Circular economy in the context of "Ecological sanitation"

Resource recovery is using wastes as an input material to create valuable products as new outputs. The aim is to reduce the amount of waste generated, thereby reducing the need for landfill space, and optimising the values created from waste. Resource recovery delays the need to use raw materials in the manufacturing process. Materials found in municipal solid waste, construction and demolition waste, commercial waste and industrial wastes can be used to recover resources for the manufacturing of new materials and products. Plastic, paper, aluminium, glass and metal are examples of where value can be found in waste.

Resource recovery goes further than just the management of waste. Resource recovery is part of a circular economy, in which the extraction of natural resources and generation of wastes are minimised, and in which materials and products are designed more sustainably for durability, reuse, repairability, remanufacturing and recycling. Life-cycle analysis (LCA) can be used to compare the resource recovery potential of different treatment technologies.

The European Green Deal, approved in 2020, is a set of policy initiatives by the European Commission with the overarching aim of making the European Union (EU) climate neutral in 2050. The plan is to review each existing law on its climate merits, and also introduce new legislation on the circular economy (CE), building renovation, biodiversity, farming and innovation.

The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, stated that the European Green Deal would be Europe's "man on the moon moment". On 13 December 2019, the European Council decided to press ahead with the plan, with an opt-out for Poland. On 15 January 2020, the European Parliament voted to support the deal as well, with requests for higher ambition. A year later, the European Climate Law was passed, which legislated that greenhouse gas emissions should be 55% lower in 2030 compared to 1990. The Fit for 55 package is a large set of proposed legislation detailing how the European Union plans to reach this target. ETS2 is the new EU Emissions Trading System that will enter into force in 2027 and, for the first time in history, will set a price for CO2 emissions from fuels used in the building and road transport sectors.

An industrial robot is a robot system used for manufacturing. Industrial robots are automated, programmable and capable of movement on three or more axes.

Typical applications of robots include welding, painting, assembly, disassembly, pick and place for printed circuit boards, packaging and labeling, palletizing, product inspection, and testing; all accomplished with high endurance, speed, and precision. They can assist in material handling.

Provenance (from French provenir 'to come from/forth') is the chronology of the ownership, custody or location of a historical object. The term was originally mostly used in relation to works of art, but is now used in similar senses in a wide range of fields, including archaeology, paleontology, archival science, economy, computing, and scientific enquiry in general.

The primary purpose of tracing the provenance of an object or entity is normally to provide contextual and circumstantial evidence for its original production or discovery, by establishing, as far as practicable, its later history, especially the sequences of its formal ownership, custody and places of storage. The practice has a particular value in helping authenticate objects. Comparative techniques, expert opinions and the results of scientific tests may also be used to these ends, but establishing provenance is essentially a matter of documentation. The term dates to the 1780s in English. Provenance is conceptually comparable to the legal term chain of custody.

Bioplastics are plastic materials produced from renewable biomass sources. Historically, bioplastics made from natural materials like shellac or cellulose had been the first plastics. Since the end of the 19th century they have been increasingly superseded by fossil-fuel plastics derived from petroleum or natural gas (fossilized biomass is not considered to be renewable in reasonable short time). Today, in the context of bioeconomy and circular economy, bioplastics are gaining interest again. Conventional petro-based polymers are increasingly blended with bioplastics to manufacture "bio-attributed" or "mass-balanced" plastic products - so the difference between bio- and other plastics might be difficult to define.

Electronic waste recycling, electronics recycling, or e-waste recycling is the disassembly and separation of components and raw materials of waste electronics; when referring to specific types of e-waste, the terms like computer recycling or mobile phone recycling may be used. Like other waste streams, reuse, donation, and repair are common sustainable ways to dispose of information technology (IT) waste.

Since its inception in the early 1990s, more and more devices are being recycled worldwide due to increased awareness and investment. Electronic recycling occurs primarily to recover valuable, rare-earth metals and precious metals, which are in short supply, as well as plastics and metals. These are resold or used in new devices after purification, in effect creating a circular economy. Such processes involve specialised facilities and premises, but within the home or ordinary workplace, sound components of damaged or obsolete computers can often be reused, reducing replacement costs.

Waste valorization, beneficial reuse, value recovery or waste reclamation is the process of waste products or residues from an economic process being valorized (given economic value), by reuse or recycling in order to create economically useful materials. The term comes from practices in sustainable manufacturing and economics, industrial ecology and waste management. The term is usually applied in industrial processes where residue from creating or processing one good is used as a raw material or energy feedstock for another industrial process. Industrial wastes in particular are good candidates for valorization because they tend to be more consistent and predictable than other waste, such as household waste.

Increased regulation of residual materials and socioeconomic changes, such as the introduction of ideas about sustainable development and circular economy in the 1990s and 2000s increased focus on industrial practices to recover resources as value add materials.

Sustainability strategies are mechanisms that contribute to achieving sustainability and are well-established in the field of sustainability science. Originally, the term centered on a triad introduced by Joseph Huber, encompassing sufficiency, efficiency, and consistency. Each of these strategies has since developed its own school of thought, emphasizing different merits and contributions to sustainability. In recent debates, further strategies are discussed, culminating in a recent framework by Eric Hartmann, which describes a total of ten sustainability strategies.

Sufficiency focuses on reducing consumption and production levels without threatening human needs. Following the typology by Maria Sandberg, four types of sufficiency can be distinguished, namely absolute reduction of consumption (e.g. less travels), modal shifts (e.g. switching from air travels to trains), sharing (e.g. carpooling) and increased longevity (e.g. repairing a bike instead of buying a new one). Sufficiency is often discussed in the context of the degrowth paradigm of sustainability. Efficiency aims to reduce resource use, energy consumption, or pollution per unit of consumption or production within existing production and consumption systems - such as improved fuel efficiency in cars or energy-saving appliances. It is often considered to share an elective affinity with the green growth paradigm. Consistency involves shifting to new industrial metabolisms that are more consistent with nature’s metabolism and hence cause less environmental damage (such as renewable energies and circular design). This strategy is implicitly advocated by the circular economy approach and rooted in industrial ecology.