Bottle innovation shows the limit of circularity

A report in today's Herald shows how far we have come in understanding how we should use materials in a consumer society – and how far we still have to go.

The Stirling Distillery is working with Heriot Watt University to explore whether it would be possible to replace traditional glass bottles with aluminium bottles instead. In some ways this is a very good example of ethical business seeking ways to reduce its environmental impact through exploration of alternative material use.

The advantages of aluminium is that it is less energy-intensive to produce than glass, it is easier to recycle and it weights considerably less, reducing the energy use in transportation. Another factor in favour of aluminium is that it is plentiful and we do not risk exhausting supply.

There are drawbacks however, because aluminium reacts with foodstuffs, the aluminium cans you use have to have a thin lining material added to prevent this. That means more processing and more chemicals.

But still, in many ways this is a perfect encapsulation of Common Weal's approach to the circular economy. We have argued that it is very much not just about how much we recycle but how we design products in the first place.

There are three of the principles of material design demonstrated in this story. First, dematerialisation – using less weight and volume of material in design and packaging. Indeed, with digitalisation dematerialisation may mean not using physical materials at all (like the digitalisation of newspapers). Using aluminium and not glass means less material overall.

Secondly, this fits with simplification. The smaller the palette of materials used in the economy, the easier it is to manage a recycling process. It is complicated design processes which use multiple materials in a single product which makes recycling more difficult, and using unfamiliar materials makes that harder too.

That said, both glass and aluminium are common materials we recycle regularly so switching from one to the other doesn't make the process significantly easier. Another 'nearly' for this project is biomimicry. That is a term which means 'can behave as if it was party of the natural processes of nature'.

Biomimicry in production processes means producing materials which can return to the earth in a natural form. Plastic cannot do this, but anything organic that will decompose does, and both glass and aluminium are found in broadly their current form in nature in the first place.

Again, the slight issue is that aluminium would not be found in such dense concentrations in nature and can leach into water supplies if it is excessively dense. But in time aluminium will 'return to nature'.

So in many ways this does reflect Common Weal's approach to global resource use. But in an important way it doesn't. The key step that is being missed here is 'share and reuse'. Rather than making a product, can an existing version of it be repaired or reused?

In this case the answer is a resounding 'yes'. That is precisely what an effective deposit return scheme should have done. It should have involved the standardisation of bottles such that they can be collected, cleaned and reused. That is the model used both in Germany and Finland.

It is clearly material-efficient but more importantly in this case it is enormously energy- and waste-efficient to reuse existing materials. It should be emphasised that this isn't an option open to the distillery in question – that kind of circular economy must be organised at the national scale.

A model of how to do this is Finland which is miles ahead of Scotland in taking steps towards circularity. Scotland is still proving incapable of implementing what would have been a substandard deposit return scheme (which would have involved no reuse of the bottles collected) never mind a world leading one.

And so it is being left to ethical businesses who care enough to try to do what they can on their own. This example shows some of the things businesses can do, but it also shows very clearly what they can't do. Getting to a circular economy is an all-society project and government must lead or we will continue to fail.

You can find further details of how to achieve a circular economy in Our Common Home (print copy here or full print package here, digital copy here).