Circular economy, Bioeconomy and Zero-emissions

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From the course by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Sustainability of Social-Ecological Systems: the Nexus between Water, Energy and Food

11 ratings

Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Sustainability of Social-Ecological Systems: the Nexus between Water, Energy and Food

11 ratings

In this course you will become familiar with the ideas of the water-energy-food nexus and transdisciplinary thinking. You will learn to see your community or country as a complex social-ecological system and to describe its water, energy and food metabolism in the form of a pattern, as well as to map the categories of social actors. We will provide you with the tools to measure the nexus elements and to analyze them in a coherent way across scales and dimensions of analysis. In this way, your quantitative analysis will become useful for informed decision-making. You will be able to detect and quantify dependence on non-renewable resources and externalization of environmental problems to other societies and ecosystems (a popular ‘solution’ in the western world). Practical case studies, from both developed and developing countries, will help you evaluate the state-of-play of a given community or country and to evaluate possible solutions. Last but not least, you will learn to see pressing social-ecological issues, such as energy poverty, water scarcity and inequity, from a radically different perspective, and to question everything you’ve been told so far. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT Part of the results and case studies presented have been developed within two projects: MAGIC and PARTICIPIA. However, the course does not reflect the views of the funding institutions or of the project partners as a whole, and the case studies were presented purely with an educational and illustrative purpose.

From the lesson

MODULE 1. Introducing the basic concepts

In this first week we will look at the nexus from a different perspective: What is the nexus? Why is it getting all this attention right now? Is it just a buzzword, or something more? We will start by explaining what the nexus means in terms of complexity and propose the basic concepts needed for a metabolic analysis of the nexus. It might take a while to get your head around these concepts, but they are essential to understand what comes next. Finally, we will give examples of “elephants in the room” in the sustainability discourse – to show you that mainstream narratives are not always right.

The “intolerable” dependence on fossil fuel imports10:42

Circular economy, Bioeconomy and Zero-emissions14:32

Jevon’s paradox and the myth of resource efficiency as a solution for sustainability9:11

Meet the Instructors

Mario Giampietro
ICREA Research Professor
Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA)
Andrea Saltelli
Guest researcher
Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA)
Tarik Serrano
Post-Doc Researcher
Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA)

Hi. Welcome back to the second session of

the lesson dealing with blunders in the framing of sustainability issues.

In this 10 minutes, we will address three popular concepts that

I use to frame sustainability and to show that there are at least doubtful,

that their validity is not particularly certain.

The three concepts are the Circular economy, Bioeconomy and Zero-Emissions.

To discuss the circular economy, we can start with the finding of

one paper that was obviously in 2015 entitled "How Circular is the Global Economy?"

So they have presented an analyses of the circularity of

the global economy and the economy of the European 27.

This is the graph with the quantitative analysis.

You see here there are the flow of materials,

solid materials going through Euro 27,

the data are in gigatons per year.

That is one part of material entering into the society.

One part of this material is composed of food and energy input.

So basically, 52 percent of the total cannot be

recycled by default because this goes in emission,

the energy consumed, or in other type of emissions by humans.

But these cannot be reused by the economy.

Another big chunk of it, 45 percent,

is construction material that goes into stocks of a building.

And also a small part of this building material can be recycled.

So basically, we start with 97 percent of the material flow that is difficult to recycle.

One part of the stocks of the building

can be recycled and give us 13 percent when including

parts of the material is already recycled because the assessment here is pretty

tricky because you are calculating the amount of recycle on 7.7,

which is more than 5.5 - which is the amount of actual flow getting into the society.

But what is the point here?

That in reality, what we referred to when we were talking about circular economy,

you are recycling the metallic elements, plastic things,

is a very short part,

short fraction of this fraction.

So what one will wonder that what they are talking about when they say circular economy;

here there is no circulation at all.

But the situation is even much, much,

much worse than that because in these analyses,

we are only considering solid material.

What if we're considering liquid,

the water required to produce the food that we are consuming?

If we would look at that,

you will have - the previous graph is this very small item on

the bottom and only for producing 2.3 gigatons of biomass.

We need much more than 690 gigatons of water.

We are calculating here 300 liters of water per kilo of biomass,

but in reality for food.

This is much more. It doesn't matter.

This you can get immediately the idea that when considering water,

it is not circularity at all.

It's not clear from where they are getting this idea that the economy can be circular.

As a matter of fact, this is exactly the point of the other blunder.

The blunder of the concept of bioeconomy we will discuss now.

So - now this move to the second point.

So circular economy at the moment is the sexier name for waste management.

Let's face it. So that get into the next step is about bioeconomy.

The bioeconomy by doing more better handling of biological flows.

We can close the cycles and we can reach up.

So bioeconomy is the part of the economy that use

renewable biological resources from land and sea as crops,

forest, fish, animals and microorganisms to produce food, materials and energy.

This is the idea and then in this way,

we will reduce the dependence on natural resources,

transform manufacturing, promote sustainable production of renewable resources and so on.

We are growing a new jobs industry.

We already went through this discussion in the previous lesson is

that there is a problem in recycling flows - is that if you want to recycle flows,

you need to find that they are capable of doing it.

