Rethinking Thrift: Modern Practices for Reducing Waste and Recycling

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Let's talk about Thrift. Thrift is a concept where you reduce, reuse, and recycle, but with an economic aspect that I think has real potential for change. My grandmother knew about Thrift. This is her string jar. She never bought any string. Basically, she was collecting string from the butchers, it would come from presents. She would put it in the jar, and then she would use it when it was needed. When it was finished—whether it was tying up the roses, tying up a part of my bike—once it was finished with that, it would go back into the jar. This is a perfect idea of Thrift. You use what you need. You don't actually purchase anything, so you save money. Kids also inherently know this idea. When you want to throw out a cardboard box, the average kid will say, "Don't. I want to use it for a robot head, or I want to use it for a canoe to paddle down a river." They understand the value of the second life of products. So I think Thrift is a perfect counterpoint to the current age in which we live.

All of our current products are replaceable. When we get that bright new shiny toy, it's because we've gotten rid of the old one. The idea of that is, of course, it's great in the moment, but the challenge is, as we keep doing this, we're going to cause a problem. The problem is that there is really no "away." When you throw something away, it typically goes into a landfill. Now, landfill is basically something which is not going to go away, and it's increasing. Currently, we have about 1.3 billion tons of material every year going into landfills. By 2100, it’s going to be about 4 billion tons. So, instead, I prefer if we start thrifting. And what that means is, we consider materials when they go into products, and also when they get used and at the end of their life—when can they be used again? The idea is to completely change the way we think about waste, so that waste is no longer a dirty word. We almost remove the word "waste" completely. All we're looking at is resources.

We used to be good at thrifting. My grandmother, again, used to use old seed packets to paper the bathroom walls. I think there are companies out there who understand this value and are promoting it. And a lot of the technologies developed for the smart age can also be adapted to reduce, reuse, and thrift more effectively. And as a material scientist, what I've been tracking over the last couple of decades is how companies are getting smart and thrifting—how they're able to understand this concept and profit from it. I'm going to give you two examples. The first one is good, the second one, not so good. The first is the automotive industry. Not always known as the most innovative or creative of industries, but it turns out they're really, really good at recycling their products. Ninety-five percent of every single car that goes on the road gets recycled here. And of that car, about 75% of the entire car actually gets used again. That includes, of course, the steel and aluminum, but also the plastics from the fender and the interiors, glass from the windows and the windshield, and even the tires. There’s a mature and successful industry that deals with these old cars and basically recycles them and puts them back into use as new cars or other products.

Even as we move towards battery-powered cars, there are companies that claim they can recycle up to 90% of the 11 million tons of batteries that will be with us in 2020. That is not perfect, but it’s certainly good and getting better. The other industry not doing so well is architecture. The challenge with architecture has always been that when we build, we don't think about taking down. We don't dismantle. We don't disassemble. We demolish. That’s a challenge because it ends up that about a third of all landfill waste in the US is architectural waste. We need to think differently about this. There are programs that can actually reduce some of this material. A good example is this: bricks made from old demolition waste, which includes glass, rubble, and concrete. We put it all together, heat it up, and make bricks we can build more buildings from. But it’s only a fraction of what we need.

My hope is that with big data and geotagging, we can actually change that and be more strict when it comes to buildings. If there’s a building down the block being demolished, are there materials there that the new building here can use? Can we use that build to understand all the materials available in that building that are still usable? Can we then put them into a new building without losing any value in the process? Now let’s think about other industries. What are other industries doing to create thrift? Well, it turns out plenty of industries are thinking about their own waste and what they can do with it. One simple example is the waste they belch out as part of industrial processes. Most metal smelters give off a lot of carbon dioxide. It turns out there’s a company called Land Detector, working in China and also South Africa, able to take that waste gas—about 700,000 tons per smelter—and turn it into about 400,000 tons of ethanol, equivalent to powering 250,000 cars for a year.

How about more familiar examples? This is a simple solution. It takes the idea of reducing, reusing, and adds an economic advantage. Instead of cut-and-sew—where typically 20 to 30 materials are used, cut from a large cloth and then sewn or even glued together—they changed it to simply knitting the shoe. The advantage is not just process simplification. It’s also that you have one material, zero waste, and potential recyclability at the end of its life. Digital manufacturing is also allowing us to do this more effectively. In this case, it’s creating the theoretical limit of strength for a material.

Nature is also very effective at thrift. Think about it—nature has zero waste. Everything is useful for another process. One example is nanocellulose, one of the fine building blocks of cellulose, which makes trees strong. You can isolate it, and it works much like carbon fiber. Take that from a tree, form it into fibers, and use it in airplanes, buildings, and cars. The advantage is not just that it’s bio-derived and renewable—it’s also transparent, so it can be used in consumer electronics and food packaging.

Another bio-based example is synthetic spider silk. It’s very hard to create spider silk naturally—you can get it from spiders, but in large numbers they tend to kill each other—so instead, you can take the spider DNA and put it into bacteria, yeast, or even milk. These produce larger volumes of silk protein, which can be spun into yarn and then made into fabric or rope. It’s bio-derived, has strength similar to Kevlar, and is used in bulletproof vests, helmets, and outdoor jackets. At the end of its life, it can potentially be composted and return to the soil.

One last example, which I think is the ultimate thrift: the water bottle, a symbol of conspicuous consumption. We have too many of them, and they’re a problem in the ocean. What do we do with them? This process is able not just to recycle them, but recycle them infinitely. Why is that interesting? Metals, glass, and similar materials can be recycled indefinitely. Plastics, after one or two cycles, lose strength and are no longer useful. But this process, using a few enzymes, can recycle them infinitely. A bottle, chair, or carpet can be broken back into its original molecules, and from those molecules, you can build another product. The cycle is infinite.

In conclusion, if you make anything—if you’re part of a design firm, refurbishing your house, or involved in any aspect of making something—think about how that product could have a second, third, or fourth life. Design in the ability for it to be taken apart. That, to me, is the ultimate thrift, and I think that’s what my grandmother would love.