Categorie: circular
After writing about “paying the fish,” it kept on nagging me. [1] Because it remains a search for the true essence of money, or in other words, the essence of compensating each other for labor and services without ruining everything. I’d like to share this here and am open to…
Degrowth is currently a topic of significant interest, presenting the idea of “degrowing” as a necessity to address our problems. (this is based on a previous article on Linkedin). The implicit message is clear and seems to point in the right direction. However, it all depends on how we define…
Just a few weeks ago I was interviewed by Paul Luttikhuis for the national Newspaper NRC. He creatively ‘summarized’ my book ( People vs Resources) into 6 limitations and discussed the issues with me. The first one is probably the most important one, and well re-phrased by Luttikhuis as: “the…
Last week, two interesting reports were published analysing how regulations can better support ‘sustainable’ material use. Very esteemed colleagues, united in a Dutch ‘Gideons tribe’ to make the buildings sector move faster, have been working on this. [1] I can agree in general with the contents and analyses ( to…
It is now exactly 10 years ago around Christmas that I struggled with the interpretation of ‘cycles’. Why I wondered, is everyone convinced there are two resource cycles, as promoted nowadays in whats called the circular economy? And why would we treat these differently? And at some moment around New…
Rifkin some time ago wrote about the 0-marginal cost society. The book had a lot of attention. But cost is a complete different measuring unit as energy or greenhouse gasses. A 0-marginal cost society is not the same as a 0-marginal resource society!! On the contrary. A small example: At…
Since it looks as if we are going to introduce the climate measures for buildings mainly via municipalities or cities, I have recovered some of my older research material about urban sustainability, developed when I worked at Wageningen University. The urban approach makes sense, buildings are not isolated functions, they…
Before going into agriculture, and the available figures for it, I will briefly summarize how evaluate keeping resource loops closed. Fot this a calculation method has been developed, called MAXergy, with Embodied Land as a measuring unit. To close resource cycles, or to keep them closed, a number of conditions…
The national organization for road works in the Netherlands, RWS, has a slogan: from A to Better. It has not brought us much so far: The roads are widened, more traffic lanes , so now we are not in a two lane traffic jam but in a 5 lane traffic…
The Tetra Materia (see previous article) approach might be useful for practice, its not the whole story. It guides direction, but does not set targets. And our system has an overall limit as well. Materials, even renewables, come exclusively from within our own system, while (renewable) energy is available in…
