Throughout his interview, Kammen touches on sustainability in a few places, discussing plastic vs metal straws and incentivizing developers to prioritize product life cycles through performance contracts. However, he does not bring up one of the more controversial ways to go green - recycling.
While recycling metals is well understood and economically viable, recycling paper and plastics is much, much harder. These products cannot be re-made into their original forms, and must instead be "down-cycled" into lower grade products. Second, we do not have the capacity to do much of this recycling (in particular plastics recycling) natively - instead, plastic waste must be shipped abroad where the externalities associated with the industry can be offloaded to poorer countries. But most importantly, at present recycling plastics is not economically viable - it takes more money, and releases more greenhouse gases to recycle a pound of PET than to make one from scratch.
I'd love to get Daniel Kammen's opinion about whether the push towards recycling makes sense to help combat climate change. While the idea is sound in theory, the fact that recycling only saves energy for metals makes me wonder if the effort to get people to change their ways would be better spent elsewhere.
Link to Kammen's interview: https://www.labxchange.org/library/pathway/lx-pathway:825945a0-367c-45dc-82b7-3d160c6e6f7a/items/lx-pb:825945a0-367c-45dc-82b7-3d160c6e6f7a:lx_simulation:fa741ca2?source=%2Flibrary%2Fclusters%2Flx-cluster%3AModernPrediction
Gavin, I’m glad you brought up the question of recycling. Even if recycling plastics is currently not economically or environmentally efficient, the leftover waste generated in the absence of recycling is another important cost to consider. Government investment and subsidies in recycling research could potentially reduce the economic costs and carbon emissions, just as they did for solar, wind, and other renewable energy sources. Additionally, your point that recycling plastics is not economically viable made me think about how policy and economic incentives can motivate companies and people toward certain behavior. For example, charging 5 cents for buying products with plastic bottles and refunding that 5 cents for recycling is meant to encourage consumers to recycle more often. However, many people simply overlook this 5 cents and don’t bother recycling. Another way to encourage companies and individuals to recycle is to implement something similar to a carbon tax. If you create more waste due to not recycling, you have to pay an additional tax per unit of waste. But these incentives all depend on whether it is worth it to promote recycling.
This is a very interesting point to bring up, Gavin. I also watched the Kammen interview but did not think about his discussion of recycling in this way. I agree that it would be very interesting to get his perspective on recycling more than just metals, given the difficulty and economic and environmental costs it can take to recycle even a small amount of PET. The general public seems to thinks that recycling is a very simple task that helps to deescalate the negative effects of climate change. Yet, in practice, there are a lot of variables around recycling that add up, as you mentioned in your post. This was super thought-provoking because it is instinct to think that all recycling is good for the environment, but is it?