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The SOSX book series
Closing the Loop
The circular economy
Written for sustainability leads, consortium builders, product and supply-chain strategists, and policy teams. It accompanies SOSX Circularity.
A companion to Seeing the Whole System, pointed at the domain the discipline fits most naturally of all: the circular economy, where the subject matter is loops, stocks, actors and incentives, and where the difference between a slogan and a working material loop is precisely the structure this series teaches you to see.
It opens with the diagram with no return arrow, then works through why recycling rates mislead, how nested cascades carry different values, why the missing actor breaks loops that look complete on paper, and where circularity actually moves. The practice chapters take one loop end to end: choke-point actors, business models read as structures, the consortium as a systems intervention, policy in the model rather than outside it.
The shape is the series' shape: the system first, then the practice, then the machine. Part II takes one loop end to end, the choke-point actor, incentives read as games where cooperation has to survive the end of the pilot funding, the standards lineage of management systems and life-cycle assessment, the parameter that does not exist, scenarios, appraisal that counts late benefits, unpriced effects and the losses you cannot buy back, and three ethical tests. Part III is the machine, and it comes last for the same reason it does everywhere else in this series.
It is written for sustainability leads, for the people assembling circular-economy alliances and consortia, for product and supply-chain strategists, and for policy teams. It stands on its own; you do not need the central book first, though the two are better together.
Inside the book
Part I, Circularity as a system
Chapters 1–10. Reading take-make-waste honestly; stocks and flows as the native language of materials; why recycling rates mislead; the loop against you and the loop you build; the cascade of nested loops carrying different values; emergence and the missing actor; boundaries where circular claims live and die; delays that run on decades; the iceberg, from waste events to the growth paradigm; and where circularity actually moves.
Part II, The practice
Chapters 11–25. Map one loop end to end; find the choke-point actor; incentives as games, and designing cooperation that holds; circular business models read as structures; the standards lineage of management systems and life-cycle assessment; measuring what matters; the parameter that does not exist; scenarios for a loop; appraising a loop, late benefits, unpriced effects and losses you cannot buy back; the consortium as a systems intervention; policy in the model rather than outside it; unintended consequences; three ethical tests; the resilience dividend; and the ways circularity goes wrong.
Part III, The machine
Chapters 26–30. The six steps retold for a loop; grounded research for a scattered evidence base; what-ifs for loop design; method by method, what the machine carries; and SOSX Circularity: the whole product life cycle and the connected systems that affect it, modelled as one system, with life cycle assessment as one of its reports.
Part IV, One spine, many domains
Chapter 31. Eight chairs, one discipline: the survey that closes the series where it began, bring us a loop.
Plus a glossary and further reading in the appendices.
From the series’ shared figure library, the same illustrations you’ll find in the book.
And for the whole argument in one place, start with the central book: SOSX: Seeing the Whole System.