It’s not a fad. We are seeing a permanent decoupling of economic activity from resource extraction, driven by several key factors, including continuous inflation that is eroding the purchasing power of regular people, acute resource scarcity threatening supply chains, and tightened regulations forcing corporations to internalise environmental externalities.

The statistics are clear. The global secondhand fashion and luxury market is projected to reach approximately $360 billion in the next four years and is growing three times as fast as the primary market. The market can be broken down into several key segments. The global secondhand apparel market reached $200 billion in 2023 and is expected to hit about $350 billion in 2028. It represents an incredible compound annual growth rate of 12%. The luxury resale segment is expected to grow from $32.47 billion in 2024 to $50.06 billion by 2030. The primary driver behind this growth is the “assetization” of luxury goods. The refurbished electronics market is also growing rapidly and is projected to hit $65 billion through 2029, with an annual growth rate of 14.2%. Finally, the secondhand furniture market is expected to reach $91.6 billion by 2027.

Well, the public narrative is mostly about fashion, but there’s a lot more going on. For example, when it comes to consumer electronics, there is something called the Right to Repair movement. It is now being codified into law across the European Union and several United States jurisdictions.

The legislative momentum creates entirely new secondary markets for refurbished devices, validated by sophisticated grading standards and data sanitisation technologies. But it’s important to note that rapid change creates complex contradictions. Resale as a service has commoditised circularity. The change has empowered fast fashion giants to launch resale platforms that many argue are a way to hide systemic overproduction through what people call greenwashing. At the same time, AI and digital product passports are emerging as critical infrastructure to bridge the trust gap in secondary markets.

The resale market has effectively separated from traditional retail cycles, functioning less like a distressed asset class and more like a preferred primary consumption channel. Growth is not uniform across geographies. In the United States, 87% of consumers cite affordability as their primary motivator, 11 percentage points higher than their European counterparts. Conversely, the European market is heavily influenced by regulatory pressures and a cultural inclination toward wardrobe curation, supported by denser networks of independent vintage stores.

The global cost-of-living crisis has acted as a potent accelerant, shifting circularity from a sustainability feature to a household survival strategy. Persistent inflation has forced consumers to trade down to secondhand goods to maintain brand access without primary market premiums. It’s particularly evident in electronics, where flagship smartphone prices exceeding $1,400 push consumers toward certified refurbished models selling for 30% to 40% less. However, the psychology extends beyond frugality. A “treasure hunt” dynamic drives engagement, with nearly 50% of resale buyers citing the search experience as a key enjoyment factor. For Generation Z, resale has become the primary discovery channel, with 80% using resale platforms to explore brands they haven’t purchased firsthand, effectively making the secondary market a gateway for primary luxury customer acquisition.

A primary brand hesitation is cannibalisation fear, but data from BCG and RaaS providers suggest the opposite. Cannibalisation has already occurred on third-party sites; by reclaiming this volume, brands capture revenue, customer relationships, and data. Furthermore, brand-owned resale increases customer lifetime value. Programmes like Lululemon’s “Like New” drive loyalty by rewarding trade-ins with store credit that is almost inevitably spent on new inventory, creating a flywheel where secondary markets subsidise primary purchases. Resale shoppers are often aspirational consumers who eventually graduate to buying new, effectively lowering customer acquisition costs for new segments.

Unlike forward logistics, which ships identical palletised items, reverse logistics processes unique items with varying conditions, defects, and values, requiring specialised infrastructure. Companies like Optoro use AI to determine the next best action for returned items to maximise recovery value, reportedly diverting 95% of returns from landfills. However, the cost of processing a single used garment can exceed its resale value. RaaS providers leverage volume and proprietary data to drive costs down, but profitability remains challenging without subsidy from primary brand marketing.

In the luxury sector, the goods are increasingly viewed as tradable assets, sometimes outperforming traditional investments. The market grows at 7.48% annually, fuelled by aggressive primary market price increases that make the secondary market the only accessible entry point for many consumers. The existential threat is counterfeiting, giving rise to AI-based authentication services.

