Educating towards a circular economy

The future is discounted for a reason, however. The future is probably wealthier, has better technology, and can reap the reward from investment today. It takes not just political good will, but a leap of faith to make the bet on spending now instead of later.

For planned obsolescence: here's another way to look at it. For a designed lifetime, we can coordinate across all the inputs to a product and select the right tradeoff between cost, quality and longevity. If we don't have a designed lifetime, the actual lifetime will only be as long as the shortest-lived part that can't be economically replaced. Making everything economical to replace means compromising on design, and often quality: a phone that plugged together like Lego would be substantially worse than our current integrated devices in weight and size.

(The idea of building something without a designed lifetime seems a little bit crazy to me, from an engineering perspective. It frames a whole bunch of decisions and trade-offs. I think it's better to put stuff into more people's hands rather than keep things expensive and exclusionary, which would undoubtedly be a side-effect of outlawing designed lifetimes.)

- integrating garbage management as part of the product - so that entail would subsidies for biodegradable and taxes for unrecycleable materials? Lets say a coke bottle is recycleable. It is now up to the consumer to recycle it. A television has many parts, some unrecycleable, some recycleable. Its often more expensive for a consumer to recycle it than to just dump it.

If you suppose this is the only system possible then you must assume so and fight within those constraints.

I propose, though, that new types of high-tech economic/political/social protocols/structures/systems can make it much more practical to achieve these types of goals, such as costing in externalities.

The problem as I see it is that we still run our society _manually_ like a big game of Dungeons & Dragons. New decentralization technologies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. show that it is possible to begin to automatically organize and regulate on a large scale.

These more sophisticated high-tech systems, when integrated into society, will make it much more realistic to track and integrate external effects into a company's bottom line, for example.

This requires changing overall core social organization into a high-tech process.

The current economy is surprisingly wasteful in its model of value creation. In Europe, material recycling and waste-based energy recovery captures only 5 percent of the original raw material value.

Is that 5% enough to cover the logistical costs of transporting/sorting etc. and energy costs of conversion? No, or else we would have private garbage trucks competing to collect our trash. Bringing the recycling rate up would only increase costs.

If recycling were more efficient (read: profitable), we could leave it to private enterprise to work out solutions. Companies would fight tooth and nail to collect our wasted "gold".

https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/circular-economy/ov...

"YOU WON'T FIND a Chinese version of Alan Bachrach [US recycling entrepreneur], just as you won't find an Indian, Kenyan, Vietnamese, or Jordanian one, either. The reason is that most of the world remains poor enough to justify employing people to do what Alan does with star screens and air guns.

Consider what happens every night in the courtyard of the Shanghai high-rise where I live. Just past midnight you'll likely hear the clank of a bottle bouncing across concrete. If you follow that bounce back to its source, you'll come to a concrete hut, not much larger than a single-car garage, from which fragrant trash has been spilled several feet into the narrow asphalt road. It doesn't look like American trash: there are few boxes, cans, or bottles. Rather, it's mostly food waste — peels, husks, bones.

Move a little closer, and you might see two or three hunched shadows atop the oozing mess, canvas bags swung over their shoulders, scrounging through it with bare hands, searching for metal cans, plastic bottles, or perhaps something better yet — a stray coin. They're not Shanghainese but often families of poor migrants from farms in the less wealthy provinces, making the best living that they can.

Families that pick through trash in the middle of the night are just the last screen in a profit-driven process that, if you wait outside my building through the night, begins at the gate at first light. There you'll see a squat and brawny migrant woman wearing a fanny pack stuffed with small money, and carrying a small hand scale. If anyone is the Chinese equivalent of Alan Bachrach, presiding over a system that harvests recyclables from the trash, she is it. Her destination is the pile of cardboard tied with twine that's waited beneath the night watchman's gaze, and a waist-high balance scale of the sort that you might find in a doctor's office. As she pulls out the big scale, the early-rising old ladies in my building wander downstairs carrying a few plastic bottles, perhaps a small cardboard box or two, and maybe a small plastic bag filled with cans. The bottles and cans are priced individually; the boxes are attached to a small hook on the hand scale and weighed. Payment is equivalent to a few pennies, which the early risers take to the wet market, in search of the day's vegetables...

There's no need for single-stream schemes to raise the recycling rate in Chinese cities because, in the end, my Chinese neighbors have something that most Americans don't: a recognition that "the recycling" is worth more than virtue.

It's worth money."

http://theweek.com/articles/455486/inside-world-forprofit-re...

But access-over-ownership is kinda orthogonal to making things repairable and upgradable. You can still make progress on the latter. I read a comment from an engineer somewhere... he said you can take tons of classes on designing for manufacturability, but he's never seen one on designing for maintenance.

Back to cars, I think the example he used was there's some makes and models known to mechanics as being complete shitjobs when it comes to regular maintenance... you need to take half the engine apart to get to some regularly-serviceable component like a clutch or whatever. I'm sure it was designed to be put together easily in the factory, but when the maintenance is an externality, you just don't optimize for that. Access over ownership doesn't address that.

Eventually we can just burn all that trash down, and reassemble the carbon the way we want. It's is not the bottleneck for decades already.