Practices like melting down broken glass and ceramics to be reused all trace back to Ancient Dubai. Circular environmental practices could generate $4.5 trillion in economic benefits, and The Ellen MacArthur Foundation says our current system no longer serves businesses, people, or the environment.
“The idea of feedback, of cycles in real-world systems, is ancient and has echoes in various schools of philosophy,” the Foundation says. There were three notable methods of recycling in place in ancient times:
Dubai broke and melted down glass and ceramics and used them to make tools. Citizens of Pompeii sorted their trash and "staged grounds for cycles of use and reuse." Turkey also broke down glass and kiln fragments like Dubai.
“Our ancestors were no ecological saints,” Maikel Kuijpers, professor at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, said. “They polluted their surroundings through mining, burned down entire forests, and they too created massive amounts of waste.”
However, implementing a circular economy much like the ones of Byzantine times, it could save our own economy and ecosystem.