From 4-Zero Community to Circular City
[video — https://youtu.be/bulhsb4IZFQ]
In March 2023, the IPCC released the 2023 report on climate change and put forward an ultimatum. This report makes a serious warning on the deadline for human beings to mitigate global warming. Yet it does not attract much attention.
I participate in the work of the circular economy research in Hong Kong and New Zealand. In this episode, I am going to review the development of Circular Cities with you.
Circular Economy
The term circular economy has not been widely used in the world until 2014 when the European Union launched the Circular Economy Vision. Circular Economy is coined in contrast with traditional linear economy.
In Linear Economy, all resources are on a one-way road, which lead to an increase in the price of raw materials, and the landfills are full of garbage. Therefore, the circular economy is to change the one-way road of the linear economy into a circular one. As shown in the diagram above, on the one hand, products are designed to have longer and more intensified use life with dematerialisation, and on the other hand, when the products are used up, they are either reused, remanufactured, refurbished or recycled to achieve Zero Waste.
A Four Zero Community Scheme
This concept of Circular Economy coincides with my article published in 2013 on zero food and zero waste. As shown above, the title of the article is: A Novel Planning Model for Approaching a ‘Zero’-Food and ‘Zero’-Waste Community, a preprint is available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2376094.
Then in 2015, I further developed it into a Four Zero Community Scheme, and implemented a pilot trial in a housing estate of about 10,000 residents in Hong Kong. An environmental protection taskforce was set up to implement the Four Zero scheme, which stands for (1) zero energy, (2) zero food, (3) zero water, and (4) zero waste. The name was derived from Zero Energy Building. At that time, Zero Energy Building (ZEB) has been quite matured in the construction and engineering field. The name Zero Energy does not mean that a building does not consume energy, but that they can produce more energy than they consume. In other words, for urban development to be “sustainable”, it is necessary to increase self-sufficiency rates in all aspects, including food, water, energy, products and services. It does not only reduce wastes, but it also saves energy in manufacturing and delivering the resources. This forms the conceptual framework for a Circular City.
Therefore, I extended the definition of zero energy to zero food, zero water, and zero waste. The article put forward a novel urban planning scheme for a 10,000 residents’ community to become a Four Zero Community.
From Recycling to Circular City
In 2015, three-color recycling has become quite popular, and most citizens believed that as long as three-color recycling is done well, the problem of global warming could be solved. I explained to the media that “the premise of true environmental protection is to reduce consumption, not just rely on recycling.”
Zero energy consumption, zero food consumption, and zero water consumption are all aimed at reducing “resource consumption” and increasing “resource production”.
Zero Energy
The energy-saving plan carried out in the community includes the conversion of public facilities in the entire housing estate to LED lights, energy-saving motors, and automatic switch lights. Due to the economies of scale in the implementation, the effect is quite satisfactory. After implementing the energy-saving measures, electricity consumption of public areas at the housing estates has been reduced by about 40%, and the electricity bills have been saved considerably.
This also happened thanks to the government’s Energy Conservation Subsidy Scheme provided by the Electrical and Mechanical Services Department at that time. The housing estate received a subsidy of about HK$500,000 from the government, which provided a strong encouragement for residents to join, as it becomes easier to achieve a breakeven of the invested sum. We were required to carry out evaluation of the measures and submitted an energy-saving audit report by professional before they could receive half of the subsidy.
Zero Food
At that time, urban farming was not so common. Fortunately, many residents welcomed it. We have implemented at least three types of urban farming, including (1) Checkered Fields that residents can rent a tiny square of land to grow vegetables, (2) Okra Food Scene co-managed by residents and the property management company, and (3) Aquaponics managed by the property management company. Although the scales of the three are quite small, and rooftop farming was not feasible in the estate, it is a critical achievement to make a demonstration effect on the viability of urban farming in high-rise high-density environment.
Zero Water
Both the rainwater collection box and the aquaponics pond have the effect of saving water.
Zero Waste (reduction of solid waste)
One of the easiest ways to reduce waste is to expand the recycling scheme to collect more types of products, as residents have already get used to recycling. At that time, we collected 29 recycling items, including toner cartridges, old batteries, transformers, and old clothes.
However, as mentioned before, it is not enough to rely on recycling. A circular city requires much more than recycling. But there have been very few exemplars on how to reduce, remanfacture and refurbish, etc. We therefore introduced a Sharing and Exchange scheme. Residents can share the tools from the property management company, and can exchange their items with neighbours with the management company as the middleman.
