Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist

by Kate Raworth

What are the design features that enable this industrial butterfly to take flight? First, focus in on the old cradle-to-grave mentality of the linear economy that incited the twentieth century’s voracious mining for minerals, drilling for oil and burning of waste. That caterpillar, the throwaway economy of take-make-use-lose, still flows from top to bottom through the centre of the diagram. But watch as it turns into a butterfly thanks to cradle-to-cradle thinking in the circular economy.24 It runs on renewable energy—from solar, wind, wave, biomass and geothermal sources—eliminating all toxic chemicals and, crucially, eradicating waste by design. It does so by recognising that ‘waste equals food’: instead of heading for landfill, the leftovers from one production process—be they food scraps or scrap metal—become the source materials for the next. The key to making this work is to think of all materials as belonging to one of two nutrient cycles: biological nutrients such as soil, plants and animals, and technical nutrients such as plastics, synthetics and metals. The two cycles become the butterfly’s two wings, in which materials are never ‘used up’ and thrown away but are used again and again and again through cycles of reuse and renewal.