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Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CLXXVII–Despite Warnings We Have Continued Business-As-Usual and Doubled-Down On Our Avoidance Behaviours

February 13, 2024

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CLXXVII

Rome, Italy (1984). Photo by author.

Despite Warnings We Have Continued Business-As-Usual and Doubled-Down On Our Avoidance Behaviours

The following is my comment on The Honest Sorcerer’s latest piece that highlights the impossibility of bypassing thermodynamic laws (especially Entropy) in our quest for the Holy Grail of a sustainable civilisation; in this instance via a ‘circular’ economy.

While what you argue appears self-evident for the increasingly unlikely prospects of the ‘green/clean’ utopian future a lot of ‘futurists’ predict will unfold as the seemingly endless stream of technological ‘breakthroughs’ come to fruition, it seems that the vast majority of people who even show some awareness of our predicament will ignore/deny/rationalise away the evidence (universal thermodynamic laws or not) in order to cling to their dreams of infinite growth and ‘progress’ upon a finite planet. I even find the argument about physical, material limits is denied by many/most of these people.

This notion that limits are meaningless appears to have got its legs from economists and business ‘leaders’ who have argued that technological progress and human ingenuity trump material limits, particularly due to the idea of infinite substitutability and recycling. History has apparently demonstrated again and again that humans adapt their technology and resource use by finding alternative and/or new sources for their material wants.

What this approach does, however, is not only focus upon a relatively small slice of human pre/history where the leveraging of a number of catalysts to technological change have occurred (especially the creation of debt-/credit-based fiat currency and hydrocarbon use that both allow the pulling of finite resources from the future into the present), but cherry picks behaviours and events.

The processes that contribute to the recurrent collapse of complex societies are minimised/ignored, with a lot of rationalising that ‘this time is different’. We can recycle. We can elect ‘wise’ leaders’. We can work together. We can avoid past mistakes. We can mine passing asteroids. We can innovate. We can migrate to other planets. We can overcome limits. We can adapt. We can slow/control/halt the growth imperative. We can find a means of creating limitless ‘clean’ energy. We can do anything we imagine and set our minds to.

And while these assertions can make us feel better by avoiding the anxieties that arise when we frame things from a perspective where these ‘hopes’ are viewed as magical thinking that avoids reality, they are leading us to pursue the ‘business-as-usual’ scenario (of the 13 possible) painted by the original Limits to Growth study. A scenario where human ecological overshoot and the consequential collapse of population and industrial society were imminent during our current century.

The Limits to Growth researchers proposed that it was possible to avoid this scenario and achieve a sustainable lifestyle but required significant changes be made as soon as possible. In the intervening years, however, our species seems to have ignored the warnings and ‘motored’ ahead with ‘business-as-usual’. And rather than heed the signals our planet and its other species have been sending us (and increasingly so over the past handful of decades), we’ve doubled down on our avoidance behaviours — especially the stories we share about all this and how everything will be alright…somehow but mostly because of human ingenuity and technology, those god-like qualities we storytelling apes possess.

How Circular is the Circular Economy?

November 13, 2018

How Circular is the Circular Economy?

Circular-economy-2

Illustration: Diego Marmolejo.

Introducing the Circular Economy

The circular economy has become, for many governments, institutions, companies, and environmental organisations, one of the main components of a plan to lower carbon emissions. In the circular economy, resources would be continually re-used, meaning that there would be no more mining activity or waste production. The stress is on recycling, made possible by designing products so that they can easily be taken apart.

Attention is also paid to developing an “alternative consumer culture”. In the circular economy, we would no longer own products, but would loan them. For example, a customer could pay not for lighting devices but for light, while the company remains the owner of the lighting devices and pays the electricity bill. A product thus becomes a service, which is believed to encourage businesses to improve the lifespan and recyclability of their products.

The circular economy is presented as an alternative to the “linear economy” – a term that was coined by the proponents of circularity, and which refers to the fact that industrial societies turn valuable resources into waste. However, while there’s no doubt that the current industrial model is unsustainable, the question is how different to so-called circular economy would be.

Several scientific studies (see references) describe the concept as an “idealised vision”, a “mix of various ideas from different domains”, or a “vague idea based on pseudo-scientific concepts”. There’s three main points of criticism, which we discuss below.

Too Complex to Recycle

The first dent in the credibility of the circular economy is the fact that the recycling process of modern products is far from 100% efficient. A circular economy is nothing new. In the middle ages, old clothes were turned into paper, food waste was fed to chickens or pigs, and new buildings were made from the remains of old buildings. The difference between then and now is the resources used.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

‘Til Sustainability Do You Part: Arranging a Marriage Between Degrowth and the Circular Economy

October 3, 2018

‘Til Sustainability Do You Part: Arranging a Marriage Between Degrowth and the Circular Economy

By now, most environmentalists have come across the term circular economy. It’s sexy, it’s cool, and it makes us feel like we can have our cake and eat it too—as long as the cake is made of sustainably grown ingredients, cooked and transported with renewable energy, and any leftover cake is composted to enable the making of future cakes.

