Kruti's Blog

A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away... Oh wait, this isn’t fiction. Or Star Wars. A not-so-long time ago, on an island not-so-far away, it literally rained cats. Cats in parachutes.                                                                                             Yep. ( image source ) In the early 1950s, Borneo was affected by a serious malaria outbreak. The World Health Organization, as part of their antimalarial campaign, sprayed houses on the island with insecticide DDT to kill the mosquito vector responsible for the spread of the disease. And it worked, the number of cases of malaria reduced. However, there were some other serious consequences. 

A term that often pops up while reading about sustainable development, efficiency or growth is "circular economy". We should aim to shift towards a circular economy model to reduce our environmental footprint, optimize costs, produce efficiently... and so on. But what is  the circular economy? Why should businesses, industries and people care? This post should serve as a short introduction to the concept.  Essentially, the circular economy is the more sustainable alternative to our current "linear" economy system.  What most industries do right now is: Take, Make and Dispose. Extract resources, process them into products, dispose off after use as waste. This is a linear system, the waste after use ultimately goes back to the earth and is, more often than not, toxic, unusable or takes long to biodegrade. Our economy runs on this linear chain of events. In the long run, this is definitely not a sustainable approach, since we can on...