Climate change from carbon to the metal-based economy.

Reducing consumption is missing from the current conversation. Need to deal with current waste, recycling and reuse only gets you so far. Shifting towards making the supply chains more circle recycle and reuse focused. A finite number of resources, need to be efficient, recycle and reuse. The focus so far has been on replacing and ignore the current waste problem. The challenge ahead is massive, need to be more efficient in everything we do. Not only that but learn to recycle and reuse way more. The result is changing how we view the world around us.

Switching to a less carbon-based economy requires metal. Extracting metal is very energy-intense, processing and manufacturing cause environmental damage. Even a minor increase in demand for metals causes huge amounts of damage. An idea we can switch without consequences is nonsense. Old electrical goods are difficult to recycle. Need to redesign the manufacturing process making things easier to recycle and reprocess. Metals can be reprocessed but certain products like batteries waste resources.

Phone companies have started to avoid shipping chargers with phones to lower e-waste. This is rather backwards when they release new models every couple of months. The focus needs to be on sending old phones back, less new phones with a much longer shelf life. Battery recycling research remains rather new, impossible at the moment to get the materials back. The amount of e-waste like phones is a huge problem, nothing like the plastic problem. Elephant in the room is how the recycling industry currently works. Shipping waste around the world, sometimes it can’t even be processed.

Electric cars alone won’t save us, at some point behaviours need to change. In my own opinion, we can increase the quality of everybody life and be environmentally friendly. Need to be honest about the changes needed and the cost of doing nothing. So far nobody wants to address the consumption element. Dreaming of technology saving us from past problems and fixing future issues.

What needs to happen?

Reduce consumption

Recycle more

Reuse materials

Be more efficient

Reshaping how the world works, to stop the climate from restructuring to a new normal. Just moving from carbon to metal would be a giant mistake. Storing up future problems, never addressing the obvious solution. Nobody wants to even touch it and think we can carry on as normal. Sounds a lot like Covid, people thinking we can go back. Failing to see how we got here.