Recycling is important, yes. But it is also completely inadequate to meet our needs. We tend to think that it is the best alternative to using virgin materials. In fact, it’s often the worst thing that can happen. Consider a glass bottle. To recycle it, you have to crush it into pieces, melt the pieces, and mold them into a brand new bottle. This is an industrial process that requires a lot of energy, time and money.
Or you can wash and reuse it.
This is a better alternative and is by no means a new idea. For most of the past century, gas stations, dairies and other businesses sold their products in glass bottles, which were then collected, cleaned and reused.
Rendering a phone, car battery, or solar panel down to its constituent metals requires far more energy, cost, and, as we’ve seen, dangerous labor than remanufacturing that product. Refurbished computers, cell phones, and even solar panels are available for purchase online and in some stores. However, retrofitting is only really widespread in developing countries. If you’re a North American and aren’t happy with your iPhone 8, there are plenty of people in less wealthy countries who are happy to get it.
There are important lessons here, perhaps the most important. Looking to the future, we will need to start thinking beyond simply replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy and increasing the supply of raw materials. Rather, we will need to completely restructure our relationship with energy and natural resources. That seems like a tall order, but there is much we can do as consumers, as voters, and as humans to soften the downstream effects of the technology arms race.
From now on, our critical metals will be sourced from all types of mines, scrapyards and recycling centers around the world. Some emerge from new sources, using new methods and technologies. And the choices we make about where and how we get those metals, and who thrives and suffers in the process, matter a lot. But equally important is the question of how much of all these things we really need and how to reduce that need.
We are lucky in some ways. That means we are only at the beginning of a historic global transition. The key is finding a way to make it work without repeating the worst mistakes of last time.
This article is based on an article by Vince Beiser. Power Metal: The race for resources that will shape the futurepublished by Riverhead on November 19 (a publication of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, all rights reserved).
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