Environmentalist Spiritual Materialism vs. Cost Effective Circularity

This is a theme that - hopefully - runs deep in the tributaries and streams of consciousness throughout this blog... There is a limited amount of time and money to address the simultaneous and related emergencies of mass extinction, deforestation, climate change, toxic releases, and waste management. 

We will be judged, and should be, based on how our generation uses its limited resources as judiciously and economically as possible.  I started my environmental-spiritual aspirations with the premise that children yet to be born, whom I will never meet, and who will never know me, would judge all of us based on how we spend our time and resources, and whether we left them a better place, or a bigger mess.

Back when I was 17, I was thinking about how to direct my own career, spend my own life, as if I was personally going to be judged based on my own actions. Not that it was a bad place to start, but even then I was aware that my "shiny conscience" wouldn't matter much to a child born 500 years from now. If it did, I should have devoted myself to a Buddhist monastery, rather than to our society's collective resource conservation.

Let me propose that we will be judged, by future children or by the Singularity (AI), based on math... how much more sustainable was one rule or regulation over the free market. Primum non nocere - first, do no harm.

ITAN: Intellectually Toxic Anecdotal Nonsense Problems

There is a disturbing pattern, not just in the Environmental Movement, but probably across all social communication, propped up by ever weaker journalism editorial systems.

Someone publishes an article, or a paper. Take the 2002 Basel Action Network's "Exporting Harm" paper on the river samples of Guiyu, China. 

1. Basel Action Network publishes the paper with a photo of a child sitting on circuit board scrap (posed upon, film major Jim Puckett admitted to me personally, though Jim seems to forget everything he admits over the years).

2. The White Paper makes an assertion that "80%" of used electronics and scrap is exported to places like Guiyu.

3. The White Paper makes an assertion that "80%" (of the 80% above? unclear) is managed improperly in so-called "primitive" conditions.

Carbon Recycling: It's Procuring Hardened Cement Stupid

citation:  Nick Beckelman, Scientific American, February 2023

A number of articles are emphasizing that "recycled carbon content" cement has the potential to reduce greenhouse gases even more than electric vehicles does.  

Solving Cement’s Massive Carbon Problem

New techniques and novel ingredients can greatly reduce the immense carbon emissions from cement and concrete production

BY MARK FISCHETTI, NICK BOCKELMAN & WIL V. SRUBAR

In this blog I explore how Recycling Policy Organizations like MassRecycle.org, NERC.org, ReMA.org, EarthwormRecycling.org, NRRArecycles.org have the experience to look at "recycled content" rules of procurement to become important to putting "hardened cement" (the value-added by captured carbon ash in the cement) into the quiver of EPR and procurement law.

How do we get our memberships to think about cement manufacturing as an important "recycled content" story, as we did with recycled content paper procurement in the 1990s?  I guess we need to write complicated blogs hoping to get the interests of academics who we can then get to make the "recycled content cement" case, invite them as conference speakers. Part of this "fishing for swordfish" strategy will involve incorporating keywords that keep the Tilapia and Perch of the press interested in our press releases.

If recycling advocates currently consider glass aggregate / daily cover in our recycling rates (never an obvious call to raw material originalists, but that referee's call has sailed), I was wondering about some forms of carbon sequestration, especially cement and concrete.  See article in Nature below.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43246-024-00546-9

The process described captures carbon and re-infuses it in cement kilns.  Now I note 2 reasons not to claim this, but no reason not to make it part of our message even if it's outside our silo (similar to GMA1872 being outside the silo but in direct competition with recycling markets)..

1. Carbon at the point it's captured in the process is not "solid" waste - though it becomes solid, in the cement, after the process.

2. Cement manufacturing processes are outside our silo/focus at organizations like MassRecycle.

(I will later try to link all of the authors names so they find this eventually)

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