cradle to recradle
i've been (slowly) reading William McDonough and Michael Braungart's cradle to cradle
.
it talks about how recycling is for the most part actually downcycling: whatever we recycle isn't really reused, but instead used again for lower quality products: virgin paper into cardboard, plastic bags into astroturf, etc. furthermore, valuable materials like metals are often lost due to the inability to reclaim them after manufacturing: sheet metal from automobiles which are covered with paint and polymers that make them unusuable, and things like wiring encased within metal and plastic, making it almost impossible to reclaim valuable copper wire. sustainability really needs to come from the design phase: instead of just assuming that whatever we make can and will be recycled, design products such that they are both easily maintained and repaired but also can be disassembled at the tail end of the life cycle to reclaim all the valuable materials to be reused. (the book itself is made out of a non-wood polymer that claims to be 1. waterproof and 2. completely reclaimable to make other books again. i'm sooo tempted to read it in the bathtub.)
there's a great article in the january 14th issue of the new yorker (sorry, not online) which talks about the scrap metal industry, in which amazingly, they actually do seem to be reclaiming all of these unreclaimable materials. from machines that shred cars down to component parts for use as scrap iron and steel, to shipping the scrambled bits of wire and plastic to china to have hundreds of women pore over it to pick out all the bits of valuable copper, if designers won't address the issue, then possibly economics will.
meanwhile there's another great article in the nytimes magazine about recycling cellphones:
Recycling feels good because we imagine it as just this kind of alchemy -- which Umicore achieves with impressive environmental controls. The centerpiece is a monstrous gas-cleaning-and-filtration system that captures and neutralizes enough of the carcinogenic and endocrine-altering chemicals produced from melting e-waste, according to Umicore, that the faint yellow emission finally released from its smokestack easily surpasses the European Union's air-quality standards. (Martin Hojsik, who campaigns against toxics for Greenpeace International, notes that the process followed by Umicore and its few, similarly equipped competitors around the world is "not entirely clean" but still "the preferable solution" for recovering metals from e-waste.) Ultimately, by weight, only 1/2 of 1 percent of the e-waste Umicore takes in cannot be safely sent back into the world in a usable form. "There is often a discussion of separating what is valuable from what is toxic," Christian Hagelüken, Umicore's senior manager of business development, told me. "But sometimes they are the same thing."
This may never be more true than for cellphones. They are the most valuable form of e-waste. Each one contains about a dollar's worth of precious metals, mostly gold. And while single phones house far less hazardous material than a computer -- an old, clunky monitor can incorporate seven pounds of lead -- their cumulative presence is staggering. Last year, according to ABI Research, 1.2 billion phones were sold worldwide. Sixty percent of them probably replaced existing ones. In the United States, phones are cast aside after, on average, 12 months. And according to the industry trade group CTIA, four out of every five people in the country own cellphones.
...
Reuse, we are told, is as green a virtue as recycling. But with e-waste all the old ecological dogmas start to become ambiguous. Cellphones represent only a part of the world's e-waste problem. But they are a key to understanding how complicated it is. They also embody the kind of high-tech products that we will be throwing away more of: easier to upgrade than repair, increasingly disposable-seeming but also deeply personal. As governments around the world, from the European Union to New York City, propose or pass laws to require the recycling of e-waste, there's little consensus about what recycling actually means. No matter how close our relationship with our phones has become -- how faithfully we keep them with us, how we hold them to our faces and whisper into them -- we rarely wonder where they go when they die.
food for thought. which doesn't make me want an iphone or a new hdtv any less.