Back to Foundation
Sanitation & waste·designed

Circular Waste

Why it matters

Buildings generate roughly 65% of the planet's waste across their life cycles, and the everyday version of the problem is just as stubborn. A household or community off the municipal grid discovers quickly that there is no "away" to throw things to. Circular waste design starts from that honesty. Every stream leaving a building is either a resource pointed at its next use or an unfinished design. Organics go to compost or the digester, greywater to the garden, materials back into service. At community scale the stakes compound: a remote site with nowhere to ship waste must metabolize it. Waste handling turns from a chore into an infrastructure discipline.

Role in 001's holistic picture

Circular waste is the connective tissue of this cluster: Composting & Waterless Toilets and Biogas (Waste-to-Energy) are its two organic engines, Autonomous Sanitation closes its water-borne stream, the gardens absorb its nutrient output, and reclaimed materials with design for disassembly extend the same logic to the building fabric itself. This page holds the loop's map. Its engines each have their own.

In the world

The hard part of a circular design is the last condition: a local loop that genuinely exists for each stream. People increasingly build that loop themselves. Precious Plastic publishes free blueprints for plastic-recycling machines anyone can assemble. Its 2024 impact report counts 1,175 machines built, around 1,400 tonnes recycled across 56 countries, and 530 people earning a living from it. The figures are self-reported, from 184 workspaces of 2,014 mapped. At town scale the same discipline shows how far source-separation can go: in Kamikatsu, Japan, 742 households sort their waste into 45 categories at a central zero-waste centre and reach an 80% recycling rate against Japan's roughly 20% national average. The residue with no assigned path is the system's honest measure of failure. That is the number a circular design drives downward year by year.

How 001 engages with it

The Hlibivka design laid our foundation for this sense: waste sorting and composting were among its six regenerative components from the first sketch, treated as building systems rather than household habits. In the published Tepla Gora sanitation work the loops got specific: digestate and treated effluent assigned to fertigation, kitchen scraps to the seasonal digester, festival waste streams governed by protocol. And Tepla Gora's daily practice — none of it our design, all of it worth documenting — already delivers the first honest number: less than 20 percent of the site's waste leaves as trash. Organics are composted on site, and the recyclable rest enters local loops. What we have not yet built is the instrumented version of that accounting: what exactly makes up the last fifth, stream by stream. That is precisely the kind of unglamorous system a living lab exists to test.

Maturity: designed. Core loops designed at Hlibivka and in the published Tepla Gora sanitation work. The lived waste practice that keeps over 80% on site is the community's own, documented rather than designed by us. The instrumented residue accounting is future living-lab work.

Working on this? If you run a community-scale waste loop with real numbers — what share truly cycles, what residue remains — your data would ground this page's next revision. Get in touch.

Further reading