Scuttlebutt: Consumption Society
By Mitch McFarland
It certainly seems like we all enjoy living in what I call the “consumption society”, wherein we get an unending flow of commercial goods to make our lives easier and more convenient. The problem is that in most cases that flow is only in one direction. It begins with natural resources taken from the earth and ends in a landfill. No one with any degree of seriousness would argue that is is sustainable over a long period of time. We have been in an accelerating race to consume the earth's resources for only about 100 years and can anyone serious believe that this can continue indefinitely?
Unless you flatly don't care, as apparently a sizable amount of the population does not, you must turn your attention to the idea of the circular economy. At this point most people have never even heard of the concept, much less promote it. What the phrase means is that we need to find a way to reuse resources as many times as possible before abandoning them to landfills and oceans.
Fortunately, there are responsible, intelligent, and creative people both in and out of government who understand this and are working on solutions. A circular economy workshop was recently convened by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a non-regulatory agency within the U.S. Department of Commerce that works on science and technology research programs meant to help advance the U.S. economy. The workshop was a means for the agency to find “actionable items” to advance recycling and waste reduction goals. Undersecretary of Commerce Walter Copan explained that the circular economy will have “tremendous societal benefits” for the United States.
Nevertheless, changing the way we view our resource use creates many challenges.
I have an electric car and nothing can sway my opinion that they are the way to go, yet Maria Curry-Nkansah, a senior research advisor at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), tells us that by 2025, “about 600,000 metric tons of lithium ion battery waste will be generated.” Obviously, that is not sustainable despite the development of geothermal mining of so-called “green” lithium.. No mining is sustainable over a long period of time. We can't go on forever tearing up the earth looking for harder and harder to find minerals. Sooner, rather than later, we are going to have to learn to live with what we got instead of relying on the idea that the earth's resources are unlimited and we can go on devouring them relentlessly . That idea may have had some currency when the Earth's population was in the millions and we hadn't harnessed machine tools. There are now nearly 8 billion of us and we have become remarkably efficient at stripping the land and sea of resources.
So what about all those batteries from electric cars? Does anyone care about that? Well, Maria over at NREL does. They are working with researchers on a battery recycling R&D project to extract lithium, cobalt and nickel for reuse, potentially by the same battery manufacturers working to fill greater demand for EV batteries. It is also working on a project that would make it easier to refurbish intact components like the cathode and anode, she said. Eric Lundgren, founder of BigBattery, works with about half of the manufacturers in the United States to source and repurpose used EV batteries for modular power storage.
And what about all those wind generators that we need to build? What happens to them after their useful life has expired? Curry-Nkansah adds, “Solar panels are in a similar boat. NREL's circular economy lab is working on developing end markets for both, but future models designed for better circularity will also be important.”
Thomas Graedel, professor emeritus of Industrial Ecology and Chemical Engineering at Yale University believes product design is hugely important to the future of the circular economy because it can help prevent the introduction of harmful or hard-to- recycle components into the environment. He points out that “designers need to think about what happens to their beautiful products when they're no longer wanted”.
Keynote speaker William McDonough, an architect and sustainability expert pointed out examples of buildings his architecture firm designed with living roofs, the ability to generate their own power, stormwater systems that water native plants and trees, and building components that can be disassembled, reused, or easily recycled or composted. In an ideal world, he pointed out, “product design is so elegant that every facet has a perfect place in the circular economy”
Kyle Wiens, founder and CEO of iFixit, an open source repair organization, stressed that repair and reuse prevents new materials from entering the waste stream, and it also reduces humanity’s carbon footprint. His organization creates open source repair manuals to help people to repair broken electronics.
We live in a world mesmerized by shiny objects with billions of advertising dollars spurring us on to greater and greater consumption. It will take more than hopeful columns like this to steer the populace toward the circular economy we must create. This is where the role of government becomes crucial. Our tax code is already designed to encourage certain behavior and discourage other behavior, but the tax code is but one of the means that can be used to alter our consumption patterns. Policy interventions, trade agreements, and business partnerships are other ways governments can move the circular economy forward.
Consumers, too, have a role to play. We must insist that products are made in responsible ways. Producer Responsibility Laws have a strong role to play. Forcing manufacturers to be responsible for the waste they create will incentivize large scale changes in behavior by companies without government micro-managing.
One is reminded of the Iroquois philosophy which instructs that “in our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.”
Image by M. Maggs from Pixabay
