Recycling is vital, it’s true. But it is also completely insufficient to meet our needs. We usually consider it the best alternative to using virgin materials. In fact, it can often be one of the worst. Consider a glass bottle. To recycle it, you have to break it into pieces, melt the pieces and form them into a completely novel bottle – an industrial process that requires a lot of energy, time and costs.
You can also just wash it and reuse it.
It’s a better alternative and it’s not a novel idea at all. For much of the last century, gas stations, dairies and other businesses sold products in glass bottles that were later collected, washed and reused.
Rendering a phone, car battery, or solar panel into its component metals requires much more energy, cost, and, as we’ve seen, risky work than refurbishing that product. You can buy refurbished computers, phones and even solar panels online and in some stores. However, renovations are really only common in developing countries. If you’re a North American who’s no longer content with your iPhone 8, there are plenty of people in less affluent countries who will happily adopt one.
There are vital conclusions from this, and perhaps the most vital of all is this: looking into the future, we will have to start thinking not only about replacing fossil fuels with renewable sources and increasing the supply of raw materials. Rather, we will have to completely change our relationship with energy and natural resources. It seems hard, but there are many things we can do as consumers, voters and human beings to mitigate the further effects of our technological arms race.
In the future, our critical metals will come from various mines, scrapyards and recycling centers around the world. Some will emerge from novel sources, using novel methods and technologies. And the choices we make about where and how to obtain these metals, and who thrives and who suffers in the process, are incredibly vital. But no less vital is the question of how much of these things we really need and how to reduce this need.
In one respect we are lucky: we are still only at the beginning of a historic global transformation. The key will be figuring out how to make it work without repeating the worst mistakes of the last one.
This article is adapted from a book by Vince Beiser Power Metal: the race for resources that will shape the futurepublished November 19 by Riverhead (printed by Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, all rights reserved).