Kyle Ritchie, Co–Author of Circular Economy for Dummies

Transcript from Kyle Richie Podcast Episode

I am ecstatic to have Kyle Richie, author of the new Circular Economy for Dummies, on the podcast to kick us off into 2020. Hey, Kyle.

• Thanks for reaching out and getting this lined up!
• As I’m sure you and your listeners are aware, construction materials in the building sector are responsible for over a third of global resource consumption. So I’m happy to meet with you and hopefully encourage those listening in to be part of a solution—that’s my forté.

To me, the book feels like you’re speaking to everybody, but it’s really geared toward businesses. It’s not about recycling for consumers.

• Yes, definitely. Businesses are the audience that we’re aiming for, from fashion to technology to architecture.
• The good thing about the Dummies series is that it’s approachable for anyone who’s new to the concept but still useful for experts.
• The best way to think about writing a Dummies book is you’re explaining the information to your mother in law, so you don’t want to be rude and make her feel dumb. But you also need to have some details in there.

Absolutely. Let’s talk about your background, because it’s an amazing thing to write a Dummies book before the age of 30. How did you find your way into leading discussions on the circular economy?

• I was born and raised in the Midwest. I was surrounded by corn and soybean fields growing up, and there’s those endless lines of crop—that’s just something that I assumed was normal.
• It wasn’t until later that I learned that that’s not the way nature works. I also realized that it’s probably not just the way we grow food that’s off balance—probably the way we design and construct buildings, and pretty much the way we use every resource that we’re responsible for is in the same situation.
• Architecture was something that I was interested in from high school, I would say. I went to Ball State University’s architecture school.
• At the end of my second year in that program, we had to draw a word from a hat, and that was going to be the word that influenced our next project. I pulled out the term “dendrology”, which is the study of trees.
• So my project essentially had people move through the site, just as water moves through a tree. There was the central access, and then there were storage pods on either side of it.
• And this project earned the best grade that I received in all of architecture school. So instead of thinking to myself that I’d figured it out, I actually left architecture school because of my success on that project.
• I started studying chemistry and biology and natural resource management because I saw an opportunity there. I didn’t know that it would lead me to sustainability and to the circular economy. But it wasn’t until I started studying the sciences that I realized that I could actually probably be of benefit to the architecture industry.
• I went to grad school at the Boston Architectural College, where I now teach a couple classes. That was how I came back to the architecture industry and started applying all of these facts and strategies that I pulled from my studies in science.
• Lifecycle management was subtly part of everything I was doing.
• Then I started working at architecture firms in Indianapolis and Baltimore, and spending some time in Boston for school. So ever since then I’ve sort of harnessed the power of sustainable design, it’s taken me to a lot of great places.

I want to focus a little bit on the lessons you picked out of nature, and specifically from the circularity of nature. Everything on this planet is given life, it dies, and it gets reused, even if it’s by bacteria.

• One of the key moments for me was learning about something called the Three Sisters, which is a planting strategy. So you have corn, you have beans, and you have squash or pumpkins. And so you plant these three different plants in one system, so that the corn stock provides a trellis for the beans, the beans add nitrogen to the soil, which is a key nutrient that all these plants need. And then the squash have these really broad leaves that cover the ground to keep moisture from evaporating, keep the soil and all the critters living in it happier.
• So it’s this sort of introduction to the systems design that you can see replicated throughout the natural world. You know, nature has been doing research and development for billions of years now. So it’s not surprising that it’s a genius at this point.
• We just need to set our egos aside and realize that even though we’re smart and capable of some pretty great things, if we want to learn how to design systems, there’s no better teacher than the environment around us.

That’s a very insightful view, that the answers are straight in front of your face, if you’re willing to look for them. But where did you begin to feel the pull towards helping to drive circularity principles?

• I think it came from after I made the transition back to architecture.
• I had this framework of thinking about how the natural world functions, and so sustainable building and architecture was supposed to be the equivalent, right? But there were still so many gaps. It wasn’t really enough.
• I always had this idea that there has to be something that’s beyond “sustainable”, even though that’s really the peak of design thinking at this point. If you look at any architecture firm around the world, they’re so proud that sustainable design is a keystone of their operations, which is great.
• But I’ve been searching for this gap between where we are and where we should be.
• I started finding out about permaculture by reading about Bill Mollison, Toby Hemenway, David Holmgren; I found out about the Ellen MacArthur Foundation—and this concept of circularity sort of kept emerging.
• It wasn’t until I started reading about the circular economy that I thought that this is the solution that is going to take us from just being sustainable with the way we operate as a society, to regeneration.
• So we’re not just giving back what we take from the earth, but we’re actually giving back more to the earth than what we’re taking.
• And that’s really the gap that I’m still waiting for us to clear. It’s not even close.

