Anna Sturman at PPESydney writes about a divide haunting contemporary ecosocialism…. “ the ongoing cleavage between work in the tradition of so-called ‘first-stage’ ecosocialism, such as James O’Connor’s ‘second contradiction’, and scholarship in the tradition of the metabolic rift school, ‘second-stage’ ecosocialism, associated primarily with the work of John Bellamy Foster, Paul Burkett and Brett Clark.”
One wedge in that cleavage could be misidentifying ecosocialism as the eco-fascism appropriated by violent right-wing movements including those favoring neoliberal solutions but mainly focused on intersectional hatred using race and class discourse in favor of political privilege and power hegemonies over subjugated cultures and populations.
The real juncture of ecosocialism comes from a variety of conflicts among land, labor, and capital.
At the Kochs’ Cato Institute, the right-wing reaction to efforts to mitigate such cleavage(s) relies on neoliberal markets and circular reasoning that negates regulatory solutions. Even moral suasion cannot prevail against the determinism of “free market” solutions to an ecological crisis that may be past the tipping point, insoluable by deregulation. They even suggest a scarcity of moral resources, which looks like “old tired ethics”. For those libertarians, the ‘wise use’ of such conventional wisdom is to capitulate to the current institutional arrangements and their often misidentified and misspecified, quantitative solutions.
At the level of critical practices, recycling and adaptive reuse are not comprehensive solutions in the absence of global, international policy regimes. A half-wild Earth cannot happen without major shifts in social relations and political systems. For example aside from the fossil fuel industry’s media disinformation about the landfill burying of expended wind turbine blades, recycling their composite materials can be made more efficient by modifying their organic constituents. It might not necessarily be the best media framing the use of material to imply one might “eat” a turbine blade converted into gummy candy.
The reality is to resolve the issues of sustainable growth brought about by the ecologically situated conflicts of capital and labor, regardless of any controversies and gaps in the value-form, considering the multimodal advances in both technology and conceptualizing commodities and money. The objective in sustainability and political economy is to conjoin the microfoundations of macroeconomics with their critical spatial and temporal regional locations.
The goal is to change the social structure of accumulation in which ecosocialism is an ever-increasing component in an age where capitalists hedge their bets by investing in both fossil fuels and renewable energy. Ultimately it is both governmentality and governance in a complete assessment of surplus value as an ecological construct.
Weinbaum and Bridges (1976) write that “capitalist accumulation creates its own necessities,” resulting in contradictions between social needs and the imperatives of accumulation. Capitalist firms must endlessly produce commodities for the sake of realizing surplus-value rather than producing things as use-values to meet the needs of people. While commodities must also have use-values, they are not produced to “satisfy directly the needs of the producer, and [are] worth nothing to the producer as a use-value,” (Clarke 1991, 86). What differentiates a commodity from waste is not inherent to the physical properties or use-value of the object. From the perspective of the capitalist firm, an object is a commodity if it can be exchanged for money to realize surplus-value. This is not a permanent condition, as some items and materials may have value in one period or context, but may not be exchangeable for money to realize surplus-value in others. An extreme example of this is the devaluation of commodities that occurs “in the event of a crisis of overproduction, in which the commodity becomes worthless… and may be discarded or destroyed,” (Clarke 1991, 86).
We can see evidence of this in the global political economy of recycling, as campaigns promoting recycling and laws mandating household waste-sorting, over the past four decades, have been too successful. The current concern for municipal waste systems and waste management firms is an excess of materials in the recycling stream, as plastic and contaminated paper from the U.S. and U.K. have become an international “hot potato” (McCormick et al. 2019). This overproduction of recycling threatens the profits of waste management companies due to an oversupply of materials that industry does not want and contamination of valuable materials with other household wastes in single-stream or improperly sorted recycling.
You’re spreading misinformation. The EV recycling battery issue is a real problem. To date the only in-house closed loop recycling is done by Tesla. And even they admit that the challenges are extreme. It is not profitable and Very few components can be reused.
