2 billion tonnes

Every year the world throws away 2 billion tonnes of ordinary waste. The rubbish from homes, shops, and streets. That is 280 kilograms for every person on the planet, every year, and it does not count industrial waste or construction debris, which adds billions more tonnes on top.

Try to picture 2 billion tonnes (2,000,000,000,000 kg)... I surely cannot. So here is what it actually looks like.

• The Eiffel Tower weighs 10,000 tonnes. We throw away the equivalent of 200,000 Eiffel Towers a year.

• The Empire State Building weighs 365,000 tonnes. We throw away 5,500 of them a year.

• A fully loaded jumbo jet weighs 440 tonnes. We throw away 4.5 million of them a year. That is one jumbo jet's worth of rubbish landing on a landfill every 7 seconds.

Most of what fills that landfill was never designed to leave it. And this is where the difference matters. Recycling breaks a material down and hopes something useful comes out the other end, often at a lower quality than what went in. A circular economy is a different ambition entirely. It means designing a material so it can be taken apart on purpose, at the end of its life, and put back into use at the same value it started with. Not melted down and hoped for. Engineered for it, from the first layer.

That difference is the whole game. Recycling manages waste. Circularity prevents it from becoming waste in the first place.

Nobody carries all 200,000 Eiffel Towers. In the material I work with, I have made that piece circular. At home, in my own hands, I do not always think about it. Most of what I let go of, I let go of by habit, without asking the question at all.

Writing this down has already changed something. I am paying more attention now to what leaves my own household, and where it goes.