The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation Helps Companies Reimagine the Future of Business
The Circular Economy: Supply Chain Reinvented
Breaking news from the frontlines of business—the world’s largest corporations are throwing away money.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s latest research report, Trash to Treasure: Changing Waste Streams to Profit Streams, unearthed that nearly 6,000 of the largest companies in the United States sent 342 million metric tons of waste to landfills and incinerators in 2014—about 8 metric tons for every $1 million in revenue—even beforetheir products were shipped, used, and disposed of by consumers. Every ounce represents money invested in raw materials, energy, equipment, and human talent to create it—all interred in the junkyard of history.
Business needs another industrial revolution—one led by corporations like Phillips, selling light as well as bulbs, or Dell, creating a closed-loop recycled plastics supply chain to recycle computers back into new computers, or the Dow Chemical Company, recovering non-recycled plastics, and converting them into usable energy. While reducing waste is not a new idea, these companies understand the value of a circular economy at work, one in which resources are endlessly cycled back into supply chains, where waste simply does not exist.
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