The Shocking Truth about Recycling
Every week I separate my trash into three different plastic bins and haul them out to the alleyway behind my house. Sometime the next morning trucks pick it all up and, I’m fairly certain, deposit all of it at a landfill somewhere outside the city. If any of it actually ends up in a recycling facility, it’s probably not one in America. Instead the city finds it easier to package up some of it and ship it to China or somewhere in Africa where cheap labor can extract some minuscule value out of it and burn or bury the rest.
This is the sad reality of many recycling programs around the world. And it’s even worse for our electronic waste. is an investigative journalist (with a substack that you should subscribe to https://substack.com/@powermetal) who has made a career of tracking down supply chains to explain their cultural and social impact. His most recent book “Power Metal” looks at the environmental impacts of all of the things that we do to make the planet greener.
Beiser identifies a strange contradiction in the effort to reverse climate change: every supposedly green action comes at an environmental cost. There are no free passes.
From the vast quantities of rare earth elements needed to power electric vehicles and sustainable power grids, to ordinary copper wire to transfer electricity, the green revolution requires entirely new supply chains and industrial capabilities. And while recycling is important, it’s far from a silver bullet. To do it properly requires reversing the supply chains that brought our gadgets to our homes in the first place. Recycling a phone means extracting all the metals, grinding up screens and locating the valuable bits, while also, mostly throwing the rest away. Just as with production, the dirtiest work often happens in the poorest places.
This interview is important for anyone who wants to understand what greening the planet actually means, instead of how we want to believe it works.
#recycling #climatechange #ridwell
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