3FOOD

Third Industrial Revolution Consulting Group
needed to innovate and move towards a circular economy. Future generations will be able to
adapt and cope with constant change, and will have a deeper systemic understanding of the
biological cycle and be capable of using the latest technologies to create a virtuous circular
society.
A clear opportunity for Luxembourg is the commitment from the current government to
implement a circular economy strategy. An effective local network will need to be backed by a
strong financial sector.
With the government’s full support and the right legal framework, Luxembourg could become
the global center for a “safe but transparent” approach to products as services. Such a
transparent approach empowers prosumers and companies by providing the tools for a
distributed and decentralized approach to marshalling local materials and creating seamless
product loops in line with the TIR philosophy of establishing a distributed, transparent, and
democratic approach to renewable energy production.
Interconnecting the Circular Economy
Just as circularity is indispensable to the goal of increasing aggregate efficiencies and reducing
ecological footprints, it is, in turn, contingent upon an interconnected digital network
composed of the Communication Internet, Energy Internet, and Mobility Internet in managing,
powering, and moving economic activity in a virtuous circular economy (CE).
The scale and complexity of the European Union’s €14.3 trillion economy, let alone the €70
trillion global economy, is so vast and data-massive that to perform the granular-scale tracking
of energy, materials, chemicals, water, and related levels of emissions, air and water pollutants,
hazardous wastes, soil contaminants, sewage and toxic effluents requires advanced computing
technologies integrated with the Internet of Things, Services and Networks (IoT, IoS, IoN).
The world produces a prodigious quantity of data, information and knowledge – as much in 24
months than in recorded history, according to Google Chairman Eric Schmidt. Data usage over
the Internet in 2016 is projected to exceed a trillion gigabytes, or one zettabyte, and this
amount is predicted to double over the next 36 months. More than 10 billion devices are
connected to the Internet and that number may explode 10,000-fold to 100 trillion Internet
connected wireless smart sensor network devices within the next 15 years (see visual below).
Such exponential growth rates have been most recently witnessed with mobile phones. Mobile
data traffic has grown nearly 400-million-fold over the past 15 years, according to Cisco’s 2016
Visual Networking Index report.
Luxembourg is poised to take advantage of this extraordinary techno-takeoff. Over the past 15
years the nation has quintupled its public R&D support, with a strong focus on advanced ICT
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