Martijn walks through the house one last time. The coat rack is empty, a pale rectangle marks the floor where the dining table stood. On the inside of the cupboard he sees pencil marks that render him silent for a moment. Their son at three, seven, eleven, and the first marks for their grandkids too. The oldest is jumping up and down. “Grandpa! I’m taller than daddy was at five!”

Thirty-one years in one house. It stays in the family, which makes it easier to leave. The modular walls come out this week and the upper floor gets divided again. In a month it will be a house for five, as his son’s family will move in. Some of the furniture will stay behind. They swapped the sofa on the subscription for something smaller, waiting at their new place. What travels in the van is little. Photobooks, clothes, their herb garden, and his grandmother’s dining table. It is a hassle to move, and his husband wanted to find a smaller one, but it has seen five generations of birthdays and he is not giving it up for anyone.

This move was overdue if they are honest. Nobody says anything to your face, but you can feel it. Space is not a thing you sit on these days. Karim and Ineke have been asking them to join the river stewardship community for years now, and when a loft came free they decided it was time.

Martijn and his husband cycle over, reminiscing as they go. The parking spaces became benches and vegetable beds so long ago that nobody finds it worth mentioning anymore. Everything sits within a fifteen-minute-walk that planners build to these days. On Kerkstraat, the vertical garden down the south face of the block is still dripping from last night’s rain. They cross the park that was a motorway junction until the 2030s; now two swimming ponds have become indispensable during the heatwaves.

Karim is waiting for them at the gate. Twenty households around a courtyard in an old flower auction, the greenhouses along one side kept and shared. Everything was lifted onto piles when they converted it. And of course the river. The dike came back thirty metres in the 2040s and the land between is meadow now, under water for most of February. The water has rights of its own and someone has to act for it; along this stretch their stewardship is responsible. A lot of the work is watching temperature and oxygen logs, but somebody has to walk the bank and see what sensors do not. Keeping the side channel clear so fish can run through in spring, all the way from the sea to the German hills now that the barriers are gone. In fact, most of the country’s green is joined up now, one patch reaching the next, so animals can freely roam half of Europe. The latest concern is the beavers. They take the willows faster than these grow back, but the warden has twice struck down the community’s efforts to stop them. Her judgment carries. The river runs through three countries, and so does her mandate.

Martijn joins for the community lunch in the courtyard. His husband is already talking with the woman who bakes the bread about helping twice per week. Their son sends a photo of the grandchildren against the cupboard door, adding their marks to the post.

Emma arrives at the office early. StadsBron, a recycled materials supplier, sits on a circular business hub outside the city. The shuttle runs four times an hour and comes with her mobility subscription. It costs about as much as the car her parents drove, but the commute takes her fifteen minutes less. Congestion is a thing of the past.

Today matters. MeubelWerk, one of her oldest clients, is settling the frame design for an office chair they will build for the next thirty years, and the whole thing depends on aluminium: grade, volume, availability and timelines. Emma pulls up the supply chain flows. Fourteen thousand frames over the next three years as a furniture lease runs out at a shared office building in Rotterdam. Six thousand more the year after, when a corporation in Tilburg refits. The alloy she knows, they have recycled it three times before. The condition she knows too, because MeubelWerk was an early adopter in the 2010s and has been designing furniture to come apart ever since. She’s somewhat worried about reusing it a fourth time though. The alloy might be too polluted with trace elements to pass the certification requirements.

These days, StadsBron is an invaluable piece in the circularity puzzle. Design and planning follow material availability, not the other way round. Her father never had that. He ran the place as Van Dijk Recycling through the nineties, when the resale value was whatever the LME in London said that morning: you took what arrived, sold it to the market, and in a bad year people were let go. When the loops closed the sector became predictable, investable, and capital came looking. Most of the family firms sold. Emma’s father refused, leaving her a business that was on the verge of bankruptcy.

What turned it around was giving the company away, more or less. With government backing she restructured to employee co-ownership. It turns out the people who had been sorting and grading for years knew things worth acting on. The clause that closes today’s contract came from one of them: someone in intake worked out what contaminated aluminium was costing to reprocess and brought it to the weekly improvement session. Now return quality requirements are part of everything StadsBron signs. In addition, the ownership model also shows on the material passport. Anything that runs through StadsBron is marked, and in public tenders that is worth points. Her clients win work with it. Customers prefer it. In fact, the new models are gaining ground and word is that they are attracting investors away from older business models.

After a long day of back and forth with MeubelWerk they are done: specification, timelines, and the condition the frames have to be in when they come back to her in 2080. Emma looks at her watch. Quarter to four, the day is nearly over. She makes a call she has been putting off: a manufacturer in Limburg whose lease book she wants sight of, because their volumes will come free in 2065 and she would like StadsBron to be the one they think of first. Fifteen years out. She books it in.

At four she is out the door. The neighbourhood table meets tonight, the fourth session on where the battery goes, and the people who prefer garden beds are not backing down. Her kids think it is ridiculous that grown adults cannot settle this but Emma has been to enough tables to know that is not how it works.

