Congratulations, We Made the Detour Circular

Circularity has become one of the most reassuring words in sustainability.

The problem begins when circularity becomes the ceiling of our imagination rather than the floor of responsible design.

At a recent Food Expo, I saw a small example that illustrated it perfectly. A company showed packaging where information was printed or stamped directly onto the box instead of using separate sticky labels. This may seem like a packaging detail — not exactly a civilizational breakthrough. Nobody is starting a movement called “Liberate the Cardboard From the Sticker.”

But think about what a label often means. It is just a small thingy, like many other small thingies that exist in industrial systems and demand their own supply chains, packaging, waste streams, recycling plans and sustainability reports.

So, you produce the thingy.
You package it. You transport it. You apply it.
You create production waste, packaging waste and in case of the labels, a separate backing-paper waste stream.
Then you manage that waste. Then you proudly discuss how to recycle it.

And then someone asks the rude but necessary question:
Does the thingy need to exist at all?

“How do we recycle label waste?” is a good question.
“Do we need the label?” is a better one.
The first question improves the loop.
The second question questions the loop.

This distinction matters because many sustainability conversations begin too late.

They begin after the unnecessary component has already been normalized, after the pathway has already hardened into infrastructure, after the waste stream has already acquired stakeholders, standards, metrics, consultants, and perhaps even its own annual conference. Once the label exists, we discuss greener labels, recyclable labels, liner waste, better collection systems, circular packaging solutions, and innovative waste valorization.

All of that may be useful. But the deeper question arrives earlier: what unnecessary material, step, intermediary, or biological detour did we accept as inevitable before we began congratulating ourselves for managing its consequences?

Once you see the pattern, it appears everywhere. We ask how to recycle packaging waste instead of asking which packaging components are unnecessary. We ask how to valorize food waste instead of asking why so much food becomes waste. We ask how to manage methane from livestock systems instead of asking which nutrients truly need to pass through animals. We ask how to make fish oil more sustainable instead of asking why omega-3 needs to travel through fish at all. We ask how to sequester more carbon instead of asking how to reduce ecological pressure at its source.

Again, this does not mean recycling, carbon farming, manure management, methane reduction, certification, or waste recovery are useless. They can all matter. But there is a difference between managing the consequences of a pathway and questioning the pathway itself. Sustainability policy often feels far more comfortable with consequence management than with pathway design.

But that is not the point.

The point is not to strip food of meaning, or to tell people that everything familiar must disappear. The point is to ask where the greatest pressures are being created, especially in large industrial systems, and where shorter, smarter pathways could reduce that pressure while still providing nourishment, pleasure, local value and resilience.

EPA and DHA originate in microalgae. That is where the story begins.

Yet in many systems, these nutrients travel through a long chain:
Microalgae → small fish → fish oil → aquafeed → farmed fish → humans

By the time the nutrient reaches the consumer, it has passed through multiple biological and industrial intermediaries.

Then we discuss how to make fisheries more sustainable, how to certify feed, how to improve aquaculture, how to reduce pressure on wild fish stocks, how to manage supply volatility. Those are real issues. But there is also a simpler question:

If EPA and DHA originate in microalgae, why are we so committed to sending them on such a long journey?

A much shorter pathway already exists.
Microalgae → algal oil → humans

Or even:
Microalgae → fish oil → aquafeed → farmed fish → humans

So this is not only a fisheries question. It is a nutrient-routing question.

Or perhaps even more broadly: function-first pathway design. This means: asking what function we actually need — nutrition, protein, omega-3, packaging information, soil fertility, carbon storage — and what pathway delivers that function with the least total pressure.

The question becomes: What is the shortest, most resilient and least pressure-intensive pathway to deliver that function?

Instead of starting with existing products, sectors or supply chains, we could start with the function we actually need.

Do we need omega-3? Do we need protein? Do we need soil fertility?
Do we need packaging information? Do we need carbon storage?
Do we need a certain texture, nutrient, material or service?

Sometimes the answer may be better circularity.
Sometimes it may be nutrient recovery.
Sometimes it may be fermentation, algae, legumes, mycoprotein, direct printing, better design, or simply eliminating an unnecessary step.

