What does the circular economy mean for IT products, and how can we all handle our IT products in a more circular way? In the work with our new report: Impacts and Insights: Circular IT Management in Practice, we looked for answers to these questions. Malin Russell, project manager for the report, took a look at the result and saw that three things stand out.
1. Today’s linear consumption is a totally unreasonable and rather new invention. When we now try to change to a circular way of doing things, we’re actually trying to learn something that, to a large extent, was natural only two generations back. The furniture that my grandparents bought when they got married still furnished their home when they passed away, sixty years later. Grandma washed and reused freezer bags, mended clothes and hardly ever wasted food. The linear way of consuming goods that has since seen explosive growth is a dead-end that doesn’t make sense.
2. Circularity happens! In our work with the report, I spoke to a number of people that have got started. Ulrika Svallingson at Malmö City Council in Sweden includes circular criteria in procurement and managed to collect some 7,500 smartphones, computers and oth