AI and – A new report-backed argument says the world’s underuse of circularity is costing €25.4 trillion a year, and that AI—paired with biotechnology—could accelerate the shift from a take-make-waste economy away from fossil fuels.
When the next wave of “AI productivity” chatter fades, a tougher question keeps resurfacing: what happens if the same technology is aimed at the world’s linear economy instead of optimizing it?
The case being made is blunt. For half a century. the global economy has relied on a simple cycle: extract finite resources. manufacture mostly disposable products. throw them away. then repeat. Petroleum ends up in packaging and apparel. Oil powers cars. Critical minerals feed the backbone of nearly every modern technology. The pattern is familiar—and the vulnerability, as recent events have made plain, is structural. COVID and the recent conflict around the Strait of Hormuz showed how fragile supply chains can be. and how dependence on finite resources concentrated in a handful of geographies is no longer defensible.
Circularity is the alternative. It’s an economic model where materials already in circulation are infinitely regenerated. reducing the need for extraction and keeping more resources “above ground” rather than bound for landfill. The argument is that circularity doesn’t just improve sustainability metrics—it changes the economics of resilience. It strengthens supply chains. diversifies reserves away from a few extraction hubs. and gives countries and industries more control over the materials they need. It also reframes costs: reusing what’s already in circulation can be hard to beat compared with the economics of sending it to landfill.
The financial stakes are quantified in a new report from Circle Economy and Deloitte. The lack of circularity is costing the world €25.4 trillion a year, equivalent to nearly 31% of global GDP. The claim is that this is more than an environmental bill. The cost shows up in resource inefficiency, premature product disposal, underutilized assets, and mounting sovereign and supply chain risk.
That sets up the role being claimed for AI. The argument says AI is what gets the world closer to making circularity the default economic model of the future, not the exception.
Biotechnology—engineering biology to design new industrial processes—has been used for decades to address major problems. from insulin and vaccines to biofuels and biomaterials. But applying biotech to circularity has been constrained by two blunt realities: biological systems are complex. and discovery and validation take time. AI, the argument goes, helps by finding patterns in vast biological datasets beyond human cognitive reach. That narrowing of the search space is said to speed up discovery and validation.
In circularity terms. the promise is about accelerating fields such as protein design and the discovery of new enzymes capable of regenerating end-of-life materials—including plastic packaging. apparel. and critical minerals found in e-waste—into virgin-identical inputs. The claim is that AI applied to biotechnology is the mechanism that can make circularity viable at global scale. and in doing so. end modern society’s reliance on fossil fuels and the linear economy.
The tension in the pitch sits in the timing. The piece doesn’t treat the next decades as an extension of the last one. “The world order of the last 50 years will not apply to the next 50. ” it argues. adding that raw materials powering everyday life will become more valuable. not less. and that the economies controlling them will hold enormous strategic power. Circularity. it says. is what breaks that dependency—and AI is what makes it feasible at the speed and scale the shift requires.
Still, the warning is explicit: AI is not without risk. It has to be designed responsibly, built ethically, and powered by clean energy. Otherwise, it simply adds to the problem it could solve.
The person making the argument is Paul Riley, founder and CEO at Samsara Eco. In his view, if the risks are handled correctly, the “dot-com era” will look modest by comparison—because this is the technology that could finally close the loop and end the world’s reliance on fossil fuels.
AI circular economy fossil fuels biotechnology Circle Economy Deloitte supply chains critical minerals e-waste enzyme discovery protein design
So basically AI is gonna fix trash and oil? sure.
I don’t get why everyone’s talking like circularity is new. People have recycled forever. But €25.4 trillion?? That sounds made up. Also AI + biotech… like are we cloning plastic now?
They keep blaming “fossil-fuel grind” but the real issue is the government loves taxes and regulations. If we just stopped shipping everything overseas we’d be fine. Circular economy sounds nice but then what, companies magically stop making cheap stuff that breaks in a month?
“Infinitely regenerated” is a wild phrase. Materials aren’t infinite lol. Plus the Strait of Hormuz thing—yeah prices swing, but I don’t see how AI changes that instantly. Feels like this is just another AI report trying to sell a future where everything gets reused and somehow landfills disappear. I’ll believe it when I see packaging not coated in 12 layers of stuff I can’t actually recycle.