So if - in order to stabilize circular flows,

you have to reproduce and sustain

the fund element that can be made possible the recycling.

I have a story that can be used to explain

the problem in terms of the recyclable diapers.

No? Recyclable diapers have been used for centuries and centuries.

And then at a certain point,

now we are basically using disposable diapers.

So we just put the diaper to the baby and throw it away.

I understood the reason of this many years ago when I had a student,

Jesus - this is him in the picture.

And by the way, Jesus now is a rector of the university.

So you realize that you are old when your students became rectors.

And then when he got the first baby,

he asked as present reusable diapers.

So we gave him as a present a reusable diaper.

And then when he got the second baby after two years,

he already got a position as associate professor.

We ask him if you want more reusable diapers?

He said no, no, no, no, no. We cannot use it anymore.

So what is the problem with reusable diapers?

It's that the reusable diapers are fund elements that have to be maintained.

So you have to wash it,

you have to dry it in the sun,

recollecting, store it in a place;

it require times and infrastructure and energy.

So what happens? If you have a disposal diaper, this is a flow element.

You are just buying, using,

throwing and it's someone else's problem.

So what is the problem here is that modern society became rich because we stopped using

fund flow and we got into the stock flow resource exploitation.

In this way, we avoid two major problem.

To take care of the fund element,

you have to have the soil to reproduce

the nutrients and the need of respecting the natural pace of flows.

So what is the delusion of the circular economy and the bioeconomy?

It's that they believe that it is possible to recycle flows within the technosphere.

So within the technosphere,

we are not capable of recycling flows.

This blunder is due to probably bad education in biophysical analysis.

In fact, we are using semantic categories like energy,

food and water; but these do not

add a meaning that make possible to make measurements of it.

What we have to use rather is primary sources,

carriers and end use.

You have primary sources of energy;

coal mines, oil reserves.

Carriers; it will be electricity,

fuels, process heat input.

Or end use; transportation, lighting.

And the same is for food.

And the same is for water. You don't have water.

You have either primary source of water; aquifers,

rivers - or you have carriers;

blue water, drinkable water - or you have end use; drinking, irrigation.

You can measure each of these things,

but you are not measuring water.

You are measuring different categories of water.

Why this is important?

Because in reality, energy,

food and water carriers are not recycled.

You have an input of energy carrier,

gasoline and you have an output of waste,

CO2 and other emissions.

The same for food. And the same is for water.

When you are using an energy carrier,

you are destroying some of these characteristics

and then the carrier is no longer useful after the use.

So what happened is that in reality,

when you are using carriers,

you have two set of fund flow relation.

You have a fund flow relation in which primary sources found from

ecosystem are used by fund of the society to generate energy carriers,

or nutrient carriers or water carriers and then

these carriers are used by fund of the society to reproduce themselves.

But in any case,

you have a relation fund-flow, flow-fund.

It never just flows going around and being recycled.

So if we are making the analysis correctly,

you have a nutrient carrier,

energy carrier or water or uses of material.

They are used and they can no longer be reused and you can see here on this site.

Then you have that this use of carriers imply waste and environmental stress.

And anywhere on the bottom,

the biosphere with processes outside human control that are

recycling this waste into useful input.

So what is there right now that you consider circular economy?

You must have a technosphere that is generating energy carriers,

but this technosphere can do that because

of the help of ecological fund and the ecological fund,

as well, can reproduce themselves because of biochemical cycles.

So the wasted pollutant that is generated are

recycled into input by the activity of the biosphere.

If you're looking at how this work in agriculture,

you have that in agriculture before the industrial revolution,

in low external input agriculture,

you're working, you select seeds,

you try to use irrigation;

but this is happening with the help of ecological fund.

The soil is reproducing itself.

The biodiversity best control and biodiversity of production aquifer.

They are all reproducing themselves.

What happened with the industrial revolution?

When we start pouring fossil energy into the society,

that basically the natural way of recycling flows has been totally eliminated.

So we are using fossil energy,

we are using fertilizer,

we are using whatever.

And then the speed at which we are using resources here is

too high for making possible for the biosphere to reprocess this flows.

And you get accumulation.

So what happens in terms of agriculture, if you want to visualize this,

what happen is that by adding a lot of fertilizer and pesticides or things,

you are damaging the soil and we are eliminating the biodiversity and

we are eliminating - and we are overdrafting aquifers all over the planet.

So what's happening is that in reality,

what we are doing has nothing to do with bioeconomy.

It is bizarre because the term bioeconomy was introduced by

Georgis Garajin in the '80s and the end of the '70s.

Exactly to say it is not possible to grow forever.

And now we are experiencing

a fantastic semantic appropriation of the terms to make exactly the opposite promise,

that by using bioeconomy,

you can have a perpetual grow.

The last part, the zero emission,

will be taken care by Professor Kozo Mayumi and will

give an excel lesson on the concept of zero emission.

Now we will do a Zen Buddhist lecture on [inaudible] with your cooperation.

When I say so, please stop breathing.

Now.

Now let's start something else.

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