Re:Garfield phones beach mystery finally solved
by userbinator on Thursday March 28, 2019 @10:34PM
(#19518654)
Economically impractical, yes.
You can bet that if for some reason the demand for those phones, or perhaps other things we may consider just waste today, rose high enough, there would be enough incentive to recover them.
Look up "low background steel" for one notable example. CFC refrigerants are another --- what used to be cheap and freely available gases were used in large quantities and simply released to the environment, then started causing environmental problems, so production was eventually banned and the price shot up enough that recovering and recycling became profitable.
"It's bad to release it into the environment" doesn't motivate as much as "it's very valuable so don't release it into the environment even if you don't care about pollution."
You can bet that if for some reason the demand for those phones, or perhaps other things we may consider just waste today, rose high enough, there would be enough incentive to recover them.
Look up "low background steel" for one notable example. CFC refrigerants are another --- what used to be cheap and freely available gases were used in large quantities and simply released to the environment, then started causing environmental problems, so production was eventually banned and the price shot up enough that recovering and recycling became profitable.
"It's bad to release it into the environment" doesn't motivate as much as "it's very valuable so don't release it into the environment even if you don't care about pollution."