REDEFINING WASTE

There were two letters touching on waste in the March 2018 issue, one ( Feed It Back) wondering what quantities of material and resources are accumulating in garages, dumps and the environment generally, and one ( Bury Our Problems) proposing excavating giant deep- seated holes in the desert with nuclear bombs to accommodate our waste.

I believe both are missing a crucial point: when they talk about waste, they are referring to the stuff we throw away. That stuff is not inherently waste. “Waste” is what we are guilty of when we do the throwing, because what we are discarding is – mostly – material made from finite resources. Our modern economy is quite literally behaving as if there is no tomorrow. Well, as if there is no next century, at any rate.

The underlying problem is that we value resources at what it costs to extract them today. However, that does not take into account what it will cost in the future as we approach exhaustion of the resource, or at least the point where extraction becomes incredibly difficult and expensive.

I liken it to a traveller setting out to cross the Sahara with a couple of hundred litres of water in his SUV. At this point he (it’s bound to be foolhardy male) will happily sell you a litre of water for R50. Weeks later, when he hasn’t yet reached the other side and has only 5 litres left, he wouldn’t part with a litre for a million rand. It’s the same water, but at the start of the journey he just isn’t considering what the future value of the water will be.

As society we need to start realising that we can’t keep on using resources based on today’s marginal costs of extraction. The future cost of materials should be factored into the cost of production as a surcharge that is accumulated and used to set up and finance systems to recover discarded materials and retrieve the resources. Manufacturers need to be directly incentivised to design for re-use and recovery. These are principles embedded in the circular economy concept, where you drive towards zero, or at worst minimal, waste. The spin-offs are legion: you cut pollution drastically, you save resources and import costs, and best of all you create tens of thousands of new jobs and hundreds of service industries as you shift from a resource- intensive economy to a labour-and services-intensive economy.

It’s not a question of whether we will develop the circular economy: finite resources will inevitably run out some day. The question is whether we can do it sooner, when it will bring nothing but benefits to society, or later, in desperation, as we scrabble to re- mine our landfills CHRIS CROZIER You and I speak the same language, Chris. Our cover story this month speaks to the wastefulness of modern life. In fact, it can be argued that all of the hardships facing humanity is rooted in greed.

But we are only human and driven by a primal biological urge to consume resources and pass on our genetics and, ultimately, achieve immortality. To escape this treadmill as a society is very difficult.

What works in our favour, however, is that we are infinitely innovative because of our big brains. Imagination is our secret weapon and when faced with enormous odds, humans have almost always engineered a way around the issue.

It’s just that in the future we always seem to discover that we could have done things differently. But at least there is always another plan just waiting to hatch and fly above whatever the obstacle we’re currently facing .

Stay curious, Chris. And enjoy the water. – Editor.