Island Wide Events 

  The vision of a circular economy is an idea for a truly sustainable future that works without waste, in symbiosis with our environment and resources. A future where every product is designed for multiple cycles of use, and different material or manufacturing cycles are carefully aligned, so that the output of one process always feeds the input of another.

  Rather than seeing emissions, manufac- turing byproducts, or damaged and unwanted goods as 'waste', in the circular economy they become raw material, nutrients for a new production cycle.

  Right now we have a linear system - we take resources out of the ground, and transform them into (often hazardous) waste. We consume and destroy our own planet faster than it can possibly recover. We've known about these problems for decades and despite increasing public awareness we are still nowhere near comprehensive solutions.

  Current 'green' approaches merely act as an ineffective brake on this destructive trajectory. A more radical shift is needed - in how we collaborate, and how we design, produce and distribute our products and the services around them.

   One way to illustrate the circular economy is to think of cycles in the natural world. A simple representation might be a seed, which grows in nutritious topsoil, becoming a strong adult tree - its body will eventually decompose to become part of the nutrient source for more trees to grow.

   But this paints too tidy a picture - living organisms have developed a vibrant, diverse ecosystem over billions of years, and it doesn't work in tidy closed loops. There are thousands of processes occurring in this simple picture - life cycles of bacteria, insects, and fungi, weather patterns, fruiting and pollination, competition with other organisms - the tree is constantly interacting with these systems and processes, all with their own inputs and outputs, and it's the combination of all of them which produces a sustainable ecosystem."