“Ever wondered what happens to all your stuff when you throw it out? A lot of it – from sauce sachets to mobile phones – ends up in landfill or gets burned. Or it ends up in our environment, causing damage to the natural world on which we depend.
“This animation shows how the circular economy aims to eliminate waste, keep products in use, and regenerate nature by cycling materials. Nature never creates waste, everything is used again and again. What if we could do the same?”
In nature, life creates waste that provides the nutrients to regenerate life. It’s a circle, a sustainable system that we can mimic when designing, making, and using things.
This video from The Ellen MacArthur Foundation explains the concept of a circular economy using gold, a mined material, and an orange, a grown fruit, as two examples.
What happens to the orange peel when we’ve eaten the orange? What happens to the gold when the phone that it’s in is abandoned for a new phone? Consider The Circular Economy: A new way to design, make, and use things.
How can we transform our linear economy to a circular one? Watch this next: What is the Circular Economy?
Plus, learn with more videos about zero waste, reuse, repair, biomimicry, and sustainability, including:
• The Surprising Places We Waste Energy
• Powered by Poop at the Straus Family Creamery
• Can rotting vegetables make electricity?
This Webby award-winning video collection exists to help teachers, librarians, and families spark kid wonder and curiosity. TKSST features smarter, more meaningful content than what's usually served up by YouTube's algorithms, and amplifies the creators who make that content.
Curated, kid-friendly, independently-published. Support this mission by becoming a sustaining member today.