Robert Kunzig in National Geographic says, “A circular economy aims to end trash by not producing it at all.” A noble thought, but how do you convince 7.7 billion Earth dwellers to comply?

Of the 103 billion tons, more or less, of resources extracted from the Earth each year, 22 billion tons of it are required to feed us, one-third of which is allowed to rot. Some of the resources go into buildings, cars, ships, etc. that have some finite life span. We tend to get bogged down in figures, but the rest of the story includes 67 billion tons of burned fuel and waste.

In an economy that extracts so...