Closed-Loop System Examples
List by Adeline Swires
[Recommended to consider resources like OpenCourseWare (MIT, TU Delft), OpenStax, etc.]Longer list of OERs available at: adelineswireslabs.substack.com/p/open-educational-resources
In this course we explore the Circular Economy: how businesses can create value by reusing and recycling products, how designers can come up with amazingly clever solutions, and how you can contribute to make the Circular Economy happen.
Building construction is one of the most waste producing sectors. In the European Union, construction alone accounts for approximately 30% of the raw material input. The Circular Economy model offers guidelines and principles for promoting more sustainable building construction and reducing the impact on our environment. You will also learn from case studies how companies already beneficially incorporate this new theory into the design, construction and operation of the built environment.
It has become almost impossible to imagine what our lives would be like without the many benefits of packaging - just think about the different packaging and single-use items you use on a daily basis. Yet as our global population grows in size and affluence, both our collective demand for packaging materials and the waste we generate as a result will increase dramatically. Currently, large amounts of packaging waste escape formal collection and recycling systems and eventually end up polluting the environment. Moreover, their material value is forever lost to the economy. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation estimates that uncollected plastic packaging waste alone is worth somewhere between 80 to 120 billion dollars a year.
How can we ensure the continuous supply of the increasingly scarce raw materials that are needed to make the products we use every day? In this course, we will look at the potential benefits of circular procurement and how recycling technologies and more efficient ways of collecting and recycling critical raw materials (CRMs) can make your business and production more resource resilient.
The top resource for Circular Materials
Resource Recovery from Wastewater and Biomass
Examples of Products Made from Wastewater
Source Separation for Resource Recovery
Resources and Shape & Structure of the City
Introduction to Resource Shortage-Peak Resources
Introduction to Resource Shortage- The Water-Nutrients-Carbon-Food Nexus
Structure of this Week: Resource Shortage
This is the best introduction course available in the market
Gain a systemic understanding of critical raw materials and learn about strategies and solutions to manage them in a sustainable way.
Objective: To define critical material and information pathways to support the development of closed-loop systems to establish reliable sources of secondary material feedstocks that divert critical resources away from landfills using material recovery strategies - recycling, remanufacturing, and reuse