Repair before shredding

Durability, maintenance, reuse, remanufacturing and recycling, in that order.

Shredding is a useful defeat, not the first step

A product contains far more than its material

Any product contains, in addition to the physical material it is made of, a considerable amount of energy already invested, manufacturing precision, and specialized human labor that made it possible to transform that raw material into a functional, finished object. Keeping that product working preserves all that accumulated value at once, while destroying it to recover only the starting material wastes, in practice, everything else. This observation gives rise to a clear hierarchy of options, ranked from most to least value preserved: repairing replaces only the specific part that failed, keeping the rest of the product intact; reusing preserves the whole object as it is, giving it a new use through another person; remanufacturing disassembles the product, recovers the still-functional components, and reincorporates them into a refurbished product; and recycling, last, completely destroys the object's original shape to try to rescue only some of the starting materials it was made of. Disposing of it with no further use is always the last resort, the one that preserves the least value of all.

Design decides, long before the waste exists

Whether a specific product can actually be repaired is decided, in the vast majority of cases, at the manufacturer's design table, long before that product is even mass-produced. Using screws instead of structural adhesive to join the parts, making the battery physically accessible without needing specialized tools, publishing a clear and accessible repair manual, offering diagnostic tools that allow precisely identifying which specific component failed, keeping spare parts available on the market for years, publishing the software needed for a complete repair, and using materials that can be cleanly separated from each other at end of life are all design decisions that determine whether that specific product will be repairable in practice, not just in theory. An object that is technically repairable on paper may, however, not be so in real economic practice if the necessary spare part no longer exists on the market, or if the cost of the specialized labor needed to repair it far exceeds the price of a new replacement product, often artificially cheap thanks to mass production subsidized by economies of scale.

Reusing is not an automatic or universal decision either

Deciding whether it makes sense to reuse an object that still works, instead of replacing it with a new one, also has no automatic answer valid for every case: it depends on carefully comparing several different magnitudes at once. A very old refrigerator that is notably wasteful of electricity can, in fact, fully justify its early replacement with a much more efficient model, because the energy savings accumulated over the remaining years can more than offset the cost of manufacturing the new unit. A mobile phone that has simply become a bit slower than the most recent models, on the other hand, does not necessarily justify that same early replacement, because the difference in energy consumption between the two models during normal use is usually much smaller in proportion than in the refrigerator's case. Comparing, in each specific case, the energy the current object consumes during normal use, how often it is actually used, the reasonable remaining service life it has left, the old unit's safety considerations, and the replacement product's manufacturing cost is the only rigorous way to make this decision well, instead of applying a generic rule that doesn't distinguish between very different cases.

Circular does not mean perpetual motion with no losses

Every successive cycle of reuse, remanufacturing or recycling of the same material inevitably involves some physical loss of matter, some cross-contamination between different mixed materials, and a progressive degradation of the recycled material's own properties, especially noticeable in the case of plastic polymers. This means the circular economy, correctly understood, never completely eliminates the need to keep extracting some genuinely new energy and material from the environment: what it does achieve, and it is no small thing, is substantially reducing the total pace of that necessary extraction, by making much better use of what has already been extracted and manufactured before. The most prudent decision sequence, applied consistently, is: buy durable products from the start, maintain them correctly throughout their service life, share them with other people when individual use is not constant, repair them when they fail, and only deposit them in the appropriate collection circuit when no reasonable earlier option in that same hierarchy remains.

Circular is not infinite

The hierarchy, from most to least value preserved: maintain > repair > reuse > remanufacture > recycle > dispose. Each step down preserves less of the work, energy and precision already invested in manufacturing the object.

Design decides real, not just theoretical, repairability: screws versus adhesive, accessible battery, manual, parts available for years.
Reuse is not automatic: compare energy in use, frequency, remaining life, safety and the replacement's manufacturing cost before deciding.
A very old, wasteful refrigerator may justify replacement; a slightly slower phone, not necessarily.

There is no perpetual motion

Every recycling cycle loses some material and degrades its properties. The circular economy reduces necessary extraction; it does not eliminate it entirely. Buy durable, maintain, share, repair, and only then deposit into proper collection.

The numbers, with their source

Only 6.9% of all materials used worldwide flow back into circulation

According to the Circularity Gap Report 2025, published by Circle Economy together with Deloitte, the global economy only manages to bring 6.9% of all the materials it uses each year back into circulation as recycled or reused material — the rest, more than 93% of the 106 billion tonnes of materials the global economy moves annually, is lost as waste, landfilled, or released into the environment as emissions. This global circularity figure has also been getting worse over time: it was 9.1% in 2018, fell to 7.2% in 2023, and dropped again to 6.9% in 2025, despite growing public and political interest in the circular economy over that same period.

Source: Circularity Gap Report 2025 — Circle Economy / Deloitte.

What this table is missing

This aggregated global figure hides enormous differences between specific sectors: some materials, such as steel or aluminum in certain industrial applications, reach recycling rates far above the global average, while others, such as most plastics or textiles, remain well below it — the global figure does not replace asking about the real circularity rate of the specific material and sector being evaluated.

Sources

The European Commission sets out its circular-economy strategy in the Circular Economy Action Plan.
Circle Economy, in collaboration with Deloitte, publishes the annual Circularity Gap Report, the world's benchmark reference on the global economy's real circularity rate.