Everything old can be new again

Do you have an old mobile phone or two lurking in a drawer or cupboard? Well you’re not alone. There are an estimated 16 million obsolete or defunct mobile phones stored in peoples’ homes and offices.
Australians replace their mobile phones about every two years, but despite the best efforts of the mobile phone industry, only about 5% are recycled.

The situation with other electronic gear such as computers is even worse. An estimated 1.6 million obsolete PCs are dumped in landfills each year.
There are good environmental reasons for recycling, because they contain small quantities of nasty toxic substances. But there are also good commercial reasons to recycle given the worldwide shortage of various precious metals. For example, a pile of mobile phones has about a hundred times the concentration of gold in ore currently being mined.

Sadly, we live in a disposable society. An apparent abundance of resources and a lack of awareness of environmental impacts have made us complacent and all too ready to toss out what we no longer need.
Australia generates over 30 million tonnes of waste each year. That’s about one and half tonnes per person. More than half of it just goes into landfills.

Car tyres are another poor performer in the recycling stakes. Of the 18 million tyres coming off Australian vehicles each year, about half go into landfills and many of the remainder are burned in kilns for cement production, so releasing greenhouse gases.

Yet one man’s waste is another man’s treasure. Almost all waste can be recycled into new products. For example, old tyres can be used to make a range of other products including tiles, road surfaces and, of course, new tyres.

Nature recycles everything, otherwise there would be an accumulation of some substances in certain places and shortages elsewhere. We need to take a lesson from nature in how to organise the economy and make sure that we also recycle everything.

Researchers at the Rocky Mountains Institute in Colorado have proposed that the only way we will really achieve this is to move to a service based economy. Businesses should supply services to their customers and take responsibility for the maintenance and recycling of the tangible goods involved. Many companies already work this way with such arrangements as car and computer leasing, but the consumer market remains dominated by sales of ever greater quantities of disposable goods.

This was originally published in the Fraser Coast Chronicle on August 2007.