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REDESIGNING THE MATERIALS ECONOMY
Chapter 6. Designing a New Materials Economy
Lester R. Brown, Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth
(W.W. Norton & Co., NY: 2001).
In nature, one-way linear flows do not long
survive. Nor, by extension, can they long survive in the human economy
that is a part of the earth's ecosystem. The challenge is to redesign
the materials economy so that it is compatible with the ecosystem.
This initiative has several components. It includes designing products
so that they can be easily disassembled and recycled, redesigning
industrial processes to eliminate waste generation, banning the
use of throwaway beverage containers, using government purchases
to expand the market for recycled materials, developing and using
technologies that require less material, banning gold mining or
at least its use of cyanide solution and mercury, adopting a landfill
tax, and eliminating subsidies for environmentally destructive activities.
Some countries are adopting these measures. Germany and recently
Japan have begun to require that products such as automobiles, household
appliances, and office equipment be designed so that they can be
easily disassembled and recycled. In May of 2001, the Japanese Diet
enacted a tough appliance recycling law, one that prohibits discarding
household appliances, such as washing machines, televisions, or
air conditioners. With consumers bearing the cost of disassembling
appliances in the form of a disposal fee to recycling firms, which
can come to $60 for a refrigerator or $35 for a washing machine,
the pressure to design appliances so they can be more easily and
cheaply disassembled is strong.54
With computers becoming obsolete often within a couple of years
as technology advances, the need to be able to quickly disassemble
and recycle computers is a paramount challenge in building an eco-economy.
Another policy initiative that can greatly reduce materials use
is the banning of one-way beverage containers, something that Denmark
and Finland have both done. Denmark, for example, banned one-way
soft drink containers in 1977 and beer containers in 1981. Canada's
Prince Edward Island has adopted a similar ban on one-way containers.
The result in all three cases has been dramatically reduced flows
of garbage to landfills.55
The environmental costs of beverage containers vary widely. A refillable
glass bottle requires less than one fifth as much energy as a recycled
aluminum beverage container, assuming the bottle is refilled 15
times, which may be a conservative estimate.56
There are also large transport savings, since the containers are
simply back-hauled to the original soft drink bottling plants or
breweries. If nonrefillable containers are used, whether glass or
aluminum, and they are recycled, then they must be transported to
a factory where they can be melted down and refashioned into containers
and transported back to the bottling plant or brewery.
Another area of potential reduction in materials use is the transportation
sector. As cities redesign urban transport systems to better achieve
social goals of increased individual mobility, clean air, less traffic
congestion and frustration, and more opportunities for exercise,
the use of cars will decline accordingly. (See Chapter 9.)
Even more fundamental than the design of products is the redesign
of manufacturing processes to eliminate the discharge of pollutants
entirely. Many of today's manufacturing processes evolved at a time
when the economy was much smaller and when the volume of pollutants
did not threaten to overwhelm the ecosystem. More and more companies
are now realizing that this cannot continue and some, such as Dupont,
have adopted zero emissions as a goal.57
Another way to reduce waste is to systematically cluster factories
so that the waste from one process can be used as the raw material
for another. NEC, the large Japanese electronics firm, is one of
the first multinationals to adopt this approach for its various
production facilities. In effect, industrial parks are being designed
by corporations and by governments specifically to combine factories
that have usable waste products. Now in industry, as in nature,
one firm's waste becomes another's sustenance.58
Market incentives to recycle can be generated by government procurement
policies. For example, when the Clinton administration issued an
Executive Order in 1993 requiring that all paper purchased for government
agencies contain 20 percent or more post-consumer waste by 1995
(increasing to 25 percent by 2000), it created a strong incentive
for paper manufacturers to incorporate wastepaper in their manufacturing
process. Since the U.S. government is the world's largest paper
buyer, this provided a burgeoning market for recycled paper.59
A number of state governments achieved a similar goal by setting
minimum recycled content standards for newsprint, reports John Young.