“A thing that’s never broken has never been loved enough to use.” The saying above the door came with the RepairCentre; the woman who ran it before Thomas painted it there. It doesn’t cover every case though, and it frustrates him to no end.

On his table lies a Nintendo Switch 2, at least 25 years old. The father and son in front of him look both anxious and hopeful — they want to play SuperMario together, it’s gloriously retro. Thomas turns over the device with a tenderness he saves for the hopeless cases and carefully wrestles it open. It’s glued, not screwed, no passport, all custom parts and he can’t get to the problem without wrecking the rest. He knows exactly why it was built this way. He spent his first career making people want the next thing before the last one had worn out. The wastefulness turns his stomach now. He takes it as a good sign.

The device is beyond saving, but not beyond use, and it goes to the ReCovered collection box. The father lifts his son up to drop it in, and the boy watches the little screen on the bin log what it’s taken: the aluminium, the lithium, the gold in the board. “It’ll be back,” Thomas tells the boy. “Just not as a Switch.” The boy agrees solemnly. That’s acceptable.

His friend Fatima walks in at one. She spent her best years in the Cool Down movement, fighting the fast consumption, fast travelling, fast-everything battles. “Earned enough Karma points today?” she jokes. As far as she’s concerned, he was wrecking the world, while she wrecked his previous career. What connects them is a shared weakness for pub quizzes and an inability to lose one gracefully. Neither has ever apologised.

Today Fatima is a guest on the Circular Realities talk show, when they cover Cool Down, and he’s excited to be in the audience and see the recording studio. It is located in an old swimming pool, drained decades ago. The tiles kept, the tribunes still curved around what was the deep end. The talk show audience sits here now. The results of innovative ecodesign are visible everywhere in the décor. The studio walls are modular, bolted rather than glued, and can be moved through the week as the programmes change. The panels were grown rather than made: mycelium and pressed reed, designed to be returned to the earth when they finally wear through. Every object on set carries a passport: viewers can pull it up in the FiksHet app to see where its materials have been. It’s incredible and such an example.

Thomas finds his seat and is surprised to see his friend, who has faced the riot police chained to a data centre, look nervous. She captures the audience immediately with her lively stories. The ban on fast fashion. How ambitious EPR rules snowballed into a world where a thing that could not be 100% reused would no longer be bought by citizens. They show amazing footage in support of her story before they turn to what is not won. The composites the labs still cannot pull cleanly apart. The critical metals the country still imports, and the people who carry that cost far away. These fights are still theirs to finish. Thomas thinks of the little boy, and the dead Nintendo he let go of so easily. It leaves him hopeful the next generation will finish what Fatima started.

Nora steps off the tram, straight from her Circular Welfare class. Her grandmother texted her about some accident and is now stuck in the FiksHet app. When she walks through the kitchen door Nora needs a moment to take in the scene. The wall is covered in red streaks, two of the neighbourhood kids are on their knees with cloths, and her grandmother is laughing. “You’re here! Good!” She waves at the counter, crowded with sealed glass jars. This year’s tomato passata, sealed and safe. “The harvest came in and so did these two rascals. I was on the very last batch.” Her grandmother has to laugh again, so the boy tells it himself: he wanted to see what was in the pot, pulled the handle, and the whole thing came down. The kid is unhurt and looks deeply impressed with his wall art.

Her grandma pours out some lemonade: “The jars came through fine, but the kitchen scale did not. The pan took it on its way down. It’s not working anymore so I wanted to get a new one from FiksHet, but that wretched app won’t show any.”

Nora looks at her grandmother. “You can’t just order a new one, granny, that’s not how it works anymore.” She flips the scale, opens the magnetic back, and finds a crack in the chip. She opens FiksHet and shows her that the standard replacements are stored in the 24/7 kiosk down the road. The two little wall artists, who have just learnt their first repair skills in school, are begging to fetch it. They know the drill: new chip from the kiosk, old one in the ReCover collection box beside it. They’re back before Nora can finish her lemonade. “Now we just need to program it to the scale… and… we’re done!” Her grandmother watches, half amazed. “I still can’t get used to this, I wish I could just order a new one. Luckily I’ve got you.” She means it kindly, mostly, but doesn’t say the old days were easier, when a broken thing did not mean calling in help.

“Wait… there’s something I’ve been meaning to give you as a thank you for all your help.” When she returns Nora’s eyes pop open wide. It’s a coat, at least 60 years old. Deep green, embroidered with flowers around the collar, the patchwork at the elbows an artwork in itself. It’s the kind of thing you’d see on influencers or sometimes the guests of the Circular Realities show. Nora cannot wait to wear it to school. It is one of the most beautiful things anyone has ever given her.

They carry the jars with passata to the community garden, walking slowly, her grandmother setting the pace now. Half of what they pass is edible: the vegetable beds, the fruit trees the street planted the year Nora was born, the herb troughs anyone may cut from. Her grandmother stops at the insect hotel, where children argue about which plants would help the bees through next summer. They’re indispensable to a good harvest. At the long table in the courtyard, the passata joins the jams and fermented carrots, the sauerkraut and bottles of cider. Ready to be shared for winter. But first there is dinner, and a harvest to celebrate.