Entrupy uses microscopic computer vision, analysing materials with 99.1% accuracy and offering financial guarantees. The RealReal employs hybrid AI tools, filtering high-risk items for human expert review. The watch segment is projected to reach 35%-40% of the global market by 2030, with mechanical durability making watches ideal for multiple ownership cycles.

The electronics resale market is driven by functional utility and grading standards. Back Market forecasts €3 billion in gross merchandise value in 2025, driven by inflation and the desire to avoid the massive carbon footprint of manufacturing new devices.

A critical barrier to corporate electronics recycling is data privacy. Blancco provides enterprise-grade sanitisation, ensuring devices from banks or hospitals can be safely resold, automating diagnostics and erasure for up to eighty devices simultaneously. The EU’s 2024 Right to Repair Directive forces manufacturers to provide spare parts and manuals for seven to ten years, fundamentally altering refurbishment economics and breaking planned obsolescence cycles, empowering independent repair shops that are critical to local circular economies.

Without digitisation, the circular economy cannot grow. A product’s journey (made, reused, repurposed) needs one steady digital link. By the late 2020s, EU rules will quietly require Digital Product Passports for clothes and tech items. These digital records store fixed facts, such as where a product started, what it’s made of, whether it can be fixed, and whether it can become new material. Starting from a shared base, the Aura Blockchain Consortium takes shape through collaboration among LVMH, Prada, and Cartier. Built around uniform blockchain systems, each item receives a distinct digital form. Should a product change hands during resale, those new owners gain access to linked records, unchangeable proof of origin and past possession. Instead of full public visibility, Aura applies controlled networks where openness meets boundaries, supporting trustworthy changes in ownership, especially where market value runs high.

The government used to encourage recycling through policy, until very recently, but now it is mandating circularity. The EU is leading the change globally, exporting regulatory standards worldwide through the “Brussels effect.” It helps multinationals adopt EU standards to simplify the supply chain.

The Right to Repair Directive by the EU came into force in June 2024. It is an incredible piece of legislation because it requires manufacturers to repair goods even outside legal guarantee periods, mandates the creation of a European online repair platform, and standardises repair information forms.

Not to mention the Eco-Design for Sustainable Products Regulation, which imposes tough standards by demanding durability, reusability, upgradability, and repairability from the start of product design. Also, the Waste Shipment Regulation prohibits plastic waste from leaving OECD borders after 2026. This regulation has led to an increase in recycling within Europe instead of shipping trash abroad.

Unlike the EU’s federal approach, the United States relies on state-level legislation, creating complex compliance maps. California, Minnesota, New York, and Colorado have passed vigorous Right to Repair laws. California’s SB 244, effective July 2024, requires parts and manuals for electronics and appliances costing over $100 to be available for seven years, crucially not excluding business-to-business equipment. Manufacturers cannot easily make California-only versions, so these laws have national ripple effects. Without federal equivalents to EU regulations, US companies often default to EU standards to maintain global supply chain consistency, essentially importing EU regulations.

They say the resale boom is a great win for sustainability, but if we critically examine it, there are some inconsistencies in that claim. For example, fast fashion brands have adopted resale aggressively. Some argue that these are sophisticated greenwashing tactics that distract people from the core overproduction business models. The Changing Markets Foundation is one such critic. Shein, for example, produces thousands of new styles daily using ultra-fast fashion models that rely on synthetic materials and labour exploitation. The platform might contribute only a microscopic fraction compared to what dominates sustainability marketing.

Investigations have revealed that clothes taken back through take-back schemes and other systems often end up incinerated, downcycled, or exported rather than resold. By using tracking devices, investigators have found that items in perfect condition were destroyed or lost, exposing a significant lack of transparency.