When did you actually start writing the book? Because it can’t have been that long ago.

• I think it would have been in 2019. I was working for an architecture firm in Baltimore, and I was working with some pretty high profile clients. That was when I started being in a position where I could start introducing these ideas of going beyond just being sustainable.
• And so the circular economy, at that point, was sort of that driving tool that I kept pulling at. I abandoned sustainability as a driving goal, and started substituting circularity.
• I’ve just been pushing on that ever since, and I’m thrilled to see that it’s gaining some traction; perhaps not so much in the US as in the UK, Europe and Africa. But I have faith that it’ll keep pushing forward here.

I went through the process of starting Datacenters for Dummies—I never actually wrote the book, but I had it accepted. Can you walk people through the process of how you got involved with writing a Dummies book?

• I have to admit, I didn’t really have to go hunting for the opportunity. It kind of got presented to me.
• I had an existing connection with the Wiley team, through one of my best friends, Eric Cory Freed, who was the co–author of the book.
• We were standing at a hotel elevator waiting to go to our rooms at the end of a day at the Boston Architectural College. And he was saying that he thought he might need to update “Green Building for Dummies” (which he did in 2008-2009), and that I’d be able to help. He reached out to Wiley and asked if they needed us to make those updates. They said no, because no one was really buying that book anymore. But there was something similar that we might be able to help them write about, which became the Circular Economy for Dummies book.
• This opportunity arose about a week after I was at a conference in Spokane, Washington, speaking about the circular economy in the built environment. Eric knew I was out there doing that. And so a week later when that opportunity came up, he reached right out to me and said, “Hey, I think this is something right up your alley. Are you interested in working on this?”
• Of course, you know, things happen for a reason—I feel like we both agree on that. I accepted and it was just before the pandemic hit that we got signed on to write the book.
  So fortunately, while other people were just staring out their window, just aching to be out of the house during the pandemic, I was too distracted, just writing after work for hours on end.

What did you learn most about the circular economy and where we’re at today, through the process of writing the book?

• Oh, good question. I think the key piece that stood out most to me was, this is not going to be something that every single individual on this planet needs to pick up and use to structure their entire life. That’s not going to be the way that the circular economy gets applied worldwide.
• The more I’ve looked at it, this is a responsibility for businesses, it’s a responsibility for government agencies, and those who control the majority of our resources. These are the really critical components of this transition from linear to circular.
• When I was growing up, we all heard: reduce, reuse, recycle. Now individuals are taking their cans and recycling them, and that’s great and all, but really that’s not making even the slightest dent overall, which is unfortunate.
• Now I’m not telling everyone to start throwing away recyclables or anything like that. But this idea of incentivizing the individual to do what is right doesn’t move the needle as much as having these large entities involved.
• If we are making the right incentives, the individual doesn’t even really need to know that they’re participating in what we know is a circular economy. If the right incentives are there, the individual will do it without even caring. You don’t need to care—as long as the incentive is there, they’re gonna do it.
• And I think that was really what stood out to me the most is that the incentives will drive this change. It doesn’t need to be a warm, heartfelt embrace of the circular economy worldwide to get us to make this transition. It just needs to be incentivized.

As Brian Aoaeh at REFASHIOND says, everyone is part of the supply chain, whether they pull from it or put into it or both. But consumers have been recycling for a while; we all do it weekly. There’s a recycling effort but business has not followed suit.

• Yeah, and it’s funny because we all see recycling as the sort of grand effort that needs to be done. But really, in the circular economy, recycling is a last resort.
• We need to be focusing more on reusing materials, making sure they’re durable, so they can be used long into the future. We need to come up with sharing programs, we need to be remanufacturing products, instead of just breaking down the product into its individual materials, and then recycling those materials. I mean, the embodied energy goes away at that point—we’ve wasted it.
• So the funny part is that recycling has been incentivized even in the built environment. As architects and engineers and contractors, we are incentivized to recycle building materials. We get credit in various green building certifications if we recycle 50% of construction and demolition waste; we’re told this is a good thing.
• But really, it’s missing the mark by not realizing that recycling is supposed to be a last resort. There’s so many opportunities to keep the value within these materials in use, and extend it into the future for as long as possible. That’s really where the value comes from—not recycling.

