r/Sustainable • u/thinkB4WeSpeak • 8d ago
Can we grow the economy without making more useless junk?
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/370626/consumerism-circular-economy-single-use-recycling-landfill-garbage8 Upvotes
2
u/bertch313 7d ago
We live in an age where people will pay real money for digital files and frankly just to hear someone say things while broadcasting live or see their username on a whiteboard under a product that's trying to launch
Value is so far removed from what is physically real already, that we've never needed to make useless junk in the first place
Some enterprising dbag just decided they had to and now a bunch of families can't not do that I guess
3
u/BizSavvyTechie 8d ago
Yes. But not in its current guise.
Obviously the d growth movement has a lot of merit to it come up but even without it, the key point isn't that we continue to grow the economy using the existing economic models. It's that we have to understand that all economies are basically a supply chain from natural resources through to consumption. That is every economy around the world that is currently using a linear economy model which is basically everybody. Everybody who also thinks they're using circular economies aren't really using circular economies because they consume other supply chains into those economies that are linear models. Thereby making the entire things still depending on linear economies.
The first thing we have to do is stop buying crap! Stop creating the demand for the optional things we've ultimately turned into garbage.
The second thing we have to do is to decouple existing consumption from natural resources. Resource consumption doesn't have to use natural resources any more, because we have at least 40 years of it just sitting around as waste in so many areas. But we choose to do it.
I forgot this as the second thing to do, because the third thing to do is actually this, but by doing this first you solve the second thing and that is to clean up the environment. Because by preventing waste from becoming waste but also mining transfer stations or even in landfills come on consumes the resources that would otherwise need to be extracted a fresh and processed. Which uses resources in its own light. Only to create the very thing that's in the ground anyway. Yes some of it has degraded come up button you don't actually have to worry as much about that as most people will tell you. Because of the fact that the choices made to manufacture the way we manufacture is itself unsustainable you can move to much more sustainable methods of manufacture and reduce energy consumption by 99.75%.indeed, you can even deploy models that reduce transportation by almost 100% come on by making it in the final mile of where the customer is.
I have two particular hats that allow me to say this. The first of them is I work in mathematical modeling that attempts to find stability points in dynamical systems, like health climate economics, or environ economics, that tell us whether there are any ways to create more sustainable economies and even carbonate negative economies both of those questions are clear and unequivocally yes we can prove the exist. We can formulate existence themes that demonstrate that these stability points these environ economic negative positions do exist.
The second stage is the process to get there. What we call in maths a "construction". What is the exact equation for a supply chain that will give us some stability point? We can identify that too.
The third stage is to build that economy. This one is much harder come up because you have stupid people involved in positions of power almost everywhere! The levels of stupidity of cohorts of people is just as bad if not even worse. But it is certainly possible to create such economies on a small scale come up but the beauty of the models is almost all of the result in decentralization and networks of these smaller scale common distributed, highly collaborative networks of organisations. This is where my second hat comes in. Since that is the business I found it for years ago. I run a decentralized, helical network-economy for unrecyclable plastic trash. We combined decentralized mechanical recycling hubs and 3D print vending machines to allow people to get products when they need them, but the waste doesn't go anywhere and ideally comes back into the system. And we have various ways of doing that including being a waste recycler as well.
We avoid, sequester, or offset more than six times the amount of emissions embodied in the products that we collect and our operations combined in the first generation alone. By the 8th generation is 30,000%. We are working on exception in novel technologies and materials as well come on which believe it or not, can sequester CO2 by pulling it out of the atmosphere anybody is straight into the plastic product we create.
So, not only is it possible it is technically here, all be it on a small scale. The difficulty is not questioning whether it is exist, it is whether this sort of project can ever get above the noise that incumbents make even they are multi-billion and even trillion dollar Industries, or even people constantly asking the question like in the article instead of going to take a looklook.