Academic research confirms rebound effects, where efficiency gains are offset by increased consumption. When consumers can sell used clothes, they may feel financially and morally justified in buying more new clothes. Studies estimate substitution rates at 1:1.23, implying resale markets might actually increase overall throughput rather than reduce primary production. Consumers buy with the intent to resell, treating clothes as temporary holdings. Similarly, the environmental savings of refurbished smartphones can be offset if consumers use monetary savings to buy more devices or upgrade more frequently, nullifying carbon reduction benefits.

By 2030, resale is expected to comprise 10% of the total global fashion and luxury markets. In high-value categories like handbags, secondhand items already make up 40% of consumers’ wardrobes, indicating saturation, where “used” becomes normal. The distinction between new and used retail channels will blur, with major retailers offering both side by side. The circular economy is inherently labour-intensive, requiring a human touch for repair, authentication, sorting, and logistics. The ILO and World Bank estimate the sector already employs 121 to 142 million people globally, poised to be a major engine of green jobs offering employment that is difficult to offshore.

The ultimate evolution is the dissolution of ownership toward “usership” models, where goods are leased or subscribed to through Product-as-a-Service. In such a model, manufacturers retain ownership and responsibility throughout product lifecycles, aligning incentives perfectly. If manufacturers pay for disposal, they design products to last forever and be easily repaired. Right now, it’s rare, yet forecasts show it spreading into expensive household items by 2030, especially as trash disposal gets more costly. At that point, Digital Product Passports probably won’t be hard to find for high-end products, letting shoppers scan a secondhand coat and immediately access details like the farm origin of fibres, handworker location, past owners, repair tips, plus reuse value.

Nowhere is change clearer than in how goods move across borders. Pushed by need, rules, and tools that connect economies differently, old ways of making and moving things fade. Even though doubts about real sustainability linger, with fake claims, energy tradeoffs, and delivery hurdles adding pressure, forward motion cannot stall. A time when buying and tossing came easily now shifts toward reusing, repairing, and reusing again. Nowhere is change clearer than in what companies must do about used goods. Instead of resisting, smart players are learning to shape these secondary trades. Success in the years ahead hinges less on selling new items than on turning every product into profit.

The post The permanent circular economy appeared first on International Finance.

In their most recent report on single-use plastic products, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) included Dubai’s flagship carrier’s closed-loop recycling programme among “good practices from the airline sector.”

“In addition to several initiatives to reduce plastic waste, the closed-loop recycling initiative allows for millions of onboard items such as plastic trays, bowls, snacks, and casserole dishes to be recycled in a local facility and remade into fresh, ready-to-use Emirates meal service products,” the global aviation body Iata said, Zawya reported.

To adopt the ideas of a circular economy—in which products are reduced, reused, and recycled—Dubai’s premier airline unveiled a closed-loop recycling programme on June 1, 2023.

This initiative aims to collect millions of outdated and damaged meal service items from Economy and Premium Economy Class dining flights.

The items will be cleaned and inspected for damage, then transported to a facility in Dubai where they will be reprocessed, ground down, and manufactured into new dishes, bowls, and trays. Finally, they will be sent to Emirates Flight Catering so that they can be used for thousands of meals in the air again.

Dubai has made it mandatory for all retail establishments to stop using single-use plastic bags as of June 1st; no store is required to provide free alternatives. Dubai has already imposed a 25-fil fee per single-use bag at all of its retail locations.

IATA acknowledged the following airline-adopted best practices: Qantas’ premium economy blankets made with 20 recycled plastic or water bottles that are 100% recycled PET; Delta Air Lines’ testing of a reusable cup system and new paper cups; Malaysia Airlines’ biodegradable materials for in-flight catering and merchandise; and Air Baltic’s initiative to allow passengers to submit in-flight meal selections up to one hour before departure to avoid unnecessary single-use plastic products.

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In today’s episode of the ‘Start-up of the Week,’ International Finance will discuss AMP Robotics and its game-changing role towards creating “a world without waste.”

