PREFACE: HOW TO READ THIS BOOK

This book is made up of “paths,” and only some of them will apply to you. Maybe you are a college student on a very tight budget, and you live in a dorm. You would love to have a battery-powered EV (BEV), but your university has only one charging station, and the next nearest one is at a local mall, ten miles away. Worse, BEVs tend to be new and expensive. If you can buy an EV, it might be that the best you can do is an old, used Prius Hybrid (HEV).

Or worse, maybe you are driving your dad’s old pickup, and that is all you are going to drive until you get through school, get a job, and make some money. This is great! You are one of those rare people who can plan for a future in a circular economy. You might get an engineering degree, or business, or construction management, and you might add a sustainability focus to these (or similar) degrees. These are some of the areas that will need people trained in circular economics. You can even become certified as a sustainability officer, which will make you valuable in the near future for corporations hoping to make themselves more profitable in the new economy. Many corporations have whole divisions dedicated to improving their sustainability and circularity. In some cases, the promotion pipeline goes up from Sustainability Officer to Director or VP of Sustainability, and then all the way to Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO) on the Board of Directors in the “C” Suite. This might be the best career path of the 21st century.

This path, however, isn’t just for the young. My degree was in writing, and through the years, I have been an industrial, institutional, technical, or science writer. At the age of 80, I studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a year, toward becoming a Certified Sustainable Science Writer (you are never too old to upgrade your credentials). The thing about these courses at MIT is there were more than a hundred other students in my cohort, and all of them were mid-career business professionals seeking certification that would allow them to move into an opening sustainability leadership role in their corporations.

In the future the world will move into a new, circular economy. I will discuss this in much more depth elsewhere, but briefly, the circular economy will be focused on reducing the waste of critical resources (e.g., metals, forests, waterways). The mantra might be … “use and reuse, or repair and reuse, or restore and reuse, or refurbish and reuse, or repurpose and reuse, or recycle and reuse.” If you feel stuck in your job, Certified Sustainability Officer might be the path that unsticks you.

This book is about paths that will lead us into a future that doesn’t put our children at risk.

So, this book is not about whether you should buy an EV or install solar and batteries. It’s about how you can evolve into a circular lifestyle compatible within the circular economy we will enjoy in the future.

So how do you read it? Read it as you would an old fashioned encyclopedia. Take what you need for your purposes, plus whatever else you find interesting.