Global
demand for copper, aluminum, steel, paper, and a whole range of other
commodities is soaring as countries like China modernize their economies. As
the rapid growth in demand outstrips the short-term increase in supply, prices
have escalated. While this appears to be bad news for consumers in the U.S.
and around the globe who face higher prices, it represents an enormous
opportunity for producers of such commodities — and it will actually lead to lower prices for commodities in the long term.
New
material technologies, such as nanotech, promise to dramatically improve the
long-term efficiency of manufacturing. These will enable us to produce far
more output with each unit of energy and raw material. However, until those
technologies become commercially viable, the best solution is to intelligently
recycle products, where feasible.
Consider
the savings in energy consumption, cited by BusinessWeek,1 that occur when materials are recycled
rather than made from scratch:
- Recycled plastic uses 80 percent less
energy.
- Recycled aluminum uses 95 percent less
energy.
- Recycled iron and steel use 74 percent
less energy.
- Recycled paper uses 64 percent less
energy.
- Recycled glass uses 40 percent less
energy.
These
savings, and the difficulty of finding and extracting new deposits of gold,
copper, silver, and other rare materials, provide sound economic reasons
for the surge in recycling. At the same time, this trend is also being
propelled by a powerful non-economic force: growing resistance to the
construction of new landfills in many communities. As a result of this and the
filling up of older facilities, the number of active landfills in the U.S. has
dropped, from 8,000 in 1988, to fewer than 2,000 today.
Driven
by the convergence of financial incentives and a dwindling number of places to
put garbage that isn’t recycled, the recycling industry is taking off — and
it’s quickly being segmented into multiple sub-industries.
Consider
just one of these segments: electronic waste, or e-waste. Computers,
monitors, printers, fax machines, televisions, VCRs, and DVD players quickly
become obsolete as each new generation of mature technologies becomes...
