The world population does not stop growing despite the COVID disruption and this is seriously affecting the environment. Ensuring sufficient food, clean water and prosperity for the next decades requires impactful actions worldwide.
One of the ongoing international public initiatives to achieve this is to move from a linear to a circular economy.
Until only a few years ago, 100% of the economy has been linear, that is, the materials are used to make a product that after use becomes garbage that is disposed of buried or burned creating additional soil or air pollution. Some advances in the last few years allowed recycling, which means reusing some materials, for example, used sports shoes are granulated and recovered as materials for new sports or leisure flooring projects or used paper is recycled to make new sheets of paper.
This is the phase in which we are currently in most of the worldwide economy segments, but still in a very small percentage of it and with big differences among countries. Nordic Countries are currently the most advanced in this process.
Ensuring the availability of resources in the future requires a more aggressive move towards the circular economy which means avoiding waste by designing and making products and materials more efficient and reusing them as much as possible. The new materials must be obtained sustainably so as not to harm the human and natural environment.
The circular economy allows us to treat the environment of our small and only planet responsibly.
Our activity of sports, playgrounds and leisure flooring, already uses some materials such as granules of end-of-use tires for shock absorbent layers, or recycled foams from old seats or mattresses and in the future it will probably be able to use polyurethanes of organic composition , as well as other organic or synthetic based top layer recycled and reusable materials on new projects after adequate reprocessing from areas in demolition that need to be renovated.
It is a significant challenge that requires effort but the result is worth it. Do your best to become more circular whatever the size of your business.
Take care
Rubberman Blog 