Alix couldn’t believe their eyes. The scanning electron microscope illuminated success for the third consecutive time: ten recycles of the alloy and no microcracks, almost no degradation of strength, no loss of flexibility. It could drive an entirely new supply chain of tough, resilient, re-usable modular parts for furniture, tram cars or buildings.

Alix grinned. Finally! A celebration was in order. The alloy tolerated more trace element impurities that built up during recycling, meaning less pure aluminium would be needed and the Netherlands could rely more on its urban mines. Their friend Emma at StadsBron would want to hear about this. She had shared her worry not long ago: the aluminium in her client’s chair frames might be too degraded to recover if they used it one more time. Now it didn’t have to be. Alix would call her after work to plan dinner.

Opening up new possibilities within circularity excited Alix – but a discovery like this is only the beginning and Alix knew better than to imagine the alloy would find its own way into the world. It would mean nothing until the standards were rewritten and the materials apps that design firms, manufacturers and repair hubs rely on were updated to recognise it. And it would mean new training to help with learning how to use the 9xxx alloy. Those would be developed for technical and design experts, for local supply managers, for citizens with basic repair skills, and for schools. The MBOs, HBOs and universities all taught circular design these days, and eventually it would even be covered in the local high schools, where children first learn to take a thing apart. This discovery was only the start, now her team would continue with a whole new phase of research: putting things in motion through the network and practical skills they have built up throughout the years.

Alix checked their watch: enough for today. The Circular Realities broadcast was about to start, and their colleague Joost was on, joining the host in another history episode. Tonight they would cover the ‘Big Tech’ era — wealth in a few hands, energy-hungry data centres, mountains of e-waste, cyber-security catastrophes — and the shift that followed, when Europe expanded regulations and began supporting responsible European circular technology and innovation firms. Alix liked Joost’s contribution for one question in particular. He would always ask, mildly, whether any of the inventions served a society that was fair. It was not a comfortable question, and Alix kept a version of it open on their own desk. Much of their best research began outside the lab. In the FiksHet app repairers logged what broke and what held. More than one of Alix’s projects had started as a complaint from someone with a screwdriver, not a hypothesis from someone with a research grant. Their job was to serve society in everything they did.

The hard problems were still hard, and Alix’s field still ran at them: the batteries that hold a city through a windless fortnight, the hydrogen kept in reserve, transport that pours power back into the grid. What had changed was quieter and harder to point at. No one in Alix’s building would now build a thing simply because it could be built; the first question in any proposal was no longer whether it worked, but who it was for, and what it would cost the world to run. Progress has become something you measure in wellbeing.

Iris glances at her schedule. A morning of short but important sessions, followed by an afternoon of verbal wrestling with her new colleagues. Her political career spanned thirty years and she was widely credited for her part in putting the fifty-year horizon on the political agenda. But as a newly appointed council member of the ‘Raad van Aarde’, she is still feeling her way. The Council was a recent innovation — an institution positioned next to the Raad van State to put muscle behind the conviction that people are one with nature. It holds space for the long-term view, weighing policy in the interest of people, animals, and ecosystems of today and of the future, rather than the next election or quarterly report.

The first hearing that morning is an international river warden over a dispute with a Dutch stewardship. Twice now the community has caged their willows to protect them against beavers but the warden is arguing that the beavers’ role outweighs the willows’ rights in maintaining the river’s inherent right to water quality.

The second sitting is thornier. A neighbourhood has come regarding the ever-present tension between land for energy and land for food. Their community table found a compromise: vegetable beds layered over the battery installation the regional energy plan required. However, it hasn’t been done before, and no one yet knows whether crops can thrive over a warming battery bank. The council’s ruling will stand for a long time so they flag this as a priority research question, to be taken up by academia. Most of what the Council does is slower and smaller — the kind of decision that accumulates into real change only over years. Iris laughs at herself: a terrible gardener, good at nothing that grows, yet somehow skilled at tending ecosystems of change, at helping a good local experiment take root and spread.

The afternoon programme is what Iris dreads, but it’s the reason the Raad van Aarde should exist at all, at least as far as she’s concerned. Transformation does not occur without pain, and the greater good keeps asking for sacrifices. The trick, if there is one, is giving loss a seat at the table. Last month it was a farming family whose land, worked for six generations, was going back to the river. The decision was correct, and still broke something that could not be made bearable. Today it is harder to see the full implications. A crucial metal the country still imports, with people and living beings carrying the burden across the supply chain. There is a representative for them in the room. Iris understands the pull of the easy yes but does not give it. The advice the council drafts has implications. It will name the loss, and the compensation owed. She will be weighing that over the coming months.

That evening, she has one more engagement, and she would keep it even if she had to give up all the rest. She was asked as a voluntary judge to an elementary school mock hearing. Three classes, each speaking for a tree: the oaks, the pines, the beeches. The trees, they say, are worried about recurring heatwaves and the summers ahead. These debates teach them to rise and speak for what can’t speak for itself. The legal rights of more and more vital parts of nature are being acknowledged, and these classes would soon be ready to adopt a living being themselves. Watching the fervor with which these youngsters voice even the inconvenient truths, Iris finds herself hopeful. Mostly.