That makes me immediately think about that National Geographic infographic about supply chain that shows the resource consumption of the whole world. And you nailed it, because you talked about how you need to use more energy to recycle, whereas in reuse, you don’t actually use more energy, unless maybe you have to move it. Recycling, ironically, is the last choice in the world of circularity: it should be continued use, reuse, then recycle.

• Right. To recycle, you need to use energy to maintain energy. That’s essentially what’s happening, right? Or you can just keep the energy to begin with and not just change its form.
• And so this is really important for any architects and contractors listening in: over half of the world’s carbon emissions are generated by the production of five different materials.
  • Number one is steel, which accounts for about a quarter of energy use.
  • Cement (try and find a building that isn’t using cement in concrete).
  • Paper.
  • Plastic.
  • Aluminum.
• If we focused on steel for example, which is a majority of it—steel’s not a bad thing if you can use it for 200 years into the future. But if we’re designing buildings with steel structures, it has a higher embodied carbon content. So now architects are trying to steer away from steel, but they’re not accounting for the fact that we can actually if design properly, we can use this steel structure for hundreds of years into the future, therefore offsetting the need to be pulling in all these new materials, even if they have a lower embodied carbon content.
• We’re not accounting for the idea of extending material use into the future for as long as possible. Buildings usually last 30 years. That’s a reasonable building lifecycle.
• It’s kind of unbelievable how we’re using materials that can last five, six, or seven times longer. It’s just acknowledging the fact that we can be using durable materials and keeping buildings in use for much longer, which offsets that need for new materials 30 years down the road.

I did not realize that you can take steel and design in a way that it’s usable for 150 to 200 years. What are we not doing more of that?

• I would say that there are two pieces to that.
• One is designing the building with the understanding that this structure is going to be able to stick around for a lot longer than the usual 30 years. So that means sticking to grid sizes that makes sense to allow flexibility into the future.

I just want to make sure we understand what you mean by “the grid”. I think of the electrical grid, the things that actually enable power in the building structure.

• The structure of a building is usually designed in a 30 by 30 foot grid or a 40 foot by 40 foot grid. You can maintain those spans because steel is so strong.
• Architects don’t necessarily design buildings with the understanding that we need to be designing this building so that it can be repurposed, reused into the future. That’s not going to be something that we’re necessarily considering right away.
• But the second piece is designing buildings to be adaptable in the future. Understanding that we do have that grid, that we can now start to change how spaces function.
• So I think the initial design, as well as designing for adaptability really starts to hone in on this idea that steel is something we can utilize for decades to come. It doesn’t need to just be thrown away as soon as the building no longer serves its original purpose.

I think that’s a fascinating point to throw out to people. Why aren’t we designing more buildings to go for 100 years?

• Yeah, and the ironic part for me is that some of the buildings that we identify in architecture school as pinnacles of good design, are still in existence today and have been for hundreds of years.
• Instead, we’re designing buildings knowing that they’re going to be demolished one day not far in the future.

Let’s shift gears a little bit. Your book is out and you’re going to be busy talking to people about it, but then it’s also going to open up into collaborations with organizations like the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. Are you starting to see that yet?

• Without a doubt. I’m currently at the starting phase of working with a great organization in Europe called Revolve Circular. They were one of the original groups that reached out to me after the book came out, and I got involved with them right away.
• They’re interested in really defining what circularity means around the world, and they’re doing a great report investigating circularity within the built environment, which is pretty revolutionary at the scale they’re aiming to do that. I think it’ll come out in the last quarter of 2022, so I’ll be supporting them in one way or another. That’s what I’m most excited about right now. It’s pretty fresh.
• But also in the beginning of the new year, I started the Circular Economy Studio, which is a pretty small group, but our goal is to act as that resource to educate architects, engineers and contractors on what steps to be taking to incorporate circular economy principles into their work.
• We’ll be helping them consider critical things early on to help that. I’m also partnering with Dave Benning out on the West Coast. He owns the Building Deconstruction Institute, and he’s been disassembling buildings and reusing their components for the past 30 years. He’s a pioneer in this essentially.
• It’s not just just pulling buildings apart to the individual elements, he’s able to take entire portions of buildings, and sell them to other people that need them. So he’s super creative about the way he approaches it, and definitely someone that I’m constantly in touch with just to learn as much as I can.
• I’ve also become pretty close to Reniera O’Donnell, who’s the education lead for Ellen MacArthur Foundation over the past few years.
  So yeah, there are these organizations that start to emerge with whom you share values, so naturally, you’re going to work with each other in some way or another.

