today’s Waste, tomorrow’s Raw Material

(Cyclical systems) (Linear) take-make-discard

Harvest alternative raw goods from industrial and domestic waste streams and landfills

Traditional raw materials

- Finite

- Expensive

Our addiction

- New technology

- Abetted by short product life cycles

- Culture of rapid upgrades

Over-consumption — Scare resources — reclaim materials

- Environnemental benefits

- Innovations signal

Waste

- Abundant

- Cheap

Turning their attention to our household rubbish and industry’s scrap as a source of innovative raw materials

Vast waste streams of discarded metal, glass, plastics and rare earth minerals.

America (USEPA) 9.4 millions tons of e-waste for every ton

- 16,000 kg copper

- 350 kg silver

- 34 kg good

- 15 of palladium

Recycle the essential guide by Lucy

Siegle

“Rich countries have a special responsibility for global environment stewardship, both because they have the capital to invest in new technologies and because they are the primary producers of waste and carbon dioxide emissions. Recycling is crucial in developing countries as it is elsewhere. However, poorer societies tend to have a different approach to waste-after all, when resources are scare, anything is a fair game, and rubbish is often re-used in the most inspired, imaginative ways.”

Humankind seems keenest on recycling when resource extraction is difficult.

“It was the industrial revolution that put the brakes on recycling in a big way. It marked a waste shed, than labour and suddenly there was no need to worry. You could also argue that it sowed the seeds for the global economy which countries to have an impact on waste today, as global trading went up several notches. When the world, and it’s associated mineral deposits and natural resources, is your oyster, why worry about eking out resources ?”

But now we do need to worry. Over the past 50 years humankind has altered ecosystems more extensively than at any comparable period of time in history. This has largely been in order to meet growing demands for food, freshwater, timbre, fibre and fuel, resulting in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on earth. If you’re looking for further evidence, you can always read the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem. Assessment, produced by 1300 researchers from 95 countries. As this volume weighs in at some 2,500 pages, it’s probably best to turn to the executive summary, the gist of which is that two thirds of the earth’s lifesustaining ecosystems are under threat to collapse. If this is not a driver fro recycling, I don’t know what is.

Speaking out when it’s unpopular. Back in the day, Henry David Thoreau raged at the robber barons-the big shots of their age, despoiling the environment in the name of progress. Deep in the throes of the seemingly unstoppable growth of tech, a modern-day Thoreau has emerged in the guise of Gerry McGovern-decrying the massive, hidden negative impacts of tech on the environment. McGovern has thoroughly documented in World Wide Waste how tech damages the Earth-and what we should be doing about it. It is not just the acres of discarded computer hardware conveniently dumped in Third World countries. Every time an email is downloaded it contributes to global warming. Every tweet, search, check of a webpage creates pollution. Digital is physical. Those data centers are not in the Cloud. They’re on land in massive physical buildings packed full of computers hungry for energy. It seems invisible. It seems cheap and free. It’s not. Digital costs the Earth.