Circular Economy and Climate Change by AnirudhGayathri

Please find below the judging results for your proposal.

Finalist Evaluation

Judges'' comments

Thank you for participating in the 2015 Climate CoLab India's Climate Action Plan contest, and for the time you spent in creating your entry.

The Judges have strongly considered your proposal, and have chosen to not advance it as a Finalist for this contest.

We, the Judges and contest Fellows, are truly grateful for your contribution to the Climate CoLab and for your commitment to address climate change.

We encourage you to keep developing your work and to submit it into future contests, which will open in the fall and winter of 2016. In the meantime, you can keep developing your work by transferring it to the Regional Climate Action Plan Workspace (http://climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans/-/plans/contestId/1302801); here you can re-open it, make edits, and add collaborators. You can do so by logging into your account, opening your proposal, selecting the Admin tab, and clicking “Copy proposal”. Once the 2016 contests open, you can use this same feature to move your proposal to an open contest.

We very much hope you will stay involved in the Climate CoLab community. Please support and comment on other proposals on the platform and continue to submit your ideas into our contests.

If you have questions, please contact the Climate CoLab staff at admin@climatecolab.org

Keep up the great work. And thank you again for being a part of this mission to harness the world’s collective efforts to develop and share innovative climate change solutions.

All the best,
2015 Climate CoLab Judges

Additional comments from the Judges

Comment 1:
The notion of producer responsibility and circular economy has been around for quite some time now and in some cases, as noted by the authors, even works. But it is not clear whether the authors of the proposal are suggesting it for all products or a limited set of products. If the former, then designing an enormous number of products for reusing/recycling is not an easy exercise at all, although there has been some movement in this direction. Even if the latter, there are all kinds of issues such as organizing collection chains, etc. would add substantially to the cost of the product (and even the climate impact will be relatively marginal). in effect, there is nothing in this proposal that is new, i.e., suggests an innovative way of overcoming the technical, economic, and other implementation barriers to implementing the circular economy model.

Comment 2:
The project focuses on the linkage between the use of natural resources, waste generation and the related climate change impacts. A key aspect is to satisfy our need for some of the natural resource requirements from the waste that we create. And that is where the concept of ‘Cradle to Cradle’ model comes in, which is central to the idea of a Circular Economy. The need is to move from a linear business model to a circular one whereby the use of natural resources and waste generated is minimized.

The proposal cites an example of the packaging industry to see how the current system can be made more sustainable. In addition to rethinking and redesigning of the products and their packaging, it would also involve a rethink on the very idea of ownership of a product. The end user would simply need to pay for the service of a product and not its ownership. The proposal applies the Cradle to Cradle model to the packaging industry whereby a company would own the packaging material and be responsible for delivering the product, unpacking it and taking back the packaging to pack another product. So, a cycle is established, drastically reducing the need to make fresh packaging material. And since the particular company owns the packaging material, it would be completely responsible for the remanufacturing as well to enable it to re-enter the cycle. Though the concept sounds interesting, however, ideas like circular economy and systems thinking can be implemented in the Indian industries only if proper knowledge of the whole process and its pros is properly spread among the industrialists as well as the consumers, as this transformation requires the collaboration of various organizations. Once one product is successfully established in a cycle, others will follow. If one by one, they wake up to this reality, then each manufacturer and each industry would be ready to make the switch to a sustainable and circular economy in the years to come. The cost of implementation of such a system will be high due to the costs involved in implementation of the idea, research on redesigning the structure and implementation at operational level. However, making an investment now will fetch good results in the long run. Overall, the proposal lacks specifics in terms of the implementation plan, financial resources required as well as the time frame.

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