The term circular economy has been a buzzword for a little bit. And at some point, these buzzwords have to make the transition—what we call in Silicon Valley, “crossing the chasm”—so that it starts to mean something tangible. People like you and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, and Marc De Wit over at Circle Economy are defining it. So are you starting to develop common definitions?

• Yeah, I honestly think so. And that’s great.
• The great thing about the circular economy as compared to sustainability, is that the word sustainability doesn’t mean anything anymore. It has been stretched and pulled in so many ways to meet so many needs that now it’s meaningless. It’s unfortunate, but it’s true.
• “Circular economy”, by definition, has three principles. Firstly, eliminate waste. Secondly, keep materials circulating. And three, regenerate natural systems. So you can’t use the term circular economy without those three principles attached to it. It’s kind of a safety net for it.
• The last thing I want is for the term circular economy to become another buzzword like sustainability, and have the unfortunate fate down the road where we’re calling hybrid cars circular or something like that. So I’m really grateful that the term circular economy came with those three rules that have to be applied.

It feels like this is the year the term circular economy is going to take hold, and I believe that your book will help define the term for people.

• The book came out in April of 2021, so it’s been out for a little bit. But hopefully, like you said, 2022 is where it really starts to catch on and make some progress.

Let’s look forward a little bit. How do you see circularity playing out this year? Because it is it’s a hot topic right now. And what do you think some of the big things are going to be in the next five to 10 years?

• You and I have talked about this before, but the circular economy has that financial benefit that sustainability doesn’t necessarily have.
• A lot of institutions that I have worked with aren’t necessarily a fan of incorporating “sustainable strategies” because they see it as an added cost to their activities. It’s an overhead for them.
• But I think we’re going to start to see a lot more institutions and organizations acknowledge that the circular economy is supposed to be financially beneficial. It’s not something we’re doing just to make Mother Earth proud. It’s something that is a tool for businesses to make money by eliminating waste. It’s the best of both worlds.
• We always associate capitalism with selfishness and destruction of the earth. And with our history, it kind of makes sense that those two are paired together. But with the circular economy, that’s not the case.
• I think this sort of framework is going to start to seep into business operations a lot more moving forward.
• We’re seeing that Adidas now has a circular shoe. We have IKEA doing a buyback program for their furniture that they’ve sold. They’ll buy it back from you, and instead of just destroying it or recycling it, they’re actually repairing or refurbishing it and selling it again. If you go to Patagonia’s website, there’s an opportunity for you to buy clothing that has been returned to them, and it’s a lot cheaper. Look at Borobabi, which is a used children’s clothing store—they’re featured in the book. You can rent kids’ clothing for about $1.50 a month, per item. Once your baby grows out of it, guess what, you just ship it back and start renting different clothing.
• We’re seeing so many examples of businesses harnessing the power of the circular economy, and understanding that waste is a cost for the business. If you have any waste leaving your business, and one point spent money to obtain that material that you’re just throwing it away, that’s a missed opportunity.
• So I think looking forward, really, we’re going to be seeing businesses realizing that this is a way to make shareholders happier. It’s a way to make more money and also to do good.

This kind of predates you a little bit, but back in the 1970s and 1980s, owning a used car was seen as something that only people with low incomes did, because they had no other choice. Then Mercedes came along, and they obliterated the concept of buying something used as being bad. Now they take that pre–owned car and sell it to those who couldn’t afford it before, and those people can have the luxury feel of a Mercedes. So Mercedes were brilliant in extending their reach into other demographics. They really laid the groundwork for where we’re at today, where buying second hand doesn’t carry that same social stigma.

• Oh, without a doubt. And I’m a big fan of the show “The Grand Tour” with those three British guys, Jeremy, Richard and James. They have an entire episode about the Ford Cortina, where based on your position in a company, you had a certain car. So you had sort of that social component where just by driving by someone’s house and seeing what car was parked in their driveway, that told you immediately what type of person or household they had.
• You’re 100% right, this sort of social movement has shifted over time, where now, if you consider driving a brand new car off the lot, you know it’s dropping value at least 15% or 20% immediately—that’s ridiculous. So I definitely think that sort of social component plays a really big role.

To your point, I would say, even the concept of ownership is in question. The sharing economy, whether it’s baby clothing or Airbnb, makes me wonder how much stuff we’ll actually own in the future, if fast forward 20 years?

