Today, companies promise that waste can, almost like magic, be converted back into treasure.
, interesting things happen when, instead of waste, we start with the question of valuation. Universal Waste, the fictional company, does what many actual companies are doing today: turn discarded products and materials in landfills back into assets, as things that can be re-harvested, traded, and speculated on . Yet, as the decaying human remains found in Claremont’s landfill of Holton’s story reminds readers, this transmutation of waste into financial value involves a dark alchemy.
. At best, landfills temporarily sequester some of the cast-offs of industrial production and consumption but they will, eventually, overflow, leak, and/or spill.If we arrange our economic systems such that they are premised on continual growth in the sense of an increasing aggregate of materials and energy flowing into them, wastes will inevitably arise. Like a bathtub, those systems are. So far as we know, we can’t dodge thermodynamics.
Rather than a singular monolithic solution, it’s important to think about a portfolio of options. Among those options is increasing efficiency, that is, using less and less materials and energy per thing produced. But that will only get us so far. As the English political economistfound out more than a century ago, the more efficient things become, the cheaper they get, and the more people can afford them.
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