The Butterfly Diagram, popularized by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, illustrates the circular economy’s ongoing flow of materials.

It divides into two cycles: the biological cycle, which returns nutrients to the biosphere, and the technical cycle, which manages finite resources. In industrial sectors, the technical cycle prioritizes maintenance, reuse, refurbishment, and recycling to conserve energy and labor.

The goal is to decouple economic growth from finite resource use through systemic circularity.