Reimagining The Word ‘Recycle’

Headquartered in Colorado, with a strong presence in the North American and European markets, AMP builds and deploys technology that solves many of the challenges around recycling industrial waste, apart from shifting the economics of the industry to make it more efficient, cost-effective, scalable, and sustainable.

AMP, led by Matanya Horowitz, has a diverse team of environmentalists, engineers, and other professionals, who share a passion for the promise technology holds to modernize the way the venture recycles products.

Since its inception in 2015, AMP has become a leader in the ‘evolution of recycling,’ as through the usage of cutting-edge technology, the venture has created a business model for the waste management industry, based on flexibility, resource efficiency, and transparency.

How Do They Do It?

AMP’s AI platform, ‘AMP Neuron’, uses computer vision to recognize patterns of specific recyclable materials within a complex waste stream. The tool distinguishes different plastic polymers, types of paper, metal containers, and multi-layered packages to characterize what’s in the recycling stream and what needs to be sorted during different process stages. The neuron then guides robots to sort and recover the materials as per the recyclable/contaminated levels.

Powered by machine learning, Neuron can recognize over 70 billion objects annually from field installations. AMP continuously upgrades this particular skill, based on daily operational experiences, to keep its solutions future-proof.

Apart from ‘AMP Neuron,’ you have ‘AMP Vision,’ a modular computer vision system that understands the AMP clients’ material flow from inbound processing to bale QC to the end of the line.

The client businesses can monitor their waste treatment lines on a real-time basis and take proactive action, create isolated waste audits and take high-resolution images of their material stream, all using the ‘AMP Vision.’

Next comes ‘AMP Cortex,’ which is a high-speed robotic sorting system guided by AMP’s AI, where the venture’s robots sort, pick, and place materials to achieve up to 99% accuracy and up to 80 picks per minute. The whole solution reduces time and money spent on high-turnover positions, apart from increasing facility safety and reducing training overhead, capturing more high-value material and most importantly decreasing contaminations during waste treatment.

AMP also has an AI-powered film contamination removal tool, the first such innovation in the waste treatment industry. The tool, named ‘AMP Vortex,’ keeps tangling film out of downstream equipment and increases the sorting efficiency and safety of the clients’ waste treatment lines, apart from automating high-volume capture of film to allow the sorters to focus on recovering key commodities.

Last but not least, ‘AMP Clarity,’ a web-based data portal provides real-time material characterization and performance measurement throughout key process stages of the waste sorting operations.

AMP’s Market Impact

AMP is helping the plastics industry to boost its waste recovery and limit contamination, apart from ensuring a higher volume of high-quality feedstock for new products and packaging. AMP’s solutions are helping the good packaging industry and its stakeholders to scale an unrivalled detection and recovery of recyclables. The technology is helping producer initiatives to increase recycling rates and create new value streams for recyclables to aid their pursuit of recycled content goals.

Take United States-based Evergreen as a case study, which uses AMP Cortex to sort green and clear PET bottles.

“With our AI-guided robots, Evergreen increased purity and consistency and doubled its PET recovery rate at its Ohio facility, generating more high-quality recycled plastic to meet its bottle-to-bottle recycling goals,” AMP stated.

Let’s shift the focus to the metal industry, where the ‘AMP Cortex’ is using its high-speed and intelligent robotics system to recover and sort out aluminium, aerosol cans, pie tins, pet food containers, nonferrous food containers and foil can pick at a much rapid and consistent pace, while preventing contamination and accelerating high-purity sorting of metals.

Virginia-based RDS is using ‘AMP Cortex’ to sort PET, HDPE, plastic film, cups, and metals at one of its Roanoke facilities. The company has been capturing more high-value material with AI and automation.

AMP’s solutions are making a mark in the construction sector too. Using AMP Cortex’s intelligent robotics and the AI platform, the venture’s solution helps its clients to pick and process lighter and smaller objects like wood, metal, drywall, and plastics, recover fines and other small objects with precision and consistency, and capture new opportunities for wood and other fractions for resale.

