Have a look around for a documentary about the towns in China that are taking the piles of recycled electronics and stripping them for the precious metals in them. It works in conjunction with the video I posted above. “Recycling” quite often not “recycling”. But separating. The PCBs of all those electronics can’t be recycled. But they do contain a lot of gold, copper, and other precious metals. Cathode Ray Tubes? Same thing. They have armies of people and children smashing these things up and boiling them down to extract all this stuff. It’s destroying their health in the process.
While recycling is good for “Western Civilization”…destroying lives in developing nations.
Again, I don’t have answers here. But rather looking for those who have new ideas to solve these problems. More to the point, looking for examples of people who are already doing this.
Honestly, it isn’t so much the US that scares me. In fact, I see the USA as the tip of the ice berg. It is the billions of other humans on the planet that haven’t had the luxuries we’ve had for the past 100+ years. I’ve already mentioned it in this thread. There’s an order of magnitude of people that are perched to enter the consumer market as well. I’m enough of a cynic to think that that group of people aren’t just going to say,
“Hey, it’s ok that my family and their predecessors have lived in abject poverty while your family had SUVs, 4 ATVs, Large Screen TVs and a cell phone every year or two.”
I am by no means saying “stop recycling”. But I see the phase we’re in as moving too slow. I’m impatient. I want to see what feels like the right solution start moving. Recycling is a patch. Not a solution.