The Second Brief

Abstract

Somewhere this week, in a meeting room with a whiteboard, a team is writing the word circular at the top of a plan. It may be a packaging change, a take-back scheme, a new supplier, a promise in an annual report. The word will be underlined. Somebody will draw two arrows bending back on themselves. And almost nobody in the room will be able to say, if asked, what condition anything is meant to be in at the end of it. This book is written for the person in that room who would like to be able to say. It is a business book about regenerative and circular economics, and it takes a narrow and practical view of a large subject. The large subject is the claim, now about sixty years old, that an economy can be organised to leave the systems it depends on in better condition than it found them: the soil, the water, the skills of a workforce, the trust of a town. The narrow view is what that claim asks of one organisation or one household, on an ordinary Monday, with the budget it already has.