Since many years, environmentalists have called to ‘close the loop’: To move from a ‘Linear Economy’ towards a ‚Circular Economy’, which means to recover materials from products at the end of their use-time and reuse them for manufacturing new products. During the past decades, this ‚simple form’ of ‘Circular Economy’ has already saved millions of tons of raw material from being buried in landfills – and used them in the production of new items instead.

For millions of years, nature is practicing ‚circularity‘. Waste that is generated by organisms is used by others and consequently fed back into the ‚lifecycle ‘.

The ‚Circular Economy‘ was common practice of human society until the late 1900’s when recycling started to be more expensive then extracting virgin materials. For this reason, and because it was more convenient, society moved towards the ‘ex and hop’ mentality.

Since then, the ‚Linear Economy‘, where products are manufactured, consumed and discarded, has been implemented in many regions creating millions of tons of waste every year. This ‚Linear Economy‘ causes huge problems due to:

• Improper waste treatment which results in pollution and health impacts
• Wasting the world’s raw materials and energy resources

and therefore, accelerates the negative impacts of manufacturing on the globe’s environment.

Since many years, environmentalists have called to ‚close the loop‘.
To move from a ‚Linear Economy‘ towards  ‚Circular Economy’, which means to recover materials from products at the end of their use-time and reuse them for manufacturing new products. During the past decades, this ’simple form‘ of ‚Circular Economy‘ has already saved millions of tons of raw material from being buried in landfills – and used them in the production of new items instead.

There have been many research projects investigating the technological conditions for extending the use-time of products. However, it has not yet been determined how to motivate and finally transform our society and its major economic players, companies and customers, towards CE 4.0 from the economic point of view, while their existing business models are still based on Linear Economy to a large extend.