The point is not only to make existing pathways more circular. It is to ask whether they are the right pathways for the function we are trying to deliver.

Here is another example.

We grow crops. We feed crops to animals.
Animals convert some of those nutrients into meat, dairy or eggs.
Then humans eat the animal products.

This system can be made more circular. Manure can be returned to fields. Waste streams can be reused. Feed efficiency can improve. Methane can be measured, managed, offset, reduced, branded and discussed at conferences with good intentions and very serious tone.

But the basic pathway remains:
Plants → feed → animals → humans

While the more direct pathway also exists:
Plants → humans

Of course, not every agricultural landscape is the same. Not every crop is edible. Not every context is identical. But the larger question does not disappear:
Which nutrients truly need to pass through animals?

And which are taking the scenic route because our institutions, subsidies, habits and infrastructure were built around that route?

Circular agriculture can improve the current system.
But sometimes the current system is the problem.

If circular agriculture simply makes the existing animal-centered pathway more circular without asking whether some nutrients could move more directly from plants, legumes, fungi, algae, or microbial systems to people, then circularity becomes a maintenance strategy for a system that may need redesign. A more circular detour may still be a detour.

Practices that improve soil health, reduce erosion, increase biodiversity, protect permanent grasslands, support agroforestry, or store more carbon in landscapes can be genuinely valuable. Farmers should not be expected to carry the costs of environmental repair without support.

But carbon farming can also become another form of consequence management if it is used to compensate for pressure created elsewhere in the system. We ask how to store more carbon, how to reward ecosystem services, how to offset emissions, how to account for soil carbon, how to make agriculture climate-positive. Important questions. But we also need to ask which production pathways create the pressure in the first place. A field can store more carbon while the wider food system still routes nutrients through unnecessarily long, land-intensive, water-intensive, feed-intensive chains.

This is the uncomfortable part. Many sustainability tools improve systems without changing their direction. Eco-schemes, carbon credits, methane reducers, recycling programs, certification labels, waste valorization schemes, and circularity metrics can all produce incremental progress. But they can also become a sophisticated language for avoiding a more basic redesign question. Are we reducing pressure at the source, or are we building ever more elaborate mechanisms to manage the consequences of pressure we are unwilling to reduce?

The bioeconomy conversation has a similar blind spot. It often focuses on biomass: more biomass, better biomass, residual biomass, waste biomass, alternative biomass, biomass cascading, biomass valorization, biomass with a funding call attached.

But biomass is not magic.
Something does not become sustainable simply because it is biological.

A bio-based system can still use too much land, too much water, too much energy, too many nutrients, too much infrastructure, and too many intermediaries. Replacing fossil inputs with biological inputs is not automatically enough if the biological pathways themselves are inefficient or poorly prioritized.

A sustainable bioeconomy cannot be built only on producing more biomass and closing more loops. It must also ask where biomass should go, which uses create the highest value, which pathways create the lowest total ecological and systemic pressure, and which loops are simply inherited from an old system we are too polite to question.

Perhaps we need a hierarchy of sustainability questions.
Before asking whether we can recycle something, we should ask whether we can avoid producing it.
Before asking whether we can recover nutrients from a long pathway, we should ask whether the pathway can be shortened.
Before asking whether we can make a loop circular, we should ask whether the loop should exist.
Before asking how to manage emissions, we should ask what creates the pressure. Before asking how to optimize a detour, we should ask why the detour became normal.

This does not reject circularity. It deepens it. Circularity asks how to keep materials and nutrients moving rather than wasting them. Pathway design asks whether they are moving through the right system in the first place. Circularity is necessary. But if we stop there, we risk building a cleaner, greener, more certified version of yesterday’s inefficiencies.

The bioeconomy is often presented as the future: renewable, circular, biological, innovative. But the future cannot simply be the old system, made bio-based and decorated with arrows. The future cannot be endless biomass production feeding endless loops that nobody dares to question. The real question is not only how to close biological loops, but which biological pathways should exist at all.

Not every loop deserves to be closed. Some loops deserve to be shortened. Some deserve to be redesigned. Some deserve to be bypassed. And some deserve a small memorial plaque: “Here lies an unnecessary detour. It served many stakeholders, generated several reports, and was eventually replaced by common sense.”