WEBVTT

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Remember what nature does. Here, nature provides a very convenient package.
Look – I can take it home this way from the store; I don't need a plastic bag.
It's robust, it's pretty protective, and it is reusable.
First of all, I eat the stuff in the middle – the banana.
And, second of all, I throw away the peel, but if I throw it away into a compost pile,
it becomes great nutrients or even if I just throw it into the ground
where there are plants, it takes a bit longer for it to decompose this way,

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but it will eventually decompose and be useful material for the growing of plants.
And nature does this. Almost everything in nature is reusable.
Our bodies themselves are reusable.
How could we manufacture in ways that are like that?
Well, this requires us to manufacture *differently*.
And it's going to require a different model for business.
But the model has to be *circular*. That is to say, the first time, yes,

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I take out raw material from the Earth and I manufacture and I make an object.
But when I resell it, when I give it to people to be used,
then the circle begins, because
if it breaks, we repair it;
if it runs out of power, we have a device that easily recharges.
So, what do we do when a product has reached the end of its life?

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What do we do to complete the circle?
Well, there are companies that are already doing that – making things so that
when it's reached the end of its useful life, we can take it apart and reuse the components.
One example is Canon, the company that makes cameras, and in this case
laser printers for your computer, have already done this with the toner,
the material within the laser printer that makes the dots on the paper,

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the colors and the black and white that makes the pictures and the words visible.
Every laser printer has in it a bunch of cartridges that contain the toner.
And when the toner is empty because we printed so many pages, what do you do
with this cartridge? Canon says,
'Oh, buy a new one and take it out of the box
and take the old one and put it into the box.'
And we insert the new cartridge back into the printer and we take the old cartridge

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and we mail it back to Canon, and Canon even pays the postage.
And Canon says, "We have designed these cartridges
so that every part of it can be reused either in a new cartridge
or in other things that can use the very same parts."
And they advertise that we have no waste in recycling, reusing, repairing.
That's the circular economy – designing things so that in the end

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*everything can be reused*, if not for the same product,
then for other, similar or even different products.