scte long read
Refuse, Rethink, Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Refurbish, Remanufacture, Repurpose and Recover
and because of the chemical structure of them they are very difficult to separate.”
inflection point in 2025 – recycling hasn’t seemed attractive for Generation X and arguably as consumers we are the worst offenders; Generation Z sees the opportunity, appeal and crucially, value in platforms like Preloved, Vinted, Facebook and Ebay which has rubbed off on Gen X. Ownership of CDs and DVDs is meaningless in 2025 – we are all used to consuming online now – a shift few imagined would be possible in the 90s. This shift will percolate through to hardware, another generation of execs will retire, a younger generation will be motivated to implement a business model that works. The fear of cannibalisation will ease off, and we will begin to see a greater adoption of second-hand iPhone and laptops etc as the circular economy begins to take hold. James George details the unexpected consequences. “When you chat to people who have cornered a market about remanufactured and re-conditioned goods, traditionally the initial response is always, no, I don’t want to cannibalise my primary market. That’s logical, but what actually happens is brands end up accessing part of the market that they never captured previously. Neither do they lose their primary customers, who then want to buy reconditioned handsets. They’ve created a secondary and tertiary markets to their primary market.” As we have seen many times now across Long Reads from cyber-security to data centres, prevailing attitudes from Gen Xers and Baby Boomers have often stymied change; our generation and those before us grew up before the Internet, before the Digital Revolution, and while we flatter ourselves we are the force of change that heralded this revolution, it won’t be us that will see it through the next evolution to a circular economy. That requires a younger generation that grasps the urgency and sees little value in the ownership of consumer products, that is perfectly happy with a second- hand iPhone or a reconditioned laptop if it means a sustainable future. However, incentivizing consumers is only part of the issue. D’Arcy pointed out that “Nobody is investing in recycling; less than 1% is extracted, it’s miniscule. The rest of these rare earths is just shredded, because they are in such small amounts,
oxygen available for another existential crisis; we are all suffering from crisis fatigue as it is. Social media and 24-hour rolling news cycles tend not to focus on a threat 18 years away either. Plus, scarcity doesn’t sell papers. Drought and famine do. Nobody wants to hear that things might run out, although this sort of thinking will help nobody in the longer term, and Victoria D’Arcy is right in pointing out, “Scarcity is just going to show up unannounced, it’s just going to happen. It will start off as delays, then it’ll affect costs, and then it will hit the margin.” The moment you flush your iPhone down the toilet, you’ll no doubt find scarcity borderline fascinating. D’Arcy went on, “We’re reaching a point where businesses will suddenly say, what are we going to do? And I can’t get them almost to listen to me yet, because the problem isn’t here yet. It’s like we’re sleepwalking into it.” Our consumerist society is like no other period in history; in the West we haven’t ever suffered shortages, apart from toilet paper in the first heady weeks of the pandemic which was largely a media construct anyway. We aren’t prepared for what this means nor how to cope when it happens. As it seems a long way off, we are indulging in the Ostrich Effect, a way of avoiding bad news by ignoring it, negating its importance, interpreting it
It is possible we are just not there yet with the means to make it happen. Like retrieving an egg from a baked cake, Chris Miller points out that “Recycling products with hundreds of thousands of components is often not cost effective. There are many firms trying to change this, but it requires new technology.” Fortunately, as we are seeing elsewhere in this piece, technology moves extremely quickly and with a bit of luck and a following wind, may not be an issue for long. Scarcity isn’t newsworthy “We’re reaching a point where businesses will suddenly say, what are we going to do? And I can’t get them almost to listen to me yet, because the problem isn’t here yet. It’s like we’re sleepwalking into it.”
Victoria D’Arcy, Circular Economy Consultant
All of this has become urgent at a point where we have rarely seen such explosive, geopolitical instability, with wars and/or tension on every continent, unparalleled migration, climate change, stagnating growth and rising populism everywhere. There is only so much
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