We sometimes need to look back to see what is ahead of us. If you have ever read “Little House on the Prairie” books, or “Waste and Want” you already know that the Circular economy is not new. In the 1700’s and 1800’s in the United States, it was quite common to take materials at end of life: fabric and metals and trade or resell those materials to be manufactured into other goods. There was recognition that despite the end of useful life as clothes, cleaning rags or a tin can, the materials had value and traded to peddlers for new products. Peddlers would then take those materials to be repurposed into other things: metal melted into new objects and rags into paper. The debris of end-of-life products were currency for new ones and sold by the pound to factories. Peddlers were the middle part of the reuse system, moving materials from rural towns to the facilities who used them. This was not referred to as “Sustainability,” as that term of art did not exist yet. What we know as Sustainability as a term and concept for manufacturing did not exist until the 1980’s.

We are now seeing a repeat of this historical process with respect to newer materials found not in dresses and pans, but devices and appliances of varying sizes. Although the same concept as trade, it is more complex. Just to get to the materials for repurposing or remanufacturing there needs to be a disassembly or demanufacturing process. Early consumer personal computers (PC’s), with metal cases you would think would be simple to recycling the case. Sadly, no. Devices were not designed to be deconstructed, and a single PC could easily use eleven assorted sizes of metal screws to hold it together, making it labor intensive to get to the metals and more valuable materials. Currently there are eighteen billion personal devices in the world today and we are looking at the Industrial Ecology with the lens of “how do we get to the materials in a manner that is sustainable?”  “Can we make the process more efficient, so the ROI of reuse makes better business sense?”

To make this process even a greater challenge is the capture of data for environmental reporting. With more and companies looking at their Scope 3 emissions and ways to reduce, the data of demanufacturing becomes a critical, missing component. The added question becomes, “How do we capture this information in a consistent, reportable manner?"