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.)
For how long can this be true when there are finite-easily-accessible resources?
> It takes...a leap of faith to make the bet on spending now...
That's some incredible pretzel logic, framing the practice of creating extra garbage to make a quick buck as "investing in the future."
That's the crux of the matter. What's the "right" tradeoff?
With things like waste disposal an externality, often times the "right" tradeoff is one that encourages frequent replacement. At best, this encourages a materialistic (wasteful) culture. At it's most cynical, this is a way of padding corporate profits by encouraging recurring revenue.
Don't get me wrong -- this is the rational choice when all incentives are towards maximizing shareholder value. I think the question is what principles do we want guiding the choice of the right tradeoff?
- 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.
It's trivial to prove for for e.g. inkjet printers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence#Programme....
The Phoebus lightbulb cartel is probably the first group of manufacturers to actually do planned obsolescence http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/history/the-great-lightbu...
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.
Policy is one. A few weeks ago there were a few posts about the Swedes giving tax breaks on repair labor, the idea being to create an incentive that encourages reuse over waste:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/19/waste-not-want...
And HN discussion on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12579879
Technologies for depolymerization and carbon capture are scalable to realize fully circular economies. Our recycling rate, however, is only about 34%[0]. This is why educating towards a circular economy is so important. Plastics, among other materials, are fascinating and great, and their challenges are largely the result of consumers.
[0] https://www.epa.gov/smm/advancing-sustainable-materials-mana...
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...
These areas are few, though. Most of the time the cost of separating valuable materials from each other in a trashed item far exceeds the value of the materials recovered.
It reminds me of Leibniz's idea that we live in the best of all possible worlds [1], except the omniscience & efficiency of the market stand in for God.
If the way in which we hope the economy picks good outcomes involves people thinking of things that might be worth doing, trying them and then succeeding if they were right, we surely must allow that not all of the good ideas have already been had, and so we do not yet live in the best (most economic?) of all possible worlds?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_of_all_possible_worlds
You misquote me. I make no such value judgment.
My original argument: If recycling were more efficient, it would be privately profitable, and a competitive recycling market would develop.
If we as a society believe recycling to be worthwhile, we should work to increase the efficiency of recycling to >5% to cover the costs associated with recycling. Alternatively we could continue to subsidize the logistical costs of recycling as we do now.
I think you are missing the point that an historical, linear, consumptive model leaves behind 95% of the value.
A circular model seeks to capture as much of that value as possible, ideally 100%.
"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.[2]"
"[2] This material value retention ratio is defined as the estimated material and energy output of the European waste management and recycling sector, divided by the output of the raw material sector (adjusted for net primary resource imports and 30 percent embedded resource value in net imported products)."
One key point of their analysis is that it includes waste management where material may be buried in a landfill. This highlights the inefficiency of the linear economy. Private companies are paid a fee to bury value.
The global recycling industry for materials is extremely competitive. Private companies are fighting tooth and nail for our gold.
Water bottles are a great, obvious example of extremely profitable recycling. Water bottles can be recycled easily and turned in to more water bottles, t-shirts, car parts, and on and on.
A less obvious, more complicated example is used carpeting. For decades, old discarded carpet has accumulated in landfills. In the linear, consumptive model, landfills were paid to bury the material and its value. It has become such a problem that governments[1] as well as industry trade organization[2] have pledged to tackle the problem. It's complicated because it is multiple materials that can't simply be ground up and remelted. A significant percentage of carpet is nylon, which is very valuable. Today, used carpet is turned in to resin[3], which ultimately becomes furniture, car parts and other useful products.
[1] http://www.calrecycle.ca.gov/Carpet/Program.htm [2] https://carpetrecovery.org/ [3] http://www.econyl.com/
I noticed this in another response, "My original argument: If recycling were more efficient, it would be privately profitable, and a competitive recycling market would develop."
Recycling is very efficient and becoming more so. Incredibly profitable private enterprises that are solely recycling companies operate in a competitive global market.
The circular economy is the next evolution of these markets.
https://www.amazon.com/Cradle-Remaking-Way-Make-Things/dp/14...
As such, this idea would have much better traction in underdeveloped economies, the third world as it were, because it's a population used to economizing and recycling.
From there, the bigger economies would catch on to meet this new kind of demand and likely through osmosis bring it back home to developed economies.
"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...
I think that captures part of it, but the other part is that used/refurbished/repurposed/upcycled, etc. are affordable to poorer people whereas a new item is not.
Consider the repurposed pick-up chassis which becomes an oxcart in some third world country. Or a paint bucket which becomes a tin to store things, etc.
However, point taken about the poor in China. Those people will work --they will work anywhich job without hesitation. People don't always recall that there isn't much social welfare other than family in China.
Access vs ownership is only going to become more prevalent over time - Uber and Lyft, tool shares and makerspaces, the move from products to services.
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.
> The notion of a circular economy has attracted increased attention in recent years. The concept is characterised, more than defined, as an economy that is restorative and regenerative by design and aims to keep products, components, and materials at their highest utility and value at all times, distinguishing between technical and biological cycles. It is conceived as a continuous positive development cycle that preserves and enhances natural capital, optimises resource yields, and minimises system risks by managing finite stocks and renewable flows. It works effectively at every scale. This economic model seeks to ultimately decouple global economic development from finite resource consumption.
How do we get there?
1. A key feature of a circular economy is to be restorative and regenerative by design. The recovery of materials and products is not only addressed at end of use, but is enabled at the design level (e.g., by the choice of materials or a design for disassembly). Companies will need to build core competencies in circular design to facilitate product reuse, recycling and cascading.
2. Business models that move from ownership to performancebased payment models are instrumental in translating products designed for reuse into attractive value propositions. By prioritising access over ownership, these models drive a shift from consumers to users. Companies with significant market share and capabilities along several vertical steps of the linear value chain could play a major role in driving circularity into the mainstream by leveraging their scale and vertical integration.
3. A value preserving materials backbone is a core requirement for the transition to a circular economy. To create value from materials and products after their use, they need to be collected and brought back.
The "circular economy" sounds like a buzzword for more aggressive recycling and eco-friendly materials use. Disposable goods are cheap. What incentives do companies/governments have to make their products more expensive?