Recycling is important, yes. But it is also completely insufficient to meet our needs. We tend to view it as the best alternative to using virgin materials. In fact, it can often be one of the worst. Think of a glass bottle. To recycle it, you have to break it into pieces, melt them and turn them into a whole new bottle – an industrial process that requires a lot of energy, time and money.
Or you can just wash it and reuse it.
This is a better alternative and not 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.
Rendering a phone, car battery, or solar panel down to the metals that make it up requires a lot more energy, cost, and, as we’ve seen, labor dangerous than the refurbishment of this product. You can buy refurbished computers, phones, and even solar panels online and in some stores. But renovation is only really widespread in developing countries. If you’re a North American and you’re no longer happy with your iPhone 8, many people in less wealthy countries would be happy to take it.
There are important lessons 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 to increasing our supplies of raw materials. Instead, we will need to completely reshape our relationship with energy and natural resources. This seems like a tall order, but there are a range of things we can do – as consumers, voters and human beings – to mitigate the downstream effects of our technological arms race.
In the future, our critical metals will come from all kinds of mines, scrapyards 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 obtain these metals, and who prospers and suffers in the process, are extremely important. But no less important is the question of how much of all these things we actually need – and how to reduce that need.
We are fortunate in one respect: we are still at the beginning of a historic global transition. 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 Vince Beiser Power Metal: the race for the 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).