But advocates of the circular economy rarely grapple with a central truth: the circular economy depends on a significant and sustained period of economic degrowth. Instead they tend to focus on innovations that deliver efficiencies and unlock new economic opportunities.

But the global data reveal this isn’t enough. According to the ecological footprint, we’re using the resources of 1.6 planets. This is undermining Earth’s systems and the ability of humans (and countless other species) to survive and thrive. To get back within planetary limits, we will need to shrink the global economy by at least 37 percent–and realistically by more if we expect to start healing the decades’ worth of damage our overconsumption has wreaked on the planet.

Degrowth acknowledges this, but circular economy advocates and designers tend to ignore or deny this reality. But shrinking material and energy demand is a prerequisite for a circular economy that functions within Earth’s limits.

There are at least three reasons for this. First, if production levels rise as a result of circular innovations, environmental savings are negated by new production–a phenomenon called the rebound effect. Second, the circular economy’s increased reliance on bio-based materialswould utilize already overtaxed agricultural and ecological capacity. Third, energy is never free. Even renewable energy brings with it significant ecological impacts. Until we right-size the global economy, we’re going to need a prolonged period of degrowth.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Our Economy is a Degenerative System

March 24, 2018

Our Economy is a Degenerative System

Impacts of resource hungry exploitative economies

“What is 120 times the size of London? The answer: the land or ecological footprint required to supply London’s needs.” — Herbert Giradet

Our ecological footprint exceeds the Earth’s capacity to regenerate. A number of useful indicators and frameworks have been developed to measure the ecological impact that humanity and its dominant economic system with its patterns of production, consumption and waste-disposal are having on the planet and its ecosystems. The measure and methodology for ecological footprinting translates the resource use and the generation of waste of a given population (eg: community, city, or nation) into the common denominator of bio-productive land per person, measured in Global Hectares (Gha), that are needed to provide these resources and absorb those wastes.

Much of the educational power of this tool is its capacity to compare between how much bio-productive land exists on the planet with how much bio-productive land would be needed to sustain current levels of consumption. In addition it also helps us to highlight the stark inequalities in ecological impact that exists between different countries.

Source: Global Footprint Network

Ecological Footprinting is basically an accounting tool that compares how much nature we have and how much nature we use. He are currently using about 50% more ecological resources than nature is regenerating naturally every year.

This point of spending more than is coming in every year — or living of the capital rather than the interest — was reached by humanity in the late-1960s. It is called Ecological Overshoot and every year since Earth Overshoot Day — the day when humanity as a whole has already used up the bio-productivity of Earth in that year — is a little earlier. Here is a little video (3:30 min.) to explain the concepts of ecological overshoot and footprint.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

The circular economy

March 28, 2016

The circular economy

Umicore.     Workers at Umicore in Brussels separate out precious metals from electronic waste.

When my battered 1969 Toyota car approached the age of 30, I decided that her body deserved to be remanufactured. After 2 months and 100 hours of work, she returned home in her original beauty. “I am so glad you finally bought a new car,” my neighbour remarked. Quality is still associated with newness not with caring; long-term use as undesirable, not resourceful.

Cycles, such as of water and nutrients, abound in nature — discards become resources for others. Yet humans continue to ‘make, use, dispose’. One-third of plastic waste globally is not collected or managed1.

Nature special: The circular economy

There is an alternative. A ‘circular economy’ would turn goods that are at the end of their service life into resources for others, closing loops in industrial ecosystems and minimizing waste (see ‘Closing loops’). It would change economic logic because it replaces production with sufficiency: reuse what you can, recycle what cannot be reused, repair what is broken, remanufacture what cannot be repaired. A study of seven European nations found that a shift to a circular economy would reduce each nation’s greenhouse-gas emissions by up to 70% and grow its workforce by about 4% — the ultimate low-carbon economy (see go.nature.com/biecsc).

The concept grew out of the idea of substituting manpower for energy, first described 40 years ago in a report2 to the European Commission by me and Geneviève Reday-Mulvey while we were at the Battelle Research Centre in Geneva, Switzerland. The early 1970s saw rising energy prices and high unemployment. As an architect, I knew that it took more labour and fewer resources to refurbish buildings than to erect new ones. The principle is true for any stock or capital, from mobile phones to arable land and cultural heritage.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Europe’s Circular-Economy Opportunity

February 23, 2016

global business

EUROPE’S CIRCULAR-ECONOMY OPPORTUNITY

A circular economy is an alternative to a traditional linear economy that uses the model of make, use, dispose of in which we keep resources in use for as long as possible, extract the maximum value from them while in use, then recover and regenerate products and materials at the end of each service life. The economy of Europe’s has accumulated tremendous wealth over the past century. Partly, this success can be seen due to continuous improvements in resource productivity—a trend that has started to reduce Europe’s resource exposure. Nevertheless, resource productivity remains hugely under-utilized as a source of wealth, competitiveness, and renewal.

