PurNat: a circular economy organization
When PurNat salvages iron, steel and aluminum from an illegal dump and sells these materials to the smelter, this work helps to reduce:
- the extraction of raw materials from the ground in order to produce new goods useful for the consumption;
- GHG emissions, in particular CO2, caused by these mining and goods production activities.
When these materials are located in forests and fields, PurNat contributes to:
- regenerate forests and fields by increasing their capacity to capture carbon of the atmosphere and sequestration for tens or even hundreds of years.
When these materials are located in the water and on the banks, PurNat contributes to:
- increase the capacity of bank sediments to sequester carbon;
- purify water from springs, streams, streams, rivers in order to increase the amount of phytoplankton in the oceans, the first food sources for fish, which remove about 100 million tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere every day.
Diagram of CE in the carbon cycle
This diagram demonstrates how human activity unbalances the carbon cycle:
- the economy, as we know it, extracts unlimited natural resources to produce unlimited consumer goods;
- greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions produced by mining extraction activities. and by companies manufacturing consumer goods, saturate the capacity of the atmosphere, forests and oceans to absorb CO2;
- the inability of forests, fields and oceans to reduce the carbon in the atmosphere causes climate warming and its disruption.
Click on the picture to zoom it.
Where to start, and how?
CE can start in all sectors of human activity e.g. education, tourism, transport thanks to people who clean the planet of waste iron, steel, aluminum because their work contributes to rebalancing the carbon cycle :
- by reducing GHGs, in particular CO2, by reducing the consumption of new products and by recovering and processing used materials in order to put them back into the short economic circuits;
- by increasing :
- the canopy of towns and villages;
- the construction of commercial, industrial wooden buildings;
- the ability of forests to sequester carbon through adequate management of tree felling and through maintenance and regeneration of field soils to limit climate change.
Texte by : Pierre Racicot, President, VRIc
Average cost to clean up an affected site with several tons of waste:
+/- $15 000
