| As reserves shrink and cost goes up, I suspect recycling will play a bigger role (I'm impressed to see Aluminium is nearly 50% recycled). This probably hasn't been a significant player before because we've never 'run out' of something so fundamental before so the pressure to make recycling happen, and the financial reward for doing so, hasn't been strong enough before. (OK, it has on the small scale - see the UK during WWII for instance, where we even cut down garden fences around the country for the metal). Also, I guess recycling is helped by improvements in technology (to extract usable pure materials from a mix), so it will become more practical in the future than it is now, which is more practical than it was 50 years ago. With electronic communication for coordination it will be more feasible than it ever has been to collect recyclables from 'everywhere', and perhaps one of the micropayment systems that have been hovering on the edge of reality for the past decade will pop into existence and become a driving force. (Maybe. Would I be less inclined to recycle something for cash value 0.001p than for the feeling of doing the right thing?). We talk about things running out, but where do they go? At some point, it might become feasible and worthwhile to go through the last 50 years of landfill sites in the first world, for instance. Unless we do develop nano-manufacturing to construct materials from scratch at scale, when this whole discussion ceases to matter so much. |