Now is a perfect time to start. All we need to do is get President Obama onboard.
Unemployment is at it’s highest in years; there are no jobs for the unemployed to go to so let’s create new ones that are really needed. I think it is time that we created a whole new series of jobs and the present level of unemployment might just be creating the right kind of pressure to force this to happen.
It is clear, we do not need more people producing stuff, we already have more stuff than we need, than any other nation on the planet or than we can afford! We need to get the unemployed back to work in a different part of the industrial cycle. One that will create value from what we presently call trash.
What we need, the big sustainable idea, is to put at least 10% of the work force, the present unemployed, to work on the recycling part of the industrial cycle. In time I believe this will need to be at least 20% of the workforce.
You see there were a few design flaws in the original blue print of the Industrial Revolution for mass production around 1850 which are only now becoming serious enough to sink starship earth! The original design for the industrial revolution never quite formulated or even thought through, called for the extraction from the earth of anything we wanted to be turned into mass produced goods and used by consumers and then trashed.
If we had taken a look at how the ecological cycle of nature works, we may have spotted the fact that you have to have a return loop where the waste or output of your new Industrial cycle gets turned back into raw materials in order to feed the cycle for further revolutions. In fact we might just have noticed that in natures ecological cycle each time the nutrients go around, they enrich nature a little bit more, thus constantly enriching and developing the world over time. Not so with our Industrial Revolution plan thing. IT destroys a little bit more of nature with every year that passes by taking more and destroying greater parts of the natural world all the time in an ever accelerating fashion as more and more of the world’s 6.6 billion inhabitants industrialize.
What we have to do today is to recognize this flaw in the design, repurpose 10-20% of our workforce to work on closing the loop between waste and raw materials input. If we can do this, we have a chance of turning our present linear and unsustainable man made world into a parallel industrial cycle running at the same time as the ecological cycle turning its waste back into raw materials and thus becoming more sustainable. In fact if we mimic nature in this part of the cycle, we could actually contribute to raising the quality of the natural world at the same time.
It is time to face a very severe fact. The earth simply cannot absorb the output of our industrial efforts. Therefore we have to take responsibility for processing our own waste.
We cannot expect the earth to take care of waste it was never designed to handle!
We can address this problem by repurposing the present unemployed and creating a whole series of new jobs that take all the (effectively free waste we produce - all $300-900 billion of it) and return it to useful materials that can be re-input into the production part of the industrial cycle. We need sorters, coding systems, materials handling plants, logistics, entrepreneurs and market makers. All of the amazing market innovations we have created in the production and selling parts of the Industrial cycle are needed, but this time working to return materials back to the input side of the cycle instead of having to use more of our scarce resources. We need all the skills and more that have been let go in the production part of the cycle during this recession to create the return or recycling part of the Industrial cycle that has been absent for the past 150 years!
Some of this activity is already happening, but there are LARGE gaps, very little efficiency and the level of activity, especially in the USA, the world’s largest consumer of materials, is almost insignificant.
What is needed is the same type of thinking that has got the production and consumption part of the cycle running so effectively and efficiently. There is no efficiency in the collection and processing of trash, that part of the cycle runs like a model T, not like a finely engineered reliable Toyota Prius! We need brains and hours of labor dedicated to making the Recycling part of the industrial cycle run as effectively.
President Obama, I think this could be your legacy, to put the nation to work in a way that is desperately needed. This is the type of New Deal we need in 2009. Not more production and jobs in production. We need a recycling Revolution in the USA.
Just imagine if you could produce another $3-900 billion a year. That would go a LONG way towards repaying our national debts! And what’s more, it is a sustainable idea.
Let’s seize this opportunity to really create something of value for the world during the next 8 years.
Can you help to get this Recycling revolution started?
