The economic model based on infinite extraction...

The economic model based on endless extraction is now showing its limits, revealing a major ecological and social debt. Faced with the depletion of resources and growing geopolitical risks, reuse has become indispensable to preserving economic and environmental stability. Businesses, governments, and citizens must all derive direct benefits from it: material sovereignty, cost reductions, and purchasing power. In the long run, second-hand goods and repairability will become the new standards of quality in a world constrained by limited resources.
Creating a culture and a reflex of “reuse” is the number-one challenge for companies that are truly aware of sustainability issues. Since the dawn of time, the economy has consisted of extracting free resources from the Earth’s crust to create wealth. This flawed representation of the physical world lies at the root of the original flaw in economic thinking, inherited from the first Industrial Revolution and clearly expressed by Jean-Baptiste Say in 1803 in his Treatise on Political Economy: “Natural resources are inexhaustible, for if they were not, we would not obtain them free of charge.”

Even today, the belief in an infinite world is deeply embedded in the growth-oriented culture of policymakers and economists. However, in the face of clear evidence of resource depletion, the idea of “weak sustainability” is gaining ground. In other words, this suggests that the scarcity of natural capital may not be a limit to growth, as it could supposedly be offset indefinitely by technological innovation. This is yet another form of magical thinking among “elites” who believe that technology—particularly AI—will help us turn scarcity into abundance. This is false.

The gradual awakening of awareness

In the real world, lucidity and mathematics teach us that behind every financial profit lies a colossal environmental and social debt that has, to date, not been repaid by economic actors. The direct consequence can be observed daily in the worsening of climate disruptions, which are merely the early signs of a systemic collapse.

Humanity cannot continue to live indefinitely on credit from the living world without acknowledging the unforgiving nature of planetary boundaries. To protect ourselves from the unpredictable consequences of potential social chaos, we must urgently begin by reducing the pressure that human activities exert on all types of resources. This means extracting less, harvesting less, plundering raw materials less.

To achieve this, we must create a genuine culture of reuse. First and foremost, we need to consign to obsolescence the linear economy based on extracting, producing, using, and discarding. Since environmental protection arguments have little impact on most of the population, we will only be able to change consumption habits if all actors along the value chain perceive direct and tangible benefits.

Reuse reveals its advantages

For France and Europe, the key argument is our near-total dependence on critical raw materials (CRMs), most of which are extracted in Africa and Russia and refined in Asia. The EU’s trade balance deficit is now largely linked to the absence of continental materials supply chains. Believing that we could rapidly reopen highly polluting mining sites in our regions and make them profitable within the limited time we have left to act is an illusion.
For companies, the argument that is beginning to resonate is the risk of shortages or prohibitively expensive access to raw materials. The geopolitical context adds yet more uncertainty, precisely when industrial players need stability and confidence in order to invest. We cannot hope to regain economic sovereignty without sustainably securing our resource supply, which will need to be as local as possible. To do this, we must quickly begin to view all the products around us not as future waste, but as “banks of equipment and materials” for the future.
Finally, for consumer citizens, improving purchasing power is by far the most compelling argument to promote reuse—and this is already becoming tangible. Platforms such as Vinted, Back Market, and Le Bon Coin are seeing explosive growth in traffic; it has even become fashionable not to buy a new smartphone or car, as the excesses of deceptive marketing have ultimately eroded consumer trust. Everywhere, reuse stakeholders are organizing and joining forces to make this new, more sustainable way of consuming desirable—one that is more respectful of nature’s fundamental balances.

The road will be long to convince the undecided, as second-hand goods are still associated with social downgrading. We do not yet imagine a celebrity or advertising icon buying used products. And yet, second-hand will soon become synonymous with robustness and quality, because circular companies whose products last—and are therefore repairable—and some of which will sell only usage rather than ownership, will be the big winners of the transition in a world where resources are inexorably shrinking.

This article is a translated version. The original publication is available on Les Echos Solutions 👉 https://solutions.lesechos.fr/business/lancer-son-projet/quand-le-reemploi-est-en-passe-de-devenir-la-norme/