The concept of a steady-state or no-growth or circular economy is the basis for all the U.N.'s and the WEF's year 2030 plans.
From Real Clear Science, December 28:
The notion of the Circular Economy envisions a world where the waste streams from industrial society replace the raw material inputs that now come from nature. A more down to earth assessment reveals that this belief overstates the prospect of finding unrealized stores of sustainable value in a large majority of contemporary waste streams. Despite moderate successes, efforts to close the recycling loop face fundamental challenges due to embedded social and technical forces that contribute to the growing complexity of material waste streams. As products require more complex material compositions, employ more intricate spatial configurations, and require more digital integration, they get harder to recycle. To achieve success, a functioning Circular Economy must reverse, or finesse, the consequences of a culture that inevitably draws more, more varied, and more processed materials into the economic system. Yet, the continued increases in the quality and variety of products available to consumers makes the extensive recycling on any real grand scale more unlikely.
Materials recovered after their use in the economy fetch the highest value when they are separated from mixed waste streams, but separation has costs. Separating materials from mixed waste into highly concentrated streams means reversing disorder and creating order. Reversing material disorder can take many forms, for example sorting out steel and copper scrap from demolished buildings, separating PET plastics from municipal solid waste, or removing CO2 from industrial flue gases. Frequently, the initial stages of separation must be followed by the removal of residual contaminants to ensure that the recycled material meets the strict tolerances dictated by the market. Because reversing material disorder will always require energy, the economic sustainability of material recovery depends on the value of the recovered material exceeding the energy (and capital and labor) costs of recovery. In the long run, the market for recovered materials competes with alternatives from natural deposits that can be more uniform and easier to process.
As newer generations of industrial and consumer products grow in both sophistication and variety, their embedded information value increasingly dominates their material value. Electronic products contain the most embedded information value and have exploded in popularity since the discovery of the transistor in the early 1950s, with billions of devices manufactured and discarded annually by the 2020s. Over this period, products have gotten smaller but have also grown far more complex in material terms. Current electronics from smartphones to laptop computers include a wide variety of highly engineered materials that require extensive global supply chains to manufacture. Recovering the rare metals that play an outsized role in making these products work remains elusive because of the effort involved in isolating these dilute materials and then extracting them. Thus, despite the ubiquity of indium and lanthanum in electronic devices, little to none is recovered from the hundreds of millions of smartphones discarded annually. Also elusive is the recovery of silicon chips from discarded computers and photovoltaic cells, or any capture of the metal dopants that they contain. Even for precious metals, greater precision has allowed producers to reduce the amount used in each device, raising the costs of recovery. Because the value of the material engineering far surpasses the value of the material, products are designed to meet new performance targets, not to be recycled....
....MUCH MORE
It's not just in materials science and advanced recycling that things get complicated.
From July 2022's "Sri Lanka As A Testing Ground For Some Of The WEF's Ideas":
Here's an interesting paragraph:
"....Sri Lanka’s situation exposes the true cost of living and the cost of ownership. In aperformance economy, which encompasses one of the economic principles of a circulareconomy, a smaller number of asset owners will take custodianship of assets to keepthem in use and provide services to many users based on consumption....."That's from "How a circular economy could help tackle Sri Lanka's economic crisis", World Economic Forum, July 5, 2022.
Related via Climateer Investing, July 26:
From The World Economic Forum.....
There is a lot going on here and for now I will leave it to interested reader to do the higher level analysis.
3 circular economy approaches to reduce demand for critical metals
"Complexity and Armageddon, or… the Story of the Hemp Microphone"
The scale of change being contemplated for energy use simply will not allow for the lifestyles people enjoy today. Period. That is the whole point of the post immediately below: "Green economic growth is an article of ‘faith’ devoid of scientific evidence" and anyone telling you different is either a liar or a fool.
And if they deceitfully don't mention the scale of change individuals will face, they are possibly a varlet. And a scoundrel. More than likely a charlatan as well.
The most concise statement of the reality is the abstract of one of the papers cited in the below essay:
Decoupling environmental ‘bads’ from economic ‘goods’ is a key part of policies such as green growth and circular economy that see economic growth as desirable or necessary, and also see that current use of natural resources and its environmental impacts is unsustainable. We estimate what a ‘successful decoupling’ (2% annual GDP growth and a decline in resource use by 2050 to a level that could be sustainable and compatible with a maximum 2°C global warming) would mean in terms of its type, timeline and size. Compared to 2017, ‘successful’ decoupling has to result in 2.6 times more GDP out of every ton of material use, including in-use material stocks. There are no realistic scenarios for such an increase in resource productivity.
Can't cut back and maintain current ways of being. Not going to happen. The math doesn't work. And it doesn't matter if you understand the math, or not.
To paraphrase an old Russian line: In reality, you don't do math, math do you.
We've also looked at:
- What will it take to recycle millions of worn-out EV batteries?"
- Wyoming Landfill Burying Used Windmill Blades (and what to do with the ever increasing supply of the things)
- Talking Trash and Making Cash: FT Alphaville On The Garbage Beat
And many, many more.
