Challenges to the Circular Economy: Recovering Wastes from Simple versus Complex Products

The circular economy re-interprets the recovery of materials by promoting designing out waste from products, retaining materials for reuse, and emphasizing key elements universally accepted for sustainability. The current efforts to target, isolate, and reduce single-use items, particularly plastics, have only recently begun in earnest. Unfortunately, the recovery and recycling of materials have been disrupted by global market uncertainty, and recently, the COVID-19 pandemic. While the pandemic and its impacts complicate materials recovery, the core of the circular economy still depends on efficiently capturing and returning spent materials for production. Arguably, our perception and common understanding of the recovery process is influenced significantly by the recycling of simple consumer products, such as plastic bags and beverage bottles. However, there are greater difficulties when managing multiple materials from significantly more complex consumer products, for example, from end-of-life vehicles. This paper presents an overview of how waste recovery-related issues vary between simple versus complex consumer products. Using food packaging, tires, cell phones, furniture, and end-of-life vehicles as examples, this paper provides a commentary on the challenges facing complex product recovery compared to simple consumer products in the Canadian context in order to establish how this classification concept can be beneficial for describing a given product and its materials recovery prospects. A categorization framework is developed and applied to these case study products to provide a relative comparison of product complexity.