He notes that the number of newsprint recycling plants in North
America increased from 9 in 1988 to 29 in 1994. This created a market
for recycled newspapers, converting them from an economic liability
into an asset, something that could be sold.60
Dematerialization of the economy is facilitated by new technologies
that are less material-dependent. Cellular phones, which rely on
widely dispersed towers or on satellites for signal transmission,
account for most of the growth in telephone use in developing countries.
These nations will not need to invest in millions of miles of copper
wires, as the industrial countries did. As recently as 1990, cellular
phones were rare. But in 1996, cellular phone sales of 51 million
overtook the 47 million new phones linked by wire. By 1999, cellular
phone sales at 172 million nearly tripled the 63 million sales of
fixed-line phones. There were 491 million cell phones in use by
then, compared with 907 million traditional ones. By 2005, the number
of cellular phones in use will probably exceed the number of telephones
linked by wire.61
The new technology has arrived on the scene just in time for developing
countries, such as China and India, which have few of the traditional
linked telephones. Within just a few years, China has overtaken
Japan in the number of cellular phone subscribers, trailing only
the United States. We can now look forward to a world population
linked by a phone network that does not require millions of tons
of copper wire.62
Efforts to reduce materials use to date have been rather modest,
consisting largely of recycling programs. In 1992, a group called
the Factor 10 Institute was organized in France under the leadership
of Friedrich Schmidt-Bleeck. Its goal is to increase resource productivity
by a factor of 10, which they believe is well within the reach of
existing technology and management, given the appropriate policy
incentives. They recognize that increasing resource productivity
by 10-fold—that
is, reducing materials use by 90 percent—would
"constitute a radical change from the traditional assumption that
a healthy economy is one that uses increasing amounts of energy,
materials, and resources to produce more goods, more jobs, and more
income." Some reductions could be even greater; for example, replacing
automobiles with bicycles to increase mobility in congested cities
could lower materials use by more than 90 percent.63
Although relatively little attention is paid to the building construction
industry, it is a leading user of material, including steel and
cement. Simple measures like increasing the longevity of buildings
can greatly reduce the use of these materials and of the energy
used in their manufacture.
The brief review of gold mining in this chapter raises questions
about whether the social benefits of gold mining exceed the ecological
costs. Some 85 percent of all the gold mined each year is used to
produce jewelry that is worn as a status symbol, often a way of
displaying wealth by a tiny minority of the world's people.
Turkish environmentalist Birsel Lempke, a recipient of the Right
Livelihood Award (often called the alternative Nobel), also questions
the future of gold mining. As analyses provide more information
on the ecological costs of goal mining, they raise serious doubts
as to whether it is worth turning large areas into what Lempke calls
"a lunar landscape." She indicates she is not against gold per se,
but against the deadly chemicals, such as cyanide and mercury, that
are released into the earth's ecosystem in processing the gold ore.64
If the costs to society of gold mining outweigh the benefits, then
the question is how best to phase out gold mining. One way would
be to put a tax on gold that would reflect the environmental costs
to society, including the landscape disruption of processing over
700 million tons of ore annually, plus the cost to society of mercury
and cyanide pollution. Such a tax would likely raise the price of
gold several times. Another approach would be to simply negotiate
an international ban on the use of cyanide and mercury in gold mining,
much as the international community has recently banned use of a
dozen toxic chemicals. Either policy approach could be used. Regardless
of which one prevails, both current and future generations would
be the beneficiaries.65
Another industry whose value to society is being questioned by the
environmental community is the bottled water industry. The World
Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), an organization with 5.2 million members,
released a study in April 2001 urging consumers to forgo bottled
water, observing that it was no safer or healthier than tap water,
even though it can cost 1,000 times as much.66
WWF notes that in the United States and Europe there are more standards
regulating tap water quality than that of bottled water. Although
clever marketing in industrial countries has convinced many consumers
that bottled water is healthier, the WWF study could not find any
support for this claim. For those living where water is unsafe,
as in some Third World cities, it is far cheaper to boil or filter
water than to buy it in bottles.67
Phasing out the use of bottled water would eliminate the need for
the fleets of trucks that haul the water and distribute it. This
in turn would reduce the materials needed to manufacture the trucks
as well as the traffic congestion, air pollution, and rising carbon
dioxide levels associated with their operation.68
One of the most environmentally productive policy initiatives would
be to eliminate subsidies that encourage the use of raw materials.