Benkei and Musashi, two high-payload and high-throughput sorting robots from Ryohshin and AMP Robotics, are leaving their marks in Japan’s construction and demolition recycling facilities.

The Road Ahead

On May 1, AMP unveiled its new AI-enabled automated sorted solutions and integrated facility offerings. A day after, the venture found a mention in Fast Company’s ‘World Changing Ideas Awards 2023.’ AMP has found itself in the ‘2023 Global Cleantech 100 Company’ list.

AMP boss Horowitz told TechCrunch that landfilled plastics represent significant losses to his country’s economy, a statement which can be backed by the US Department of Energy’s (DoE) 2019 report. The report found a loss figure of around USD 7.2 billion for that year. Of the estimated 44 million metric tons of plastic waste managed domestically in 2019, approximately 86% was landfilled, 9% was combusted and 5% was recycled, the study stated further.

Horowitz further estimated that the recovery of US plastic packaging and food-service plastic alone could represent a pool of earnings of USD 2 billion to 4 billion per year. AMP’s fleet of around 275 robots is now deployed in over 100 waste treatment centres.

“We have a number of larger opportunities in front of us, from opportunities in Europe and across the world, to large, fleet-wide deployments of robots and deployment of fully automated sorting facilities. The capital helps us build the technologies and team to support these opportunities,” Horowitz concluded.

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In the words of the UNEP, “Plastic pollution can alter habitats and natural processes, reducing ecosystems’ ability to adapt to climate change, directly affecting millions of people’s livelihoods, food production capabilities and social well-being.”

However, plastic, the material which is threatening our ecosystems, can also become a crucial element for the global economy’s net-zero goals.

Decoding the change

As per an Economist Impact webinar, “In order to cut waste and greenhouse-gas emissions, the plastics sector is reorganising its production and technology base, developing alternative raw materials and energy sources, and innovating in new technologies and investments.”

Take India’s case for example. The Asian economic powerhouse is also one of the world’s top users of plastics, and this industry is anticipated to grow further.

Given the fact that plastic is a part and parcel of the country’s socio-economic fold, it is difficult to get rid of it completely. While the nation is now seeing an increase in the usage of biodegradable plastics and alternative materials like paper, cloth, and glass, experts believe that the plastic industry needs to be regulated with the principles of ‘Circular Economy’, where increasing recycling and reuse, and creating biodegradable substitutes of the material can be aggressively promoted by the government.

India also has a large but unorganised recycling industry that can be backed further with efficient waste collection and segregation systems, along with a sound mechanism to prevent contamination from the material.

In June 2023, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati, one of India’s premier research institutes, set up the NRL-Centre of Excellence (CoE) for ‘Sustainable Materials Translational Facility on Bioplastics’ at its campus. The new facility will work towards the development of environment-friendly sustainable plastics.

In the recently concluded CHINAPLAS 2023, Asia’s premier plastics and rubber trade fair, over 3,900 exhibitors presented their latest innovations in adherence to the circular economy concept. Four eco-friendly thematic zones, including the ‘Recycling Technology Zone’, ‘Recycled Plastics Zone’ and ‘Bioplastics Zone’ and ‘Eco-friendly Additives Zone’, were set up during the event.

Over 200 machine makers and materials providers showcased an array of sustainable solutions in these four theme zones.

As per the World Bank, around 2 billion tons of municipal solid waste is being generated every year and this will reach 3.5 billion tons by 2050. Regions like East Asia and Pacific to witness their plastic waste generation increase by 70% by 2050. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation too claimed that the world’s oceans would contain around 937 million tons of plastic compared to 895 million tons of fish by 2050. COVID-19 pushed single-use plastics usage by as much as 300%.

So clearly the plastics industry is facing a steep task to come up with quick solutions to offset these scary predictions. Breakthroughs showcased by IIT Guwahati and CHINAPLAS 2023 have shown that the industry is up for the challenge.

