It is not about life or death. t is not about the betterment of a particular community, or society at large. It’s about profit.
This is a nonsensical point of view. If we’re going to get out of our current climate problems we need to replace fossil fuel infrastructure with renewable energy sources as much and as quickly as possible. That’s going to mean more electrical infrastructure, more solar panels, more grid-scale battery systems, more wind turbines, more hydroelectric stations, etc., which in turn means more copper, steel, aluminum, silicon, and concrete.
Sure there’s profit motivation involved. It’s going to be a lot of fucking hard work and people gotta eat. But framing resource extraction for industrial use as only motivated by profit is so narrow-minded that this conversation can’t really continue until you take a few steps down from your high horse and adjust your extreme point of view to something more rational.
We have already extracted these materials, and they are out there ready to be reclaimed and reused. It just so happens that it’s more profitable to trample communities and destroy the earth to get more of it, rather than use what we already have.
There are already massive recycling industries in place for aluminum, steel, copper, and even lithium recovery from old batteries. Aluminum in particular is cheaper (more cost effective in terms of time and labor) to recycle than to mine and refine new ore. That’s great, but it still doesn’t produce enough volume of material, we still need more new material also.
There are also quarries that grind rock and old concrete down to make fine particles, but… it’s not the same as sand, it can’t be used in all of the same production processes. The result is more like very fine gravel than it is sand. There’s also an issue with a lot of concrete being reinforced with steel cables or rebar, which you can’t just throw into a rock grinder.
I don’t know why you’re talking about this as if it were all-or-nothing, that’s not a practical approach in the real world. It seems like you’re more interested in scoring holier-than-thou points than discussing actual solutions.
This is a nonsensical point of view. If we’re going to get out of our current climate problems we need to replace fossil fuel infrastructure with renewable energy sources as much and as quickly as possible. That’s going to mean more electrical infrastructure, more solar panels, more grid-scale battery systems, more wind turbines, more hydroelectric stations, etc., which in turn means more copper, steel, aluminum, silicon, and concrete.
Sure there’s profit motivation involved. It’s going to be a lot of fucking hard work and people gotta eat. But framing resource extraction for industrial use as only motivated by profit is so narrow-minded that this conversation can’t really continue until you take a few steps down from your high horse and adjust your extreme point of view to something more rational.
There are already massive recycling industries in place for aluminum, steel, copper, and even lithium recovery from old batteries. Aluminum in particular is cheaper (more cost effective in terms of time and labor) to recycle than to mine and refine new ore. That’s great, but it still doesn’t produce enough volume of material, we still need more new material also.
There are also quarries that grind rock and old concrete down to make fine particles, but… it’s not the same as sand, it can’t be used in all of the same production processes. The result is more like very fine gravel than it is sand. There’s also an issue with a lot of concrete being reinforced with steel cables or rebar, which you can’t just throw into a rock grinder.
I don’t know why you’re talking about this as if it were all-or-nothing, that’s not a practical approach in the real world. It seems like you’re more interested in scoring holier-than-thou points than discussing actual solutions.