My first exposure to the circular economy did not inspire confidence.

My Mom, my brother and I were in the attic of my uncle’s home rummaging through an old trunk overloaded with castoff clothing that my cousins had outgrown.

I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but we were clearly poor, and with 6 kids, there simply wasn’t enough money to buy new clothes. One of our most hideous family photos has us kids kitted out in fabrics I am certain were recycled from bedroom curtains.

Necessity, or in my situation a mild case of poverty, teaches you to value your stuff, make your stuff last longer, use your stuff minimally to reduce wear and tear, and to repurpose your stuff at end of life.

The hydrocarbon industry has never been particularly hip with circular thinking. In fact, the business model for the industry has been pretty much linear for my entire lifetime:

1. Producer extracts the resource (crude oil, raw gas, dirty coal) and transforms it into something useful (fuels, energy, petrochemicals).

2. The consumer uses it (burns it, wears it, builds with it, and lots of other uses), and disposes of it (carbon emissions into the atmosphere, construction materials into landfill, single use plastics everywhere) as waste.

There’s no evidence of a circle.

There are now a handful of good examples in the industry of the circular economy finally coming to life.