Circular Economy

Just finished reading a fascinating article in this month's National Geographic called The End of Trash. It describes the efforts being taken in some parts of the world to create a circular economy in which waste becomes just another material for some other process.  What is especially interesting about this concept is that it is as much a return to how waste was treated in the past as it is a result of innovations in these modern times which might enable it to come about.

The article takes great pains in detailing the source, processes and use, and final destination of our waste. Not surprisingly, while 2/3 of the material flowing through the global economy, that was 67.4 billion tons in 2015, gets emitted as pollution or scattered/disposed of as waste, less than 10% is reused.  This contrasts starkly with the knowledge of how societies and cultures more tuned to nature, wasted very little, as an example, in the use of a buffalo, meat for sustenance, hides for clothing, ligaments and bones for sewing thread and tools; nothing harvested that wasn't used in some way. 

Additionally, our trend towards a more consumer driven society, and the accepted belief that shiny and new is always better than worn and old, creates an endless supply of still useful goods that are discarded only because they work a tad less efficiently or are just not the latest and greatest.  The cell phone industry is a perfect example of this cycle of waste.  It eventually becomes necessary to replace a working but aged cell phone merely because the technology which cell phones access changes (or is purposefully altered) so that the older phones don't work.  Not only have advertisers been very successfully convincing the majority of people that keeping up with the Joneses, is necessary to remain socially accepted, but it has been latched onto by many of our institutions so that failure to do so is considered anti-capitalist, hence anti-American. 

A number of examples were cited in the article of successful attempts to create a more circular economy, hence less trash.  Unfortunately, most were overseas.  In Iceland, a power station that takes advantage of geothermal energy from the magma beneath the country's lava fields, not only produces heat and electricity for homes, but after treating the water that has created that energy, the water is used to create a popular tourist attraction.  Also noted was the Italian company that extracts wool to be
re-spun, and an 11 company cooperative in Denmark where the steam from a nearby power plant is used to sterilize a company's equipment, which then sends its yeast slurry to a bioenergy plant where microbes process in into natural gas. 

Unfortunately, the circularity gap, the difference between what is wasted and what is reused, is widening, not closing, our use of natural resources is on pace to double again in another 30 years, and our carbon emissions are certainly not slowing.  The author, an admitted optimist, accepts the premise that his generation, my generation, needs to relinquish the reigns of power, the sooner the better, to make way for the ideas and vision of those born since 1990.  Those people, who will do their living and dying in the second half of the 21st century, hopefully will make the necessary (and difficult) decisions to rethink our assault on nature, our use and abuse of the finite natural resources of our planet, and do their best to create a more circular economy that combines the thriftiness of our more agrarian ancestors with the innovation of the coming continued advancements in material processing, waste management and cooperative business practices.

I would imagine that our vision of the future, the one where machines make life easier, less dangerous, more productive, does not include mountains of used consumer goods or islands of plastic floating in our waterways.  Yet that is our direction, if we continue to fail to address how we are becoming the trashy neighbor of the solar system.  The article in Nat Geo makes it all too clear that it is not the lack of how to make things right, but the lack of will to do it, just as it is with so many of our shared problems.

Perhaps a silver lining might emerge from this virus scare but only if we resist the belief that we can merely return to doing what we did before.  We need a sea change in our approach, or we will fail to heed the lessons of this pandemic, and fail to do the right thing by our progeny and our Mother Earth.