Nowhere are these greater than in the electricity sector. In France,
for example, the state-owned aluminum company gets electricity at
the heavily subsidized rate of 1.5� per kilowatt-hour, while other
industries pay 6� and residential users pay close to 12�. In Canada,
the government of Quebec also offers the aluminum industry electricity
at 1.5� per kilowatt-hour. Without this huge subsidy, the industry
probably could not profitably manufacture nonrefillable beverage
containers. This subsidy to aluminum indirectly subsidizes transportation,
including both airlines and automobiles, thus encouraging travel,
an energy-intensive activity.69
The most pervasive policy initiative to dematerialize the economy
is the proposed tax on the burning of fossil fuels, a tax that would
reflect the full cost to society of mining coal and pumping oil,
of the air pollution associated with their use, and of climate disruption.
A carbon emissions tax will lead to a more realistic price for energy,
one that will permeate the energy-intensive materials economy and
reduce materials use.
The challenge in building an eco-economy materials sector is to
ensure that the market is sending honest signals. In the words of
Ernst von Weizs�cker, an environmentalist and leader in the German
Bundestag, "The challenge is to get the market to tell the ecological
truth." To help the market to tell the truth, for example, we need
not only a carbon tax, but also a landfill tax so that those generating
the garbage pay the full cost of getting rid of it and of managing
the landfill and its potentially toxic waste flows in perpetuity.70
ENDNOTES:
54. Tim Burt, "VW is Set for $500m Recycling Provision," Financial
Times, 12 February 2001; Mark Magnier, "Disassembly Lines Hum in
Japan's New Industry," Los Angeles Times, 13 May 2001.
55. Platt and Seldman, op. cit. note 45.
56. Based on John E. Young, "Refillable Bottles: Return of a Good
Thing," World Watch, March/April 1991, p. 35.
57. Dupont will cut all material waste and emission of toxic substances
to the environment, according to its "Safety, Health, and Environmental
Commitment," as reported 15 April 1998 by University of California
at Berkeley "People Product Strategy" program, at best.me.berkeley.edu/~pps/pps/dupont_dfe.html.
58. NEC Corporation, Annual Environmental Report 2000: Ecology and
Technology (Tokyo: July 2000), pp. 24-27.
59. John E. Young, "The Sudden New Strength of Recycling," World
Watch, July/August 1995, p. 24.
60. John Young, "The New Materialism: A Matter of Policy," World
Watch, September/October 1994, p. 37.
61. Molly O. Sheehan, "Telephone Network Diversifies," in Brown
et al., op. cit. note 24, p. 93; 1999 data from International Telecommunication
Union, World Telecommunication Indicators 2000/2001 (Geneva, Switzerland:
March 2001), pp. 11, 35.
62. "China is No. 1 in Asian Cell Phone Market," International Herald
Tribune, 17 August 2000.
63. Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek et al., Factor 10: Making Sustainability
Accountable, Putting Resource Productivity into Praxis (Carnoules,
France: Factor 10 Club, 1998), p. 5.
64. Share of gold to jewelry and Lempke from "Don't Mine Gold...,"
op. cit. note 24.
65. Young, op. cit. note 4.
66. Catherine Ferrier, Bottled Water: Understanding a Social Phenomenon
(Surrey, U.K.: World Wide Fund for Nature, April 2001).
67. Ibid.
68. Ibid.
69. Young, "Aluminum's Real Tab," op. cit. note 18, pp. 26-33.
70. Weizs�cker quoted in Young, op. cit. note 60, p. 34.
Copyright
© 2001 Earth Policy Institute
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