The economy as we know it today is a rather linear affair. We extract resources from the earth and transform them into all sorts of products. We then use these products for varying amounts of time, yet all eventually end up as waste.

A circular economy, by contrast, decouples consumption from the depletion of finite resources. It is a concept for an industrial system that is restorative by design, based on how living systems sustain themselves. In nature, nutrients are never wasted. Instead, they are continuously reused in endless cycles of regeneration.

The circular economy consists of two distinct cycles. The first is for biological nutrients that are designed to be safely returned to the biosphere after we are done with them. The second cycle contains technical nutrients, these are materials that are kept in circulation within our industrial systems without ever (re-)entering the environment. This process is known as the technical cycle. Since this course is about recycling Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE), we will be focusing on the technical cycle.