The European Union’s new Circular Economy Act aims to double the EU’s circularity rate by 2030 and create a unified market for secondary raw materials. It focuses on establishing a single market for secondary raw materials, increasing the supply and quality of recycled materials, and stimulating market demand for recycled inputs across EU industries. Despite growing awareness of the circular economy, the EU’s circularity rate has barely shifted, moving from 10.7% in 2010 to just 11.8% in 2023. The European Commission has acknowledged the barriers, pointing to inefficiencies in resource use and failure to account for environmental costs within the linear economy.

While legislation is necessary to create standardized frameworks and shared accountability, policy alone won’t solve the systemic challenges of overconsumption, waste generation, and resource dependency. What’s needed now are working, scalable models of circular economy in action.

That’s exactly what our global network of decentralized Microfactories has been building with operations across 9 countries. By transforming an everyday single-use item, such as disposable chopsticks, into premium engineered products, we’ve shown that localized circular infrastructure can reduce reliance on virgin resources, strengthen community resilience, and keep materials in continuous use. This is real, measurable impact at a local level, that can be replicated across the globe.

Circularity cannot wait until 2030. Policies like the EU’s Circular Economy Act create top-down momentum. The challenge, and the opportunity, is to pair that momentum with bottom-up innovation from entrepreneurs, businesses, and local governments who are ready to prove what’s possible now.

Regions across Asia, North America, and beyond must act now to embed circular practices into their economies, because every community needs infrastructure that captures value from the resources already in circulation. Our journey in responsible manufacturing demonstrates that a distributed, decentralized approach works. With over 80 Microfactories signed and in development worldwide, we’re saving carbon, reducing pressure on natural ecosystems, and showing that sustainable business models can scale globally while empowering local communities.