For example, electrical and electronic appliances and toys are popular items to exchange. Furthermore, we also organised upcycling workshops to make furniture and cleansing agents ourselves. These practices are important components of the circular economy.
By means of various waste reduction projects, we have successfully reduced the amount of solid waste in the housing estates by 15%. It shows the importance of reducing waste at the source as it can also reduce carbon emissions in the transportation of waste.
Award-winning results
With the Four Zero Community Scheme, the property management company won the Hong Kong Awards for Environmental Excellence (HKAEE) Property Management Award in 2015. It is an affirmation of the community environmental protection work and it is the result of the joint efforts of residents, residents’ association, management company and a group of volunteers.
Producer Responsibility in a Circular City
What we have done is on the consumer side, but a circular city also requires producers’ efforts. As I pointed out at the meeting of the Environmental Affairs Committee of the Legislative Council on May 29, 2017 that most group representatives believed that the authorities should strengthen work on reducing and recycling waste at the sources, and require manufacturers to take responsibility for reducing, remanufacturing and recycling their product packaging materials to avoid excessive use of packaging materials. I and the Vice-Chairman asked whether the Administration would consider introducing a producer responsibility scheme for packaging materials to provide economic incentives to encourage manufacturers to recover and recycle retail stores to collect packaging materials belonging to their products. It is a pity that there are still no relevant measures.
The producer responsibility system is just one of the circular economy projects vigorously promoted by the Auckland Council.
Auckland’s Circular City plan
https://www.aucklandnz.com/business/economy-and-sectors/circular-economy
The Auckland Council has promised to achieve zero waste by 2040, and the government is actively promoting a number of plans for a Circular City. Here are some resources to share with you about what the local council is doing.
Two major cycles: biological cycle and industrial cycle
It can be seen from the figure above that to recycle urban waste, it is necessary to divide them into biological and industrial recyclable categories, such as kitchen waste and plastic. The former can be recycled through composting or converted into bioenergy, while the latter requires industrial treatment, such as maintenance, upgrade and other steps that can be cycled.
Except for a small amount of household kitchen waste, which can be recycled by consumers themselves, most of the rest of the waste must be processed by producers or third parties before they can be recycled, especially whether industrial products can be disassembled and sorted Recycling depends to a large extent on the design and packaging decisions of producers, so the success of a circular city depends very much on the implementation of the producer responsibility system.
Six steps for producers to build a circular economy
Building a circular city begins with the construction of a circular economy. The six steps as shown in the above figure include: 1. Measure your progress for continuous improvement, 2. Understand the impacts — review your product’s lifecycle, 3. Think about how to improve circularity, 4. Build a business case and a team, 5. Make the change & communicate — integrate this work into your business and industry, 6. Celebrate your success — drive participation, and loop back to step 1.
This is very similar to the approach I used in the Four Zero Community Scheme in Hong Kong. We built an environmental protection taskforce, and carried out a large amount of data analysis on the processes. We emphasised quantitative measurements of the costs and benefits of the work, so that it can better convince residents to support. We also celebrated our achievements and encouraged more residents to join our activities.
Circular economy starts from design
Most urban waste is difficult to disassemble and to be sorted. Once damaged, many goods, such as electrical or electronic appliances, are difficult to repair or reuse. The reason is that recycling or disassembling is not considered in the design.
Taking electronic products such as mobile phones and irons as examples, sometimes the body cannot be disassembled at all. On top of that, the maintenance costs are astonishingly expensive. The parts are mixed with metal and plastic, and there can have some toxic substances, making it difficult for a large number of electronic products to be sorted, reused or remanufactured.
A circular economy starts from design! For example, product design, including fashion design and architectural design, etc., must consider the whole life cycle of the product. Only when the products are designed to be easy to disassemble and to repair, then it can facilitate building circular economy and avoid discarding products that cannot be repaired or disassembled for remanufacture.
If circular economy has been fully considered in the design stage, then the cost of product maintenance or disassembly and remanfacturing can be greatly reduced. Else, even if people are keen on reducing waste, it will be deterred by the insurmountable high cost of implementation. In fact, this is a common excuse of environmental unfriendliness.
Finally, we should bear in mind that producers are profit chasers, if we, in the capacity of consumers, want to avoid global warming and extreme weather from affecting our lives, we can use the power of consumers to choose products with better producer responsibility. You are also welcome to share your consumption experience to promote a more environmentally friendly consumption.
