The difference between Circular Economy and Cradle to Cradle (C2C)

C2C is a concept of total recycling through design. The product is conceived so that the cost of recycling is lower than the cost of buying new material. It is at start a focus of a company to increase competitivity by reducing the costs and transforming a product orientated approach into a service platform. C2C is a circular paradigm in its essence with a redesign of the product (which becomes a service) , a redesign of the production platform able to recycle, a redesign of the distribution and re-acquisition network and the development of value added services attached to a virtual product.

Circular Economy is a concept of companies integration in the objective of reusing the waste of a company as a resource for another one. The issue with circular economy is that it belongs to the linear paradigm (vs the circular one) which intends to close a linear process with different specialized actors in charge of recycling. In this case companies will not redesign the product in order to leverage re-acquisition of the product and recycle everything but create partnerships resulting mainly in finding a complementary revenue in the waste produced. We may even consider C2C and circular economy in opposition since in C2C the waste has a very high value that should stay in the boundaries of the company and not been used by competitor/partners. It may happen in the future that partners will be essentially integrated in the C2C process of a company as providers of service or transformers of degraded residue the companies do not want to reuse (biomass, …). Of course circular economy represent a drive to reach C2C since recyclers will negotiate with producers to update product design in order to ease recycling. The integration of the recyclers as service providers will come from the objective of customer fidelization and the necessity to exist in the market at every step of the service life cycle (production, distribution, re-acquisition of matter, recycling) and up selling of premium services. Partners will specialise in the different activities of production, distribution, recycling , always ensuring that value added material will come back to the producers to close the loop, ensuring that the producer will be autonomous material wise.