A new study  “Growth within: A circular economy vision for a competitive Europe” has provided fresh evidence that a circular economy, made possible by the technology revolution, would make Europe to grow resource productivity by up to 3% annually translating into primary-resource benefit of as much as €0.6 trillion per year by 2030 in these economies.

Additionally, it would generate €1.2 trillion in non-resource and externality benefits, bringing the annual total benefits to around €1.8 trillion compared with today.

CIRCULAR ECONOMY IS FOUNDED ON THE BELOW PRINCIPLES:

Waste is food

Waste does not exist… the biological and technical components (nutrients) of a product are designed by intention to fit within a materials cycle, designed for disassembly and re-purposing. The biological nutrients are non-toxic and can be simply composted. Technical nutrients – polymers, alloys and other man-made materials are designed to be used again with minimal energy.

Diversity is strength

Modularity, versatility and adaptiveness are to be prioritised in an uncertain and fast evolving world. In working toward the circular economy, we should focus on longer-lasting products, developed for upgrade, ageing and repair by considering strategies like emotionally durable design. Diverse products, materials and systems, with many connections and scales are more resilient in the face of external shocks than systems built simply for efficiency.

Energy must come from renewable sources

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The circular economy’s missing ingredient: Local

September 16, 2015

The circular economy’s missing ingredient: Local

Chicago the plant circular economy

Courtesy ofMari Viramontes
The Chicago flag, made from wood salvaged at The Plant.

One Saturday in early June, a group of people gathered behind an old meatpacking plant on Chicago’s South Side, armed with shovels and handmade compost sifters.

In teams of three, the group began sifting a huge pile of rubble excavated from the lot in order to install an anaerobic digester. One person scooped rubble on to the screener, while the other two shook the screen back and forth, forcing small particles through while keeping large rocks and branches out.

“Soil has three components: Sand, silt and clay,” explained soil expert Dominic Brose as the group rested between bouts of sifting. “This is mostly sand we’re getting here. Hardly any clay.”

Soil scientist Dominic Brose explaining soil structure at a Plant Chicago soil-building workshop.

The setting was The Plant, a former meatpacking facility turned urban food hub. The occasion wasOpen Source Circular Economy (OSCE) Days 2015, a worldwide hack-a-thon aimed at inspiring people to reconsider waste, production and the economy as we know it.Because Plant Chicago focuses on urban agriculture and material reuse, we decided to host an OSCE Days workshop with the challenge of building soil from all locally available materials.

We invited Brose, a soil scientist with the local wastewater treatment facility. He brought a 10-cubic yard load of composted wastewater solids (biosolids). We also had a truckload of woodchips dumped on site and set to work creating the sand portion of our soil recipe. With Dominic, a few Plant Chicago staff and six other workshop attendees, we sifted for two hours, yielding about a cubic yard of sand.

Estimating that the lot would need about 500 cubic yards of sand to meet our soil-building goals, we’d obviously need to innovate beyond hand-sifting. We spent the rest of the workshop brainstorming and drawing plans for building our own automated sifting machine from salvaged materials.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

 

The Journey of Setting up a Reuse and Repair Centre – a solution for a circular economy

January 21, 2015

The Journey of Setting up a Reuse and Repair Centre – a solution for a circular economy

The 1951 film, ‘The Man in the White Suit’, is a classic comedy from Ealing Studios with a sinister edge. It tells the story of an inventor of a thread that never wears off. When his bosses at the factory discover what he’s doing, they hunt him down. A fabric that never runs out is the antithesis of capitalism and their business model.

65 years later, you could ask what has changed. Modern capitalism is still framed around a disposable culture where things are made not to last in order to sell more – the concept of ‘built-in obsolescence’. As consumers, we are taught to be dissatisfied with what we have. A recent documentary ‘The Lightbulb Conspiracy’ charts the way product design (of lightbulbs, and many other household objects) has increasingly been for shorter life-spans as a way of fuelling growth for growth’s sake.

For me, 20 years ago, it took the experience of a year living in a village in rural eastern Nepal to see how our culture of consumption in the developed world is not just manufactured, it is only one reality and possibility amongst many others. There, living in a household of 8 people for a year, we created less than a dustbin of waste. We got milk straight from the cow, vegetables unpackaged from the market and hoarded and refilled containers full of rice, kerosene and other staples. And when our precious stove broke down, we would get it fixed.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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