Recycling is important, yes. But it is also completely insufficient to satisfy our needs. We tend to consider it the best alternative to using virgin materials. In fact, it can often be one of the worst. Let’s consider a glass bottle. To recycle it, you have to tear it apart, melt the pieces and mold them into a completely new bottle – an industrial process that requires a lot of energy, time and expense.
Or you could just wash it and reuse it.
This is a better alternative and hardly a new idea. For much of the last century, gas stations, dairies and other businesses sold products in glass bottles that they would then collect, wash and reuse.
Refurbishing a phone, car battery, or solar panel down to its constituent metals requires far more energy, cost, and, as we’ve seen, unsafe labor than refurbishing that product. You can buy refurbished computers, phones, and even solar panels online and in some stores. But restructuring is really only widespread in developing countries. If you’re a North American no longer satisfied with your iPhone 8, there are plenty of people in less wealthy countries who would be happy to get it.
There are important lessons from here, and perhaps the most important of all is this: as we look to the future, we will need to start thinking beyond simply replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy and increasing our supplies of raw materials. Rather, we will have to completely reshape our relationship with energy and natural resources. It seems like a tall order, but there are a number of things we can do – as consumers, as voters, as human beings – to mitigate the downstream effects of our technological arms race.
Going forward, our critical metals will come from all types of mines, scrap yards and recycling centers around the world. Some will 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 who suffers in the process, are extremely important. But no less important is the question of how many of all these things we really need and how to reduce that need.
In one respect we are lucky: we are still only at the beginning of a historic global transition. The key will be to understand how to make it work without repeating the worst mistakes of the previous one.
This article is adapted from one by Vince Beiser Power Metal: the race for resources that will shape the futurepublished November 19 by Riverhead (an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, all rights reserved).