The Next Industrial Revolution? A Policy for Recycling Goods
Conventional wisdom has it that the next century’s revolutions in technology will most likely involve computers or biotechnology. But the technological revolution we need most is in a rather less sexy field: materials.
Actually, what we need are two linked and complementary revolutions: one in materials technology and one in materials policy. It’s the policy side that will be the most difficult, but if we work out a rational materials policy, it will go a long way toward fostering what needs to happen in materials technology.
Why materials? Because of the natural environment. Ensuring a quality environment is one of our biggest challenges, given continued world population growth and increasing consumption.
You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to understand why we need a better materials policy--just go to any shopping center and ponder the fact that everything for sale there is also found in great multiples all over this country and in the rest of the industrialized world, and increasingly in the developing world as well.
Ken Geiser, director of the Toxics Use Reduction Institute at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and a board member of Greenpeace, jokingly calls shopping malls “pre-landfill.”
We’re faced with two contradictory facts: Shopping is now the No. 1 nonoccupational activity of Americans, but landfills and other disposal sites around the country are rapidly filling up. The only solution is a massive and thorough rethinking of production and consumption, a revolution in the economy every bit as profound as the industrial or information revolutions.
Take the personal computer industry, for example. There are now about 150 million PCs in the world, and the industry sells an additional 20 million machines every year, mostly to customers who are replacing computers they already own.
In 1991, a study done at Carnegie Mellon University estimated that by 2005, the same number of PCs that exist now, 150 million, will have been sent to landfills, taking up the equivalent of 300 million cubic feet of space, or an acre of land piled 3 miles high.
Germany is one place where leaders are thinking creatively about how to deal with such problems. Germany has a very high population density, with little room for expanding landfills.
Several years ago, the German government passed a law that requires all manufacturers to take back any packaging a consumer wants to return. Shortly afterward, this was extended to actual commodities, beginning with consumer electronics. Now, when a German customer buys an electronic device, that product can be returned for recycling when the consumer no longer wants it.
A similar policy has been adopted voluntarily by German auto makers. BMWs and Mercedes are now the most recyclable cars in the world--BMW will buy back any of its cars, no matter what shape they’re in.
This has introduced a new concept into German production: “birth to death” responsibility for commodities on the part of German manufacturers. German leaders expect this concept to be extended to all commodities eventually. German industrialists at first opposed the policy, but it has had the unexpected result of increasing German consumers’ loyalty to domestic products, and it has also created a booming recycling industry.
We need similar innovations in the United States. Researchers at Microelectronics & Computer Corp. here in Austin have proposed a national computer-recycling facility that would take in machines and turn them into reusable components or raw materials.
Ideally, this would be supplemented by the industry adopting standards for manufacturing that would make it easier to identify, separate and sort parts. So far this is still just an idea, but one with great potential for both profit and environmental impact.
A wide range of policies pointing us toward cleaner production, “birth to death” commodity responsibility, more effective recycling, toxics substitution and so on, could make the nation more efficient and, at the same time, better at preserving the environment.
Unfortunately, despite Clinton administration programs and initiatives on competitiveness and sustainability, not enough has changed, and much of the rhetoric in Congress these days is explicitly opposed to environmental progress.
U.S. leaders need to understand that regulatory policy and innovation can be synergistic, not necessarily antithetical to each other. Environmental leaders, also, need to grasp the important contribution that technical innovation and policy can make together. Too many environmentalists are anti-technology by knee-jerk reflex.
It appears to be instinctive for most animals to avoid “fouling the nest.” Our current economic assumptions of unlimited growth, production and consumption will violate this instinct in the not-too-distant future if we don’t change our thinking. Fortunately, there are things we can do, and it’s not too late to start.
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Gary Chapman is director of the 21st Century Project at the University of Texas at Austin. He can be reached at gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu
