In the Dutch manufacturing industry, bed producer Royal Auping is regarded as a pioneer in the development of circular enterprise. And in addition to taking great strides towards perpetual reuse of resources and materials, the company is also considering alternative commercial models, in which, rather than buying a bed, the consumer purchases a good night’s sleep. CEO Aart Roos: “We want to move away from linear use of resources.”
A pile a thousand times as high as the Eiffel Tower. That’s how many old mattresses are fed into incinerators in the Netherlands every year. “More than one-and-a-half million times 20 kilos of resources literally go up in smoke every year. And that’s just in our little country,” says Aart Roos. “Once you comprehend the implications, you realise that this has to change.”
Roos uses this graphic image to illustrate one of the more serious flaws in our current economic system: we are extremely inefficient in our management of resources, even though we know that many of them are finite. And the growing world population inevitably means that resources are in increasingly short supply. The situation is compounded by the fact that the ‘take, make, dispose’ approach generates vast amounts of waste and emissions that are threatening our global living environment and the wellbeing of future generations.
None of this is new to Roos: Auping embarked on what he describes as a ‘journey towards circularity’ back in 2010. Roos: “We want to move away from linear use of resources. So circular enterprise is an important pillar of our sustainability strategy, together with renewable energy, closed systems, supply chain transparency and corporate social responsibility.”
A closed loop of resources and materials sounds like a great idea. However, putting it into practice is a very complex challenge. One that requires adjustments in product design, use of alternative materials and, in many cases, extensive adaptation of operating processes.
