divergent distractions

One video I'm not so sure I'd like Indian policy makers to see

Mike Biddle, here espousing a highly mechanized, technology heavy solution to recycling plastics uses all of one line to summarily dismiss any of the work that waste pickers and small-scale recyclers do. Clearly, he's not spent much time around waste workers in India, probably he landed in Mumbai, spent an afternoon in Dharavi and then returned to his plush hotel in downtown. Of course, independent waste recyclers doesn't quite jive if you want to be selling large-scale recycling plants to governments like India's or China...

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Cellphones can contain up to 60 rare-earth metals, many of which get lost due to poor design

By contrast, modern mobile phones, which may contain up to sixty useful and rare metals, are too small and fiddly for triage to be worth the effort. The upshot is that many valuable materials end up in landfills or are melted into new metallic alloys, wasting their unique properties.

via economist.com

If products were designed to facilitate proper separation and recycling of the constituent parts we could have a shot at creating sustainable cycles of raw-material use. As it stands, these materials get mixed and thrown away and even where it's possible to re-use the economic incentive is not necessarily there because of prohibitive costs (again poor design...).

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One video I'm not so sure I'd like Indian policy makers to see

Cellphones can contain up to 60 rare-earth metals, many of which get lost due to poor design