Global Infrastructure Hub (15 pages).
This thought piece for the G20 Infrastructure Working Group (IWG) is an examination by the Global Infrastructure Hub (GI Hub) of: the need to transition to a circular economy, the role of infrastructure in such a transition and the enablers for this transition. The purpose of this thought piece is to consolidate available literature and industry sentiment on the circular economy, specifically around the drivers, enablers and opportunities surrounding infrastructure’s role in accelerating the transition to a circular economy. This thought piece serves as a baseline for the discussions that will take place at the G20 IWG Workshop on the 30 April 2021.
The extraction, manufacturing and production of materials is responsible for around 45% of global greenhouse gas emissions. A study shows that moving to renewables can only address 55% of these emissions, indicating that the 1.5°C target of the Paris Agreement can only be achieved by combining current efforts on renewable energy and energy efficiency with circular economy approaches.1 The circular economy is therefore a powerful solution for meeting long-term policy objectives related to climate change. The circular economy can also reduce supply chain risks and short-term supply shortages by requiring less material input and establishing local secondary material supply.
The circular economy is centred around the 6R principles for circularity. The aim is to refuse (or significantly reduce) the amount of new materials entering the system. This is achieved by ‘closing the loop’ and maximising the amount of materials recovered and subsequently reused, repaired, refurbished and recycled. Residual materials are those that can no longer be reused or recycled, and the available pathways are to extract the embedded energy (e.g. through waste-to-energy) or to safely dispose of these.
Within this 6R framework, infrastructure has a dual role to play, first by increasing the ‘circularity of infrastructure’ in line with the 6R principles, and second by implementing ‘infrastructure for circularity’ (i.e. providing infrastructure that supports circular economy activity and the delivery of these 6R principles). Six opportunities for infrastructure were mapped to the 6R framework.