The more that I concern myself with resources using an accounting metaphor, the more I think about the nature of money compared to how we treat our resources.
There is a limited quantity of money printed by any governing body in order to maintain the value of the cash itself. So when you spend a bill, it becomes the possession of the store, which in turn returns it to the bank, which is promised to you through a paycheck at the end of the week. You might never see the same bill twice, but you can be assured that money is cycled through the system and not just recklessly reprinted every time. Money is in a closed-loop system, and is only replaced when it cannot be used anymore.
We need to imagine our resources like this. They don't just go away once we've used them. We have to put them into a closed-loop where we can extract the useful components out of the waste product to be reused in the same manner that the original product was used for. Recycling a plastic bottle into a rug has limited uses. The value of our resources is diminished because we just get more when we need it. Nobody sees the value in a used piece of paper when we can just make more new ones at the mill.
We're creating a problem of value. If we placed more value on our resources, we would produce less. Instead we would cycle it through the loop until it can no longer function and THEN and only THEN can we break it down into its components to be re-distributed into the cycle. This is similar to the way that we wash and reuse beer bottles several times before they are melted down and remade into the same beer bottles anew. The glass industry gets it, but what is everyone else doing?
What money we spend comes back to us. What we throw out, must come back to us. As William McDonough and Michael Braungart propose in "Cradle to Cradle": Waste equals food.
How much of the planet did you spend today?
No comments:
Post a Comment