The production,
processing, and disposal of material in our modern throwaway society
wastes not only materials but energy as well, thus producing
unnecessary, climate-disrupting carbon dioxide emissions. In nature,
one-way linear flows do not survive long. Nor, by extension, can they
survive long in the expanding global economy. The throwaway economy
that has been evolving over the last half-century is an aberration,
now itself headed for the junk heap of history. The potential for
sharply reducing materials use was pioneered in Germany, initially by
Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek in the early 1990s and then by Ernst von
Weizsäcker, an environmental leader in the German Bundestag.
They argued that modern industrial economies could function very
effectively using only one quarter the virgin raw material prevailing
at the time.
In 2002, American architect William McDonough
and German chemist Michael Braungart wrote Cradle to Cradle: Remaking
the Way We Make Things. They concluded that waste and pollution are
to be avoided entirely. "Pollution," said McDonough, "is a
symbol of design failure."
Industry, including the
production of plastics, fertilizers, steel, cement, and paper,
accounts for more than 30 percent of world energy consumption.
Worldwide, increasing recycling rates and moving to the most
efficient manufacturing systems in use today could reduce energy use
in the petrochemical industry by 32 percent.
Reducing
materials use means recycling steel, the use of which dwarfs that of
all other metals combined. Steel use is dominated by three industries
- automobile, household appliances, and construction. In the United
States, virtually all cars are recycled. They are simply too valuable
to be left to rust in out-of-the-way junkyards. The U.S. recycling
rate for household appliances is estimated at 90 percent. For steel
cans it is 60 percent, and for construction steel it is 97 percent
for steel beams and girders, but only 65 percent for reinforcement
steel. Still, the steel discarded each year is enough to meet the
needs of the U.S. automobile industry.
The cement industry
accounts for 7 percent of industrial energy use. China, at close to
half of world production, manufactures more cement than the next top
20 countries combined, yet it does so with extraordinary
inefficiency.
Restructuring the transportation system also
has a huge potential for reducing materials use. For example,
improving urban transit means that one 12-ton bus can replace 60 cars
weighing 1.5 tons each, or a total of 90 tons, reducing material use
by 87 percent. Every time someone decides to replace a car with a
bike, material use is reduced by 99 percent.
The big
challenge in cities everywhere is to recycle the many components of
garbage, since recycling uses only a fraction of the energy of
producing the same items from virgin raw materials. Advanced
industrial economies with stable populations, such as those in Europe
and Japan, can rely primarily on the stock of materials already in
the economy rather than using virgin raw materials. Metals such as
steel and aluminum can be used and reused indefinitely.
And since AUT is
so crap at providing recycling options, the best alternative is to
take home your plastics and glass and recycle it there.
Check
www.reducerubbish.govt.nz/recycle/tips
for recycling tips
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