Discussing the circular approach

The circular economy concept aims to reduce the amount of plastic waste generated by applying a “closed loop” system where plastics are produced, used and reused in a continuous cycle to prevent its leakage into the environment. This model addresses the challenges of minimizing the wastage created by single-use plastics.

For example, the packaging industry accounts for the largest segment of plastic applications. Application of the ‘Circular Economy’ principles in this sector would require innovations in production technologies and materials to ensure reusable, recyclable, or compostable plastic products. Also, the stakeholders will have to ensure that disposed items are properly collected, recycled or composted, before reusing them.

A study from Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University in Singapore suggests that reusable plastic bags are more environmentally-friendly than those from paper and cotton, in cities and countries with efficient waste management systems.

As per BIGCOMMERCE, Sustainable Packaging should meet conditions like being beneficial, safe and healthy for individuals and communities throughout its lifecycle, meeting performance and cost requirements while being sourced, manufactured, transported, and recycled using renewable energy. Also, the solutions need to optimize the use of renewable or recycled source materials, while being manufactured with clean production technologies and best practices and last but not least, being effectively recovered and utilized in biological and/or industrial closed-loop cycles.

A CGS survey of 1,000 American consumers found that almost 70% of respondents considered sustainability as at least “somewhat important” and almost half (47%) said they “would pay 25% more for sustainable products.”

Another Nielsen research found that 48% of US consumers were willing to change their consumption habits to lower their impact on the environment. The survey company’s analysis further found that sustainable product sales in the United States have grown nearly 20% since 2014, and the company estimates that sales would reach $150 billion by 2024.

BIGCOMMERCE has also suggested measures like reducing packaging materials, minimizing waste, shipping small packages (cost friendly too), recycling packaging materials, using plant-based and edible packaging methods, bringing compostable and biodegradable plastic alternatives into the play, and last but not least, using manufacturing partners with sustainable practices, as immediate solutions for the industry.

New trends are emerging

A report from ManufacturingToday found that plastic-oriented industries are taking an interest in chemical recycling technologies, which break down plastics into building blocks to convert them into secondary raw materials for producing new raw materials.

Chemical recycling has also been found ideal for treating multi-layered or heavily contaminated plastic, as the process can manufacture high-quality recycled material.

“Mechanical recycling has become better and more efficient in turning out good quality secondary materials. Digitalization, artificial intelligence and automation have contributed to more efficient recycling operations that many companies offering recycling technologies have added these to the capabilities of their machines,” ManufacturingToday remarked.

“Bottle-to-bottle recycling has been taken to a higher level in processing post-consumer PET bottles to high-grade recycled PET (rPET) material, making it possible to produce bottles from as high as 100% recycled PET (rPET). Also, bottle-to-bottle recycling has been able to meet the high safety standards required for food packaging with no risk of contamination. Another innovation is the development of techniques in the recycling of multilayer flexible packaging that now, 100% of multilayer film production waste can be recycled,” it commented further.

Innovations like recycling methods like injection moulding systems, extrusion technologies and blow moulding systems are seeing huge R&D-related investments. Also, materials solutions geared toward improving the properties of recycled resins like additives and stabilizing agents are supporting the plastics industry’s sustainability bid as well.

“The urge to make plastics more sustainable will encourage manufacturing firms to use sustainable plastics. The global recycled plastics market size garnered 50,465.24 kilotons in 2021 and will depict a CAGR of 3.3% from 2022 through 2030. A marked rise in plastics recycling rates and better plastic waste treatment could facilitate the circular economy. Forward-looking companies will likely focus on diverting waste plastics towards recycling facilities, a trend poised to favour market growth,” remarked Grand View Research.

Innovations galore

A report from the IDTechEx ‘Sustainable Packaging Market 2023-2033’ explores the sustainable materials, leading players, and technology trends driving the industry, while presenting a forecast for the sustainable packaging market segmented into 21 different materials.

