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We popularized recycling in the public consciousness as a fix to our bad habits. We say, "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" but forgot that it's prescriptive of the orde
by arbitrage 7y ago
We popularized recycling in the public consciousness as a fix to our bad habits. We say, "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" but forgot that it's prescriptive of the order in which you are supposed to try to be greener.
Recycling is the last resort. It's good that we've bettered recycling technology so vastly in a few decades, but it shouldn't be the first option. It still uses energy, water, and produces more waste.
And, of course, there's always the opportunity cost, the inherent omnipresent friction of economics. We could be doing better things with all that effort, people, time, and money, than doing a poor job of making up on the backend for a lack of effort on the frontend.
- mistrial9 7y agothe spirit of the parent post here is well-intentioned, but insufficient depth and breadth. Economic value is not rooted in physics. There is no universal value for 0.01 kg of copper, through the ages. The incremental opportunism, and market fluctuation that has been so incredibly effective at building the industrial and post-industrial world, is also miserably short-sighted when it comes to overall flows of material and energy. So, you can't say "Recycling is a last resort" without context, and context gets too complicated, too fast.
- arbitrage 7y agoIt's a metaphor. Not literally a physics or math statement. In the system where most people operate most of the time, there's friction between all moving parts. Likewise, in the person-realm, every choice or action has an opportunity cost. "No such thing as a free lunch." You can tell it's a metaphor and not a literal mathematical statement because it's not written in TeX /s