The question I think needs to be answered is how we can move the market forces to move away from such harmful practices? I think this is a symptom of much larger geopolitical and economic issues.
Can't legislate physics. At some point, people are going to need to decide that they shouldn't use some of this stuff. Or maybe make the stuff last longer? Or figure out how to recycle it? Not sure. So many issues from refining through to product lifecycle. (The fact that solar panels cannot be recycled for instance really kills me personally. Like a dagger to my heart.)
I don't know what the answer is, but it's clear we have a long way to go.
What does that even mean? You can absolutely legislate the cost to the environment, to health, to sustainability. If making a widget causes $1 trillion in environmental damage to natural resources, legislating that the company is responsible for that damage is the solution. They either innovate to prevent the damage in the first place, raise prices of the product to cover all the costs (which would basically price out products that aren't sustainable), or they go out of business and stop damaging the environment.
- Apple is using 100% recycled rare earths in their upcoming iPhones, but they are just one manufacturer out of many.
- No one has really figured out how to extract the elements out of phones after they have been manufactured.
- We don't yet know how to recycle solar panels either.
Apple is also moving their energy to renewable sources for all of their facilities, their partners, and I believe their partners' partners.
They are not just pushing renewable sources with the partners and partners' partners, but are also pushing for Carbon neutral.
With that plan meant to hit "zero/negative footprint by 2030" I find myself feeling less and less guilty about buying their products and returning the "not yet old" versions.
And in 2030, I'd be happy to pay Apple the incremental extra $ for the guilt free experience.
I mean, it is aspirational and 10 years away. So they could be wrong and not hit the goal.
Beyond that, yes I buy iPhones anyways and so will trust Apple at their word until some new agency does a deep dive and provides the counterfactual data. Or if over 10 years, Apple erodes the trust they have built with me.
Rare earth metals are rare; it isn't an energy tradeoff as it isn't like we are synthesizing this stuff... it is a "eventually we run out" situation (and presumably a lot sooner than oil, with less ability to swap in replacements).
> Rare earth metals are rare; it isn't an energy tradeoff ... it is a "eventually we run out" situation
Rare earth metals are mostly not rare. The vast majority of rare earths are plentiful. We're not going to run out of the most useful rare earths for hundreds of years at a minimum. It's the extraction and processing that is a problem (environmentally), not the scarcity factor. The US for example is loaded with rare earths and has barely even scratched the surface of its supply (the same is true of Canada and Australia); there has been a lack of interest in rare earth mining in the US for the past several decades because of how intense and dirty the process of extraction and processing is.
> The rare earths are a relatively abundant group of 17 elements composed of scandium, yttrium, and the lanthanides. The elements range in crustal abundance from cerium, the 25th most abundant element of the 78 common elements in the Earth's crust at 60 parts per million, to thulium and lutetium, the least abundant rare-earth elements at about 0.5 part per million.
> The "rare" in the name of this group of elements is actually somewhat misleading; the U.S. Geological Survey describes them as "relatively abundant in the Earth's crust."
Instead track resource/labor contents of products directly and "price" resources according to their pollution/known externalities.
One of the biggest problems we have is that markets can price labor costs effectively, but are terrible at pricing resource/raw material costs. Supply and demand has nothing to do with ecology and known externalities of resources. We should be able to set the costs of fossil fuels directly democratically (and same with rare earth minerals) either on a per-resource basis (if the use of the resource has known costs) or a per-process basis (if the process of extracting the resource has known costs), and have those costs trickle through the economy via companies that are effectively acting in a distributed productive relationship (like a market) but without using prices for allocation. Instead use orders directly, and then have consumers cover the costs of products on purchase, at which point the money they earned from their (negotiated) wages would be destroyed and not circulate the productive economy.
Markets can only effectively price resources in a democratic setting. This is impossible in a globalized capitalist system.
