your current trail and running route is taking you. Assess opportunities to deliver circularity, looking deep within your operations and beyond your community of suppliers, customers and stakeholders.

Define your overall objective and give it the necessary strategic grounding, ensuring it is widely communicated and understood by those who deliver it.

What Is Circular Economy & How Does It Work?

For some companies, this may be a small step. For others, it will require a transformation of their entire business model. Either way, identify the company-specific capabilities that will define your circular transition.

Build the connections and partnerships needed to develop an effective circular ecosystem. Circular ecosystems should be part of a collaborative framework within well-functioning markets and have clear rules, specific infrastructure and logistics networks.

Track your cycle stages with adequate management and reporting processes, and use those processes to further refine your cycle strategy.

About Science For A Circular Economy

It’s better to ease into your transition instead of letting others jump on you and find yourself playing. Millions of tonnes of spent solar panels, wind turbine blades and lithium-ion batteries can be landfilled – or recycled. For clean energy conversion.

Over the past decade, production volumes of solar panels, wind turbines and lithium-ion batteries have increased and prices have fallen. This has led many countries to slow the transition rate to low carbon electricity. This helps electric vehicles become more mainstream, an important step in pushing the decarbonisation of transport.

To prevent global warming from reaching catastrophic levels, production of these clean energy technologies needs to scale up by orders of magnitude over the next decade.

Taking The Circular Economy Forward

Accomplishing all of these should be the first priority of anyone who cares about the fate of life on Earth. But there’s another critical priority that can’t be ignored: Many of the tools that make this important transition possible—and the valuable materials used to make them—could end up in landfills.

If not reused and recycled, this waste can wreak havoc on ecosystems and communities. It could also mean losing accessible sources of critical raw materials such as lithium and cobalt, which are expensive to mine and often produced in environmentally and socially harmful ways.

Today, the size of panels, turbine blades and batteries that are nearing the end of their life. But that is changing fast. It is time to increase recycling capacity to keep pace with the development of clean technologies that will emerge in the next few decades.

Myths About The Circular Economy In Transport » Tumi

By 2030, the U.S. is expected to deploy about 1 million metric tons of solar panels per year, said Maria Curry-Enkansah, director of the U.S. Circular Economy Strategy Initiative for Advanced Energy Materials Technologies — and worldwide. This number will be around 8 million metric tons per year. The numbers only increase from there. According to the International Energy Agency, global PV waste could increase tenfold to 78 million tons by 2050.

Also, according to the World Economic Forum, around 600,000 metric tons of lithium-ion batteries from first-generation EVs are expected to be waste by 2025, rising to 110 million worldwide by 2030. The volume of wind turbine blades reaching end-of-life could reach 12 billion metric tons by 2050, according to a 2020 study.

So what can we do today to avoid creating these large amounts of waste in the future? Experts say the only solution is a concerted and aggressive effort to enforce government regulations and establish private-sector investment that will allow clean energy technologies to be rolled out on a large scale.

Benefits Of A Circular Economy

It is important to note that there is a clear distinction between the raw materials of the clean energy economy and the raw materials of the fossil economy. Renewable energy and energy storage systems do not burn non-renewable resources and cause irreparable damage to the climate and environment in the process. Instead, they take inexhaustible sources of energy—sunlight and wind.

But to be truly sustainable, these industries need to reinvent themselves in ways that allow their products to be recycled at the end of their lives. This requires effective regulatory structures to encourage the private sector to invest in businesses and infrastructure, as well as government mandates to limit their unnecessary dumping, to collect, transport, destroy, clean, recycle and reproduce their components.

This will require a lot of innovation, from new techniques to break down and rebuild the components of solar panels, turbine blades and lithium-ion battery cells, to new approaches to designing end-of-life recyclable products. Easy and safe. .

Circular Economy: One Of The Solutions To The Current Climate And Environmental Crises?

To meet US and global demand for these clean energy technologies, supplies of key materials must expand dramatically. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that total mineral demand for clean energy technologies will increase by 2040 under the Sustainable Development Scenario (SDS), setting a path for global temperature increases of less than 2°C. The rate of demand for minerals used to make EVs and batteries is particularly dramatic – increasing thirtyfold between now and 2040, while demand for lithium will increase fortyfold over the same period.

Recycling and reuse do not come close to eliminating the need to mine and store large quantities of these basic materials. But they can definitely get used to it.

Take the example of batteries: According to the IEA report on clean energy minerals, by 2040, “renewable quantities of copper, lithium, nickel and cobalt from spent batteries could reduce the combined primary supply requirements for these minerals by 10%.

We Need A Second Earth To Support Our Current Consumption. We Can Do Better If We Think ‘circular.’

Megan O’Connor, CEO of Beverly, Massachusetts-based battery and mineral recycling startup Nth, said: “In the next 10 to 15 years, recycling will become a big part of [sourcing] the materials we need. This clean energy transition..” life stop “But even if we recycle 100 percent of the lithium-ion batteries we make by 2030, “they only get 10 percent of the cobalt we need.” This points to the fact that recycling will be most effective. New technologies that reduce or eliminate the need for various metals.

Mining, processing and transporting the raw materials used in clean energy technologies are expensive and energy intensive. It can also be environmentally harmful and cause unexpected cuts in supply. For example, 70 percent of the world’s cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where it is extracted in ways that harm the environment and violate human rights. A White House supply chain report last year found that China refines 60 percent of the world’s lithium and 80 percent of its cobalt, which “presents a serious threat to the future of the U.S. domestic auto industry.”

Recycling can dramatically reduce those costs and drawbacks. For example, this map from the Resale Center, Battery Recycling Consortium

The Circular Economy Explained

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