Ken Webster's presentation on the work of the EMF and insights in the Circular Economy

1. Circular Economy
Why and why now?

2. Welcome

3. Redundant whaling station South Georgia

7. Frameworks and Change
If the machine inspired the industrial age, the image of the living
system may inspire a genuine postindustrial age
Peter Senge et al. (Sloan Management Review)
You never change things by fighting against the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the old
model obsolete
Buckminster Fuller

9. Cradle to Cradle

13. Why Now? Other changes in progress,
other contexts that matter
• Exhaustion: commodities, energy and credit. Resource shocks coming,
risks and price volatility
• ICT (digital revolution) collaborative use, rental easy and convenient,
control technologies track items, link systems (more mobile phones
than toilets) from consumers to users
• Politics: high unemployment, declining public services, expensive
housing and debt, rising inequality
• Open source: User is producer, user is creative, user is a hacker
(design for repurposing) 3D printing, innovation
• Finance: looking for the new winners and reducing risk- diversity:B2B
complementary currencies

16. In search of rarity (1970s)
• An unofficial recording. Perhaps
their best!
• Search dealers and classified
adverts / ‘black markets’
• Pay €80-200 if a copy is found
• Wait years….

17. In search of rarity the obvious (2010)
• An unofficial recording. Perhaps
their best!
• Check the internet
• Pay nothing
• Wait a few minutes for the
download
• (or if you must buy –its easy to
find …still €80-200)

18. White Bicycle Scheme 1965
In most early
schemes e.g.
Holland 1965,
Cambridge UK
1993 all bikes are
stolen or
destroyed very
quickly

19. Easy rental arrangements- including an individual’s car

20. Airbnb – rapid growth

21. Zilok – rent anything + Liftshare + Zookal – rent textbooks

22. What’s wrong with this picture?

23. Unemployment

24. Food prices and Riots

25. Adbusters. social media enabled the OCCUPY movement to flourish

26. Circular economy – customer as user and producer
• Design for refurbishment,
• Repair, repurposing (‘hacking’)
• Disassembly
• Extended use periods
• User understandable and repairable
• They all contribute to a different relationship with products =
business opportunity??
•

28. Why not? Extended use period

29. Innovation and …

30. Civilisation starter kit?
• Open Source - we freely publish our 3d designs, schematics, instructional
videos, budgets, and product manuals on our open source wiki and we
harness open collaboration with contributors. Low-Cost - The cost of
making or buying our machines are, on average, 8x cheaper than buying from
an Industrial Manufacturer, including an average labor cost of $15 hour for a
GVCS fabricator and using mail-order parts. Modular -
Motors, parts, assemblies, and power units can interchange. User-
Serviceable - Design-for-disassembly allows the user to take
apart, maintain, and fix tools readily without the need to rely on expensive
repairmen. DIY - The user gains control of designing, producing, and
modifying the GVCS tool set. Closed Loop Manufacturing - Metal is
an essential component of advanced civilization, and our platform allows for
recycling metal into virgin feedstock for producing further GVCS technologies -
thereby allowing for cradle-to-cradle manufacturing cycles

31. Civilisation starter kit (cont)
• High Performance - Performance standards must match or exceed
those of industrial counterparts for the GVCS to be viable. Flexible
Fabrication - It has been demonstrated that the flexible use of
generalized machinery in appropriate-scale production is a viable
alternative to centralized production. Open Business Models - We
encourage the replication of enterprises that derive from the GVCS
platform as a route to truly free enterprise - along the ideals of
Jeffersonian democracy. Industrial Efficiency - In order to provide
a viable choice for a resilient lifestyle, the GVCS platform matches or
exceeds productivity standards of industrial counterparts.