Too Cheap to Matter

Or are we just not the ones paying

There is something deeply misleading about the way value is currently being framed in circularity discussions. Claims that the recycling economy represents hundreds of billions of dollars in “untapped value” are repeated with such confidence that they begin to sound like inevitabilities rather than assumptions. What is rarely questioned is the narrowness of what is being counted.

Circularity, in its dominant form today, has become almost entirely material in its scope. The conversation revolves around fibres, polymers, and waste streams that can be reprocessed and reintroduced into production. Value is defined in terms of what can be recovered, traded, and scaled. It privileges what can be monetised and sidelines what cannot.

If we were to apply the same logic used to estimate the value of material recycling to other parts of the system, the picture would begin to look very different. Consider water.

The textile industry is estimated to use approximately 93 billion cubic metres of water each year. In most major textile producing regions, water remains significantly underpriced, typically ranging from around 0.20 to 1 US dollar per cubic metre depending on geography, infrastructure, and level of treatment. If one were to follow the same methodology often used in recycling projections and simply multiply volume by price, the annual value of water used by the textile sector would fall somewhere between 18.6 and 93 billion dollars.

On the surface, this appears smaller than the widely cited figures attached to material circularity. However, this calculation is fundamentally incomplete because it treats water as a commodity input rather than as a life-supporting system. The true costs associated with water use and misuse do not sit within its market price. They are distributed across public health systems, ecosystems, and communities that are structurally excluded from pricing mechanisms.

Water scarcity and contamination are not abstract environmental concerns. They are directly linked to human mortality and morbidity. Estimates suggest that more than one million people die each year due to issues related to inadequate access to safe water, sanitation, and hygiene. A far larger population experiences chronic health impacts, reduced economic productivity, and diminished quality of life as a result of water stress and pollution. These burdens are disproportionately concentrated in regions that are central to global textile production.

Economic systems, uncomfortable as it may be, do attempt to quantify the cost of human life through the concept of the Value of a Statistical Life. This metric is widely used in policy analysis, infrastructure planning, and environmental regulation. Peer reviewed studies and regulatory agencies place this value in the range of several million dollars per life in high income countries, often between 5 and 10 million dollars. In lower income contexts, the figure is typically adjusted downward based on income elasticity, with estimates sometimes falling closer to 1 million dollars or below.

Even if one adopts a conservative global average of 1 million dollars per life, the economic loss associated with one million water-related deaths per year reaches approximately 1 trillion dollars annually. This figure does not account for non-fatal disease burdens, long-term health impacts, lost productivity, ecosystem degradation, or intergenerational effects. It is a partial estimate that already exceeds the most optimistic projections of value attributed to material recycling.

This comparison is not intended to suggest that water and materials should be directly traded off against each other, but rather to expose a structural inconsistency in how value is defined and pursued. Material circularity generates revenue streams that can be captured by firms and investors. Water stewardship, in contrast, primarily involves cost redistribution. There is no equivalent mechanism to capture returns from avoided harm. It requires investments in infrastructure, process changes, chemical management, and governance systems whose benefits are diffuse, long-term, and often external to the balance sheet of any single actor.

As a result, the system gravitates toward what it can monetise. Brands actively pursue recycled inputs, invest in technologies that enable fibre-to-fibre recycling, and align themselves with regulatory incentives that reward recycled content. At the same time, far fewer resources are directed toward ensuring that water use within the same supply chains is managed in a way that protects ecosystems and human health. Wastewater treatment remains inconsistent, chemical management is often reactive rather than preventive, and basin-level water governance is still treated as peripheral rather than central to sustainability strategies.

The disparity is not due to a lack of awareness. It is a reflection of how incentives are structured. When value is defined primarily in financial terms, and when those financial returns depend on the ability to capture and resell material flows, the system will optimise accordingly. Elements that resist commodification, such as clean water, public health, and ecological stability, are systematically undervalued regardless of their actual importance.

Framing circularity as a multi-hundred-billion-dollar opportunity is therefore not simply an optimistic projection. It is an indication of where the system expects to extract value. What it leaves out is equally telling.

Water, health, and ecosystem impacts cannot sit outside the system as residuals to be managed later. They have to be part of the same logic that defines value in the first place. That shift carries a consequence the current model avoids. Not everything that matters can be captured as return, and unless the system is willing to absorb what it cannot monetise, it will remain selective in what it closes.

If circularity, in your system, begins and ends with fibres and polymers, then it is not true circularity. It is material recovery with a revenue model.