A fascinating thread…
https://mstdn.jp/@landley/117136387125760084
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…that (like every other sector of modernity) needs to be placed in its broader context.
Philippe Bihouix will help you do that
…Courtesy of @cityroler https://kuber.studio/cookie/ entered my timeline this morning. It’s pretty sobering. Not news to me but good to have it reflected back so starkly.
In its report on my phone and network context it has the below to say, which I’m jumping on as a useful point of leverage to return to what I heard Philippe Bihioux narrate a couple of days ago.
And what Philipppe says is much more stark about “this economy”. Some extracts to follow later
…I should just upgrade my phone, right? Well…
Philippe makes clear that “every smartphone that we build today will be a resource which is *not available* for a radiologist, for a surgeon, or for any kind of medical device”.
This is of course just one pointed example of how our economy is dissipative of the resources it consumes, in particular its metals.
Philippe talks through how diverse the extent of recyclability is with respect to different metals…
“You can take a copper cable and melt it and produce another copper cable and it’s still perfectly okay and 99.999% purity and you you will conduct electricity without any problem. So the metals don’t lose their characteristics.
…
It is in theory true, but it is completely false when we look at the way we are implementing the metals and the way we are designing our objects. Let’s take a couple of examples…
…“Titanium is really a great metal. It is expensive because of its high melting point – more than 2,000°C for sure, and it’s quite well recycled.
But 95% of titanium is used as titanium dioxide, which is the universal white dye that you find everywhere: in cosmetics, in sun creams, in toothpaste, in paper, in paint.
You are just dispersing [an extraordinarily valuable metal]…
…“[That titanium] was perhaps somewhere in Madagascar or another country where it was extracted. Then you transform it into a chemical compound.
And then, [when it’s for example in your toothpaste], you will just spit it out every time you clean your teeth. So for sure this part cannot be recycled…
…“Even when you recover the product to be recycled then recycling is not so perfect.
I like the copper cable because it is really easy to identify and it’s pure, so it’s easy to remake a pure copper thing.
But for most of the 60 metals that we use, we use them in alloys. Sometimes an alloy can have 10 different types of of metal.
And when you arrive at the recycling stage, you don’t have thousands of people to sort the thousands of alloys that you have…
…“You don’t have the time or money to dismantle every object.
When you go to recycle a car, you just crush it. You remove the tyres, you remove the glass, a few things, and then you crush all the metal and plastic content.
You try to split metal and plastics. And then you try to split between ferrous and non-ferrous metals.
But when you have crushed everything – with some neodymium, rare earth, copper cables, everything – they stay together and you have no way to split them…
…“So, how does it finish? Where is this atom of copper now? It’s in recycled steel.
So it has not disappeared, but it will never ever be possible to extract it again from the steel. It’s in there. It’s like a trace element. It’s like an impurity of the new steel.
And it will generally be used in very basic uses like in the bars that we use in concrete…
…“And so you have extracted this copper one day, maybe using a child in a mine.
You have refined it.
You have made a copper cable.
And then it will finish in a steel bar in concrete infrastructure that you will never recover.“
…This thread uses the hashtag #BihiouxLowTech because Philippe Bihioux wrote a book about “low tech” but Philiipe says its main intent was to say:
“be careful about high-tech products”.
We are NOT being careful.
…Philippe has also published a graphic novel with drawings by Vincent Perriot:
« Ressources: Un défi pour l’humanité »
‘Resources: a challenge for humanity’
https://www.casterman.com/Bande-dessinee/Catalogue/ressources/9782203275980