• Right! It’s called “product as a service”.
• You are essentially leasing a product from a company, but the company still owns it and therefore they’re in charge of maintaining it and repairing it, if it gets broken—even taking it back and giving you a new one, if it’s completely unusable.
• So this product as a service mentality is definitely growing—you called out Airbnb, and Uber and Lyft are also good examples. I think we’re going to start seeing this applied a lot more and more.
• For me, I’m thinking about the future of buildings. Even your house may not be owned by you, at some point. I know, I’m essentially describing renting, but there will be a big difference between where we are now and this sort of product as a service in the future.
• It’s definitely emerging, and you’re right, the whole idea of ownership may cease to exist one day.

I think you can add another economic point to the product as a service concept, which is, if I have one or two of something, it will cost me a lot to maintain them. But if I own and maintain millions of these things at scale, I’m more effective and efficient. So products as a service can also help the consumer because they can reduce costs of maintenance and ownership through the product life cycle.

• You’re right, you can have economies of scale working for you if you can maintain a million things instead of a million people maintaining one thing each—it makes a huge difference.

I think that circularity is a system and it has to be thought of as a system that everyone’s a part of. That’s how big you have to think in order to really take advantage of circularity, because you’ll be missing things if you think myopically either as an individual, as a company or as a region. The world is just integrated. It just is.

• I think that’s one of the biggest advantages of the circular economy but currently, it’s also one of the biggest barriers: this need to have so many hands involved and agreeing on one system of circulation.
• You can be someone who wants to buy something, but if the product’s not offered in the right sort of system, good luck reaching out to the company as an individual and saying, “hey, can we come up with a deal where I just lease it and you maintain it for me?”
• So it’s that sort of complexity that will be a benefit in the future, but is still a barrier to the emergence of the circular economy.

Let’s focus on what’s on tap for you and what you’re doing this year.

• Looking at my past and how opportunities have come to me, it’s never really been because I had this goal that I was chasing. So what I’m involved in this year, or wanting to be involved in, is just to be available.
• That means speaking with people such as yourself, connecting with different groups and companies that are exploring the same territory. And I’ve found that naturally, opportunities, projects, really amazing things will sort of emerge from this. So I can’t point at one project.

I’d like to give a shout out to Deborah Dull, who has also been on the podcast. I mean, I’m not sure how well the two of you know each other, but you said earlier that you had a chance to chat with her. And I mean, you guys are two peas in a pod, I would think.

• Yes, definitely! LinkedIn has proved to be a really great way for me to connect with folks like Deborah. We actually spoke earlier this week.
• That’s one of the benefits of entering this group I have now with all these amazing individuals with a similar mind that I’m getting introduced to, and chatting with them and really connecting on things. So I’m just going to keep doing that this year.
• I think this will be my opportunity to spread myself out and get involved and help out however I can.

The fact that that book exists says a lot about where we are today, and that people are taking the circular economy seriously. Is there anything else that you see coming up this year that confirms that this is the year of circularity for you?

• Problems drive innovation, that’s the relationship.
• So the biggest problem that I’m seeing in my industry—and I guarantee just about everyone listening is experiencing the same thing—is that supply chain issues on this globe right now are going mad.
• I’m having contractors reach out to me saying, “I can’t get any of these materials that you’ve specified”.
• We need to come up with something different, because there’s no way we’re going to make the client pay this premium for its lack of accessibility.
• But I think this problem will be a blessing in disguise for the circular economy. We’ll start to notice that we actually have all these materials already! Why would we just recycle or throw them away, just to demand more materials?
• So I think these supply chain issues are going to become a massive incentive for us to start incorporating the circular economy.
• Today, the new circularity gap report came out from Circle Economy. It’s perfect timing. Unfortunately, it shows that despite all of our efforts, we’re still only 9% circular, which is incredible to think about. That means 91% of the material that we extract from the Earth is not participating within an economic cycle that allows those materials to stay in use.
• I think these sort of supply chain issues are going to create some ripples that we’ll see in just about every single industry.

I’m with you 100%. Well, honestly, this has been an incredible conversation. I’m so thankful that you’ve been able to spend some time here. I think you’re gonna be busy as hell this year; you’re in the right place at the right time with the right commentary on what’s going on. So, congrats to you on that, and I think you’re gonna have a really fun couple of years ahead.

• Thanks a lot. And for anyone listening in, we have our LinkedIn page for the Circular Economy Studio, so you can follow us there and see everything that my colleagues and I are doing.
• Thanks for having me on. It’s been fantastic.

Thank you so much, and congratulations. It’s the rocket ship, you know!

• I’m trying to hang on, trust me!

Connect with Kyle Ritchie

You can connect with Kyle on LinkedIn and follow the Circle Economy Studio.