重新认识节俭：减少浪费与循环利用的现代实践

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Let's talk about Thrift. Thrift is a concept where you reduce, reuse, and recycle, but yet with an economic aspect, I think has a real potential for change. My grandmother, she 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 which we live in.

All of our current products are replaceable. When we get that bright new shiny toy, it's because, basically, we've got 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 way. 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. Current at the moment, we have about 1.3 billion tons of material every year going into landfills. 2100 is 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 of completely changing 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 pay for the bathroom walls. I think though there are companies out there who understand this value and are promoting it. And a lot of the technologies that have been developed for the smart age can also be adapted to reduce, reuse, and also thrift more proficiently. 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, a good one, the second one, not so good. The first is the automotive industry. Not always known as the innovative or creative of industries, but it turns out they're really, really good at recycling their products. 95% of every single car that goes on the road gets recycled here. And of that car, about 75% of the entire car goes and actually gets used again. That includes, of course, the steel and aluminum, but then also the plastics from the fender and also the interiors, glass from the windows and the windshield, also 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 new 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 are going to be with us in 2020. That I think is not perfect, but it's certainly good and it's getting better. The other news is that industries are not doing so well is the architecture industry. Where the challenges with architecture has always been, when we build up, we don't think about taking down. We don't dismantle. We don't disassemble. We demolish. That's challenge because it ends up that about third of all landfill waste in the US is architecture. We need to think of a different about this. There are programs that can actually reduce some of this material. A good example is this. It's actually bricks that are made from old demolition waste, which includes the glass, includes the rubble, includes the concrete. We put it up, put it all together, heat it up and make these bricks we can basically 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 we can be more strict when it comes to buildings. If there's a building down the block which is being demolished, are the materials there that the new building being built here can use? Can we use that build to understand all of the materials available in that building that's still usable? Can we then basically put them into a new building without actually losing any value in the process? Now let's think about other industries. What other industries doing to create thrift? Well, it turns out that there are plenty of industries that are also thinking about their own waste and what they can do with it. One simple example is the waste that they basically belch out as part of industrial processes. Most metal smelters give off an awful lot of carbon dioxide. It turns out there's a company called Land Detector, who's actually working in China and also seeing as soon as South Africa, they're able to take that waste gas about 700,000 tons per smelter and then turn it into about 400,000 tons of ethanol, which is equivalent to basically powering 250,000 or quarter million cars for a year.

How about the proper ones, more close to home? This is a simple solution. It takes the idea of reducing, reusing, but then also with economic advantage. So it's a simple process of changing from a cut and sew, where typically between 20 and 30 materials are used, which are cut from a large cloth and then sewn together or even sometimes glued, they change it and said that they just knitted this issue. The advantage of this is not just simplification of the process. It's also, I've got one material. I have zero waste and then also I'm able to potentially recycle that at the end of its life. Digital manufacturing is also allowing us to do this a little bit more effectively. In this case, it's actually creating the theoretical limit of strength for a material.

Nature also is very effective at thrift. Think about it. Nature has zero waste. Everything is useful for another process. In this case, Namo Tully Lose, which is basically one of the very fine-building blocks of cellulose, which is one of the materials that basically makes one of the things that makes trees strong, you can isolate it, and it works very much like carbon fiber. Take that from a tree, form it into fibers, and then as fiber is constrained in things such as airplanes, buildings, cars. The advantage of this, though, is not just its bio-derived, comes from a renewable resource, but also that it is transparent, so it can be used in consumer electronics as well as food packaging.

Another one from the biosource is synthetic spider silk. Now, it's very hard to actually create spider silk naturally. You can basically get it from spiders, but in large numbers they tend to kill each other, tend to eat each other, so basically you've got a problem with creating in the same way you do regular silk. So, what you can do is you can send the DNA from the spider and put it into various different things. You can put it into bacteria, you can put it into yeast, and you can put it into milk, and what you can do then is the milk or the bacteria produce in much larger volumes, and then from that spin a yarn and then create a fabric or a rope. Again, bio-derived has incredible strength about the same as kevlar, so they're using it in things like bulletproof vests and helmets and outdoor jackets. It has great performance, but again, it's bio-derived at the end of its life, it potentially can go back into the soil, get composted, so again, be potentially used again as a new material.

I'd like you to leave you with one last one which is bio-based, but this I think is like the ultimate thrift. Think about the poster child for conspicuous consumption, it's the water bottle. We have too many of them, they're basically going everywhere, they're a problem in the ocean, what do we do with them? This process is able not just to recycle them, but to recycle them infinitely, and why is that interesting? When we think about reusing and recycling, metals, glass, things like that can be recycled as many times as you like. Plastics, after about once or twice of recycling, whether it's a bottle or whether it's a chair, whatever it is, if it's a carpet, after two times of recycling, it tends to lose strength, it's no longer any use. This though, just using a few enzymes is able to recycle it infinitely. So I take a bottle or a chair, or some other plastic product, I basically put it into a few enzymes, they break it apart, they basically put it back into its original molecules, and then from those molecules you can basically build another chair or carpet or bottle. So the cycle is infinite.

In conclusion, it's one of the things that you think, if you make anything, if you're any part of a design firm, if you're basically refurbishing your house, any aspect in which you make something, think about how that product could potentially be used as a second life or third life 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 basically what my grandmother would love.