Circular Infrastructure: The Other Half of a Sustainable Energy Economy
When Canadians think about how to solve for sustainable energy, we often focus on what to create: solar panels, wind farms, electric vehicles, batteries.
But the real test of sustainability isn’t what we create, it’s what we leave behind.
A sustainable energy economy needs more than clean technology. It needs circular infrastructure: systems designed to reuse, repair, recycle, or return what we take.
This matters not just for the planet, but for Indigenous communities, who often bear the costs of what some others call progress.
1. We’re Still Building in Straight Lines
Most of today’s clean energy projects follow a predictable and linear model: extract, build, use, and discard. Even technologies that reduce emissions, like batteries or wind turbines, have end-of-life risks if there’s no plan for reuse or safe disposal.
As we noted in The Next Energy Economy, many Indigenous Nations are leading clean energy projects, but few of those come with full support for managing the waste that future generations will have to deal with.
2. The Risk Gets Passed Down
From mining to decommissioning, too many ‘sustainable’ energy projects pass the risk to the land and people at the edges of the system. This often means Indigenous communities, especially those in rural or remote regions. They get left with old infrastructure, chemical runoff, and abandoned sites.
When Indigenous communities are not involved in infrastructure planning from the beginning, circularity becomes an afterthought, if it happens at all.
3. Circular Means More Than Recycling
Circular infrastructure means designing systems that reduce harm from the start, including:
Using fewer harmful materials
Planning for maintenance, repair, and reuse
Creating jobs in dismantling and rebuilding (not just in construction)
Embedding Indigenous consent, governance, and knowledge at every stage
As discussed in What Makes Innovation Indigenous?, the values of balance, responsibility, and forward-looking thought are built into Indigenous worldviews. Circularity isn’t new. it’s just not always recognized.
4. The Opportunity We’re Missing
Canada will invest many billions of dollars in clean energy and infrastructure in 2025 and beyond.
But without circular design, we risk repeating the same extractive patterns, and we’ll end up with a slighty cleaner version of the same broken economy.
Indigenous leadership offers a better way by innovating in a way that both serves and respects the communities it touches, past, present, and future.
Conclusion: A Loop, Not a Line
The future of sustainable energy infrastructure in Canada is circular, which means we need to reduce both emissions and harms.
For Canada to lead in sustainability, we need to support Indigenous-led infrastructure planning. Not just with grants, but with governance. Not just at the start, but through every stage of a project’s life.
The energy economy isn’t sustainable until it respects the whole circle.