Recently, I heard a phrase by Facundo Cabral that remained spinning in my head: "Juan Comodoro looking for water found oil... but he died of thirst", and I can't help but think about how worn out we have the world with our excessive consumerism while ignoring the fundamental thing: how to preserve it for the future.
Natural resources are becoming increasingly scarce, and although we discuss sustainability in panels, conferences, and meetings, we continue to operate as if we had a spare planet in our shopping carts daily.
According to the Circularity Gap Report, the use of materials worldwide has skyrocketed exponentially in the last 50 years, even exceeding the population growth curve. In other words, we consume resources faster than the planet can replenish them.
For this reason, the circular economy concept is more than a fashion trend or a requirement for environmental regulations; it is a strategic necessity. Simply, it involves designing products and processes with the vision that materials have multiple life cycles, minimizing waste, and maximizing reuse and recycling. However, to implement it in the industry, we must analyze how this works in the value chains in Mexico.
Take the formed metal industry as an example. A key challenge is the reliance on imported steels, particularly from Asia, due to the lack of local production of specific grades and specialized alloys. This situation increases costs, and delivery times and affects the carbon footprint due to transcontinental transport.
Although efforts are being made to develop national capacities for producing these materials, many companies still must import specific steel to meet their customers' quality standards. To close this cycle, it is necessary to encourage investment in local production and develop strategies that reduce dependence on external inputs, boosting the industry's sustainability and competitiveness.
Otherwise, thinking of a truly disruptive approach, the objective would be to work on the homologation of national equivalences for every one of the imported steels. This would allow us to significantly increase the percentage of national content in our manufacturers, reducing costs, time, and dependence on foreign markets structurally and sustainably.
The real challenge is the cost structures and performance indicators of production plants. In many companies, decision-making focuses on reducing immediate costs without assessing the long-term impact of adopting more sustainable models.
How do we change this? We must watch the whole movie. By this, I mean integrating circular economy criteria into purchase metrics, encouraging the redesign of products to facilitate the disassembly and reuse of materials, and investing in innovation to adapt processes to a more sustainable vision.
Ultimately, if we continue to operate with the logic of "buy, use, discard," what happened to Juan Comodoro will happen to us: we will have a market with many opportunities but a planet without resources to take advantage of them.