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

by Kate Raworth

a true step-change in outlook—is to do no harm, an ambition that is also known as ‘mission zero’: designing products, services, buildings and businesses that aim for zero environmental impact.

Instead of aiming merely to ‘do less bad’, industrial design can aim to ‘do more good’ by continually replenishing, rather than more slowly depleting, the living world. Why simply take nothing when you could also give something?

we have a responsibility to leave the living world in a better state than we found it.

‘We are big-brained animals, but we are newcomers on this planet, so we are still acting like toddlers expecting Mother Nature to clean up after us. I want us to take on this design task and become full participants in every one of nature’s cycles. Start with the carbon cycle—let’s learn to halt our industrial ‘exhale’ of carbon pollution and then, by mimicking plants, learn to ‘inhale’ carbon dioxide into our products and store it for centuries in rich agricultural soils. Once we’ve cut our teeth on the carbon cycle, let’s apply what we have learned to the phosphorus, nitrogen and water cycles, too.’

With nature as model, we can study and mimic life’s cyclical processes of take and give, death and renewal, in which one creature’s waste becomes another’s food. As measure, nature sets the ecological standard by which to judge the sustainability of our own innovations: do they measure up and fit in by participating in natural cycles? And with nature as mentor, we ask not what we can extract, but what we can learn from its 3.8 billion years of experimentation.

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.

On the biological wing, all nutrients are eventually consumed and regenerated through the living earth. The key to using them endlessly is to: ensure that they are harvested no faster than nature regenerates them, harness their many sources of value as they cascade through the cycles of life, and design production in ways that gift back to nature. Take coffee beans as a simple example: less than 1 percent of every bean ends up in a cup of coffee, and the leftover coffee grounds are rich in cellulose, lignin, nitrogen, and sugars. It would be foolish to throw such organic treasure straight on to a compost heap or, far worse, into a rubbish bin, but this happens in homes, offices and coffee shops worldwide. Coffee grounds, it turns out, make an ideal medium for growing mushrooms, and then can be used as feed for cattle, chickens and pigs, and so are returned to the soil as manure. From the humble coffee bean, imagine scaling that principle up to all food, crops and timber, and scaling it out to every home, farm, firm and institution: it would start to transform our last-century forestry and food industries into regenerative ones that reap value from and then regenerate the living systems on which they depend. On the butterfly’s other wing, in contrast, products made using technical nutrients, such as metals and synthetic fibres, do not naturally decompose so they must be designed to be restored—through repair, reuse, refurbishment, and (as a last resort) recycling. Take mobi...

if we start to look upon every object, be it an eighteenth-century building or the latest smartphone, as if it were a battery storing valuable materials and energy, then we begin to focus on retaining or reinventing that stored value.

‘generous cities’: human settlements that nestle within the living world. As a first step in the process, she starts by observing a city’s local native ecosystem—such as the nearby forest, wetland or savannah—and records the rate at which it harvests solar energy, sequesters carbon, stores rainwater, fertilises soil, purifies the air, and more. These metrics are then adopted as the new city standard, challenging and inspiring its architects and planners to create buildings and landscapes that are ‘as generous as the wildland next door’. Rooftops that grow food, gather the sun’s energy, and welcome wildlife. Pavements that absorb storm water then slowly release it into aquifers. Buildings that sequester carbon dioxide, cleanse the air, treat their own wastewater, and turn sewage back into rich soil nutrients. All connected in an infrastructural web that is woven through with wildlife corridors and urban agriculture.26 Such design possibilities arise out of regenerative, not degenerative, questions. ‘Don’t ask: what’s my fair share to take?’ Benyus explains. ‘Ask: what other benefits can we layer into this so we can give some away?’27 Imagine if such a regenerative city were also distributive by design. Renewable energy microgrids would turn every household into an energy provider. Affordable housing connected by dedicated public transport routes would make the cheapest form of travel the fastest.

In the Netherlands, Park 20|20 is a business park designed on ‘cradle to cradle’ principles, constructed with recyclable materials, an integrated energy system, a water treatment facility, and roofs that collect solar energy, store and filter water, block heat and provide wildlife habitats.

business mindset that has arisen from the design of contemporary capitalism. And that design is the opposite of generous. It is focused instead on creating just one form of value—financial—for just one interest group: shareholders. While regenerative designers now ask themselves, ‘how many diverse benefits can we layer into this?’, mainstream business still asks itself, ‘how much financial value can we extract from this?’ Of course there may be some overlap of those two ambitions—since being regenerative can sometimes be highly profitable—but if that area of overlap is all that business is interested in pursuing then regenerative design will fall very far short of its potential.

companies leading the pack have adopted a niche set of circular economy techniques such as: aiming for zero-waste manufacturing; selling services instead of products (such as computer printing services instead of printers); and recovering their own-brand goods—ranging from tractors to laptops—for refurbishment and resale. These are excellent strategies for efficient resource reuse, and they can be highly profitable too.

the full regenerative potential of circular production cannot be reached by individual companies seeking to make it happen all within their own factory walls: it is an illogical and unfeasible basis for creating a circular economy.

if every tractor, refrigerator and laptop manufacturer attempts to recover, refurbish and resell all and only its own-brand products within proprietary cycles of material flow, the system-wide regenerative potential will never be achieved.

circular manufacturing must ultimately be open source because the principles behind open-source design are the strongest fit for the circular economy’s needs. These principles include: modularity (making products with parts that are easy to assemble, disassemble and rearrange); open standards (designing components to a common shape and size); open source (full information on the composition of materials and how to use them); and open data (documenting the location and availability of materials). In all this, transparency is key. ‘For whoever has the product at the end of its use, the recipe should be open source so anyone can see how to reuse its materials,’

Today’s most innovative enterprises are inspired by the same idea: that the business of business is to contribute to a thriving world.

Regenerative enterprise needs the support of financial partners seeking to invest long-term in generating multiple kinds of value—human, social, ecological, cultural and physical—along with a fair financial return. But current finance culture is still narrowly focused on driving short-term financial value, such as through share buybacks or increasing dividends instead.

Profit is the law of business: that has to be considered, but not at the expense of human rights, environmental standards and community.’50

‘regenerative finance’ with the aim of creating finance that is in service to life. When finance is in ‘right relationship’ with the whole economy, he explains, it will no longer be driving it but rather supporting it by turning savings and credit into productive investments that deliver long-term social and environmental value.

The state’s role is key to ending the business-as-usual of degenerative economic design. And it has many ways to actively promote a regenerative alternative, including restructuring taxes and regulations, stepping up as a transformative investor and empowering the dynamism of the commons.

Governments have historically opted to tax what they could, rather than what they should, and it shows. Tax windows, and you’ll get dark houses, as Britain discovered in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; tax employees, and you’ll head for a jobless economy, as many countries are discovering today. It is happening in part thanks to the twentieth century’s legacy of perverse tax policies, which charge firms for hiring humans (through payroll taxes), subsidise them for buying robots (through tax-deductible capital investments), and levy next to nothing on the use of land and non-renewable resources.