As per it, plastics recycled through mechanical and chemical means, along with the ‘Bioplastics’ and ‘Biobased Materials’, will guide the innovations in the industry in the coming days. IDTechEx’s analysis of 95 start-ups operating in sustainable packaging found over twenty different biobased materials with over $4 billion in the investment pipeline.

Under the RUBIO project, 18 partners are currently turning the vision of a sustainable plastics industry into reality. These stakeholders are trying to use regionally available plant residues to create versatile, sustainable products that are recyclable and biodegradable.

As part of the project’s roadmap, the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Polymer Research IAP is developing new types of bioplastic polybutylene succinate (PBS) so that it can be used for significantly more applications. Together with the company POLIFILM EXTRUSION GmbH, the Fraunhofer IAP has developed an initial commercial product, as per reports.

“Bioplastics are increasingly providing an alternative to petroleum-based plastics. These sustainable materials offer a number of advantages: They are made from renewable resources and help to reduce the dependence on fossil fuels and CO2 emissions into the environment. They can be biodegradable and have processing properties comparable to those of classic petroleum-based plastics. Like classic plastics, bioplastics can be sorted, fractionated and recycled,” as per a report from Phys.org.

Plastics and electric vehicles

Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence division and Sumika Polymer Compounds Europe (SPC Europe), a leading manufacturer of thermoplastic compounds, announced its partnership in January 2023 to digitise the performance of new sustainable automotive-grade polypropylene (PP) compounds, thus enabling engineers from the stakeholders to recyclable design components, which will offer a lower carbon footprint for future vehicles.

Sumika Polymer Compounds’ short glass-fibre polypropylene (GF-PP) THERMOFIL HP and recycled polypropylene (GF-rPP) THERMOFIL CIRCLE materials use sustainable manufacturing and recycling processes and offer carmakers performance equivalent to incumbent engineering plastics, but with an up to 60% lower carbon footprint.

The American Chemistry Council’s (ACC) report titled, ‘Chemistry and Automobiles,’ found that on average from 2012 to 2021, the amount of plastic in automobiles increased by 16%, to 411 pounds. Calculations show those 411 pounds made up less than 10% of an average vehicle’s weight yet approximately 50% of its volume, thus significantly improving the car’s fuel efficiency, apart from reducing costs for drivers and carbon emissions from transportation.

With electric vehicles becoming more popular, plastics have emerged as an important element in the auto industry.

The article has discussed various developments in the plastics industry, all leading to one conclusion. By adopting a circular economic approach and investing in research and development, plastic, which is often considered harmful to the environment, can become a game-changer in promoting clean and sustainable industrial practices.

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The Energy Transitions Commission (ETC) warned in research that significant supply gaps for lithium, nickel, graphite, cobalt, neodymium, and copper might push up costs and push back the deadline for achieving net-zero emissions by 2050.

The ETC stated that in order to lower the risk of a shortage, mines must produce more. However, since large-scale mining projects can take up to 20 years to complete, little has been invested in exploration and output over the past ten years.

“In some key minerals – particularly lithium and copper – it will be challenging to scale up supply fast enough over the next decade to keep pace with rapidly rising demand,” ETC Chair Adair Turner said in the report.

According to the ETC, over the past two decades, energy transition metals have received an average annual capital expenditure of USD 45 billion, as opposed to the USD 70 billion needed annually to increase supply by 2030.

“Governments, regulators, producers and consumers must work together to increase recycling, improve material efficiency, invest in new mining, and regulate environmental and social standards,” Adair Turner said.

The commission estimates that between 2022 and 2050, the production of up to 6.5 billion tonnes of materials will be necessary for the energy transition, with 95% of that production being made up of steel, copper, and aluminium.

The estimate assumes that sustainable energy technologies will be aggressively deployed to achieve global decarbonization, and that recycling and the amount of material required will follow current trends.

However, if investors are successful in accelerating technological, efficient, and clean energy material recycling advancements, the overall demand for new supplies from mines would eventually decline by 20% to 60%.

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