To reform the world it aids to know the world

Anyone planning to alter how the world works runs into that Hayekian problem of understanding how it does work before those reforms. This being, as his Nobel Lecture points out, something that is difficult for that world is a complex place.

Which brings us to this exhortation in The Guardian from an American professor of design:

….and cobalt will be processed from broken flatscreen TVs, not acid-rinsed from a million tons of rubble.

Well, cobalt tends to be acid rinsed from material already being processed for nickel or copper so we’re not entirely sure what the complaint is. It’s already in the vat, why not extract the second material? But of rather more interest we fear that trying to extract from flatscreen TVs would be an isometric exercise. A great deal of effort to get nowhere.

We don’t claim to know everything about mineral usage, just a great deal. We’re entirely unaware of the use of cobalt in flatscreens and we can’t even think of what it might be used for in them. In batteries, yes, but flatscreens? We’ve even tried checking this and the detailed breakdowns we can find don’t mention it. There is something called Cobalt TV but that’s something entirely different and cannot, possibly, be the mistake being made. It could be us making the mistake of course an if so we welcome any correction - the world is that complex place after all.

If you’re going to plan the world then these sorts of details do matter.

This before we get to the larger errors in the plan. The insistence is that we must have repairable tech and also that we must have a circular economy. No more new mining, recycle everything. But if we are to recycle everything - turn old electronics into the ore from which we make the new - then having repairable tech makes no difference. So, the old part can be extracted and replaced, or the whole machine extracted and replaced. Those broken bits are still going to go into the same crushing, grinding and creation of ore process whether they’re parts or the whole thing. It’s entirely unnecessary to do both in order to reduce that mining of virgin material. Whether to repair or recycle becomes simply a fiscal decision, either and both gain the desired end. Which we use should be decided by which is cheaper for this part or that machine.

The biggest of those larger errors being, of course, that we already have a vast global industry which does exactly this - recycles old equipment for their metals values. One of us even made their living in this field for a number of years. If the value of recycling some old kit is higher than the cost of doing so then it gets recycled. If it isn’t profitable - if value isn’t being added by the process - then it doesn’t. And how else would anyone want such a system to work? Doing what is worth doing and not doing what is not?

After all, none of us are likely to think that scrap metal merchants are going to leave $100 bills on the ground, are we? Or even, even if we agree that the problems detailed exist we still already have our solution - a capitalist and market driven economy already recycles what is worth recycling and doesn’t what isn’t. Most especially in the metals world, the industry with the highest recycling rate of any other, anywhen. Other than that which weathers off the occasional onion dome all the gold ever mined is still being recycled……