Almost everything that’s said about recycling is wrong. At the very least, none of the conventional wisdom is completely true. Let me start with two of the most common claims, each quite false:
If either of those two claims were true, then the debate would be over. The truth is more complicated than almost anyone admits.
There are two general kinds of arguments in favor of recycling. The first is that “this stuff is too valuable to throw away!” In almost all cases, this argument is false, and when it is correct recycling will be voluntary; very little state action is necessary. The second is that recycling is cheaper than landfilling the waste. This argument may well be correct, but it is difficult to judge because officials need keep landfill prices artificially low to discourage illegal dumping and burning. Empirically, recycling is almost always substantially more expensive than disposing in the landfill.
Since we can’t use the price system, authorities resort to moralistic claims, trying to persuade people that recycling is just something that good citizens do. But if recycling is a moral imperative, and the goal is zero waste, not optimal waste, the result can be a net waste of the very resources that recycling was implemented to conserve. In what follows, I will illustrate the problems with each of the two central fallacies of mandatory and pure-market recycling, and then will turn to the problem of moral imperatives.
When you cast policy issues in moral terms, you degrade the character of public discourse. You lead people to see conflicting priorities as an occasion for battle, rather than an occasion for compromise. You send the message that policy is best decided by appeals to one’s inner conscience (or, more likely, to the polemics of demagogues), rather than by appeals to impersonal cost-benefit analysis. And this is a very bad thing. If overusing landfills is a bad habit, then branding everything you don’t like as evil is a far worse one.
If we’re determined to instill blind moral instincts that make people behave better most of the time, I’d like to nominate a blind moral instinct to respect price signals and the individual choices that underlie them—an instinct, for example, to recoil from judging and undercutting other people’s voluntary arrangements. I like it when my neighbors dispose of their beer cans properly. I’d like it even more if they’d stop trying to dictate other people’s wages, working conditions, housing contracts, and drug habits.
By concentrating our moral resources on recycling, we not only crowd out that nobler mission; we actually undercut it, by sending the message that price signals are unreliable. Of course, some price signals are unreliable, but the whole point of the moral suasion agenda is to get things right most of the time, not all of the time. Every time a misguided locavore makes the world a poorer place by choosing expensive local food, it’s because she’s absorbed the false lesson that prices are generally a poor measure of social cost – a lesson first absorbed, I suspect, at the feet of the recycling propagandists she first met in elementary school.
...the practice of sorting household waste into “trash” and “recycling” is an instance of what Nona Glazer ( 1984, 1993) calls “work transfer”—a reorganization of labour and day-to-day life by the state and industry in which production is shifted from industry into households without compensation. Households provide recyclable materials as “free gifts” to industry when they do the unwaged work of sorting this recycling from undesirable waste.
What differentiates a commodity from waste is not inherent to the physical properties or use-value of the object. From the perspective of the capitalist firm, an object is a commodity if it can be exchanged for money to realize surplus-value. This is not a permanent condition, as some items and materials may have value in one period or context, but may not be exchangeable for money to realize surplus-value in others. An extreme example of this is the devaluation of commodities that occurs “in the event of a crisis of overproduction, in which the commodity becomes worthless… and may be discarded or destroyed,” ( Clarke 1991, 86).
Contemporary recycling sorting transforms household members into unpaid post-industrial rag and bone men, sifting through domestic refuse to remit valuable materials as a “free gift” to industry and enabling the sale of the products, in which this waste is embodied in the first place. In seeking to increase the quantity of these recycled materials, the recycling industry created the conditions that generated its own crisis of overproduction. Their new task is to convince and compel households to take on a more intensive process of household recycling sorting that requires additional time and knowledge so that the recycling industry can forestall crisis and maintain its profits. However, the looming crises of accumulation and waste are impossible to postpone forever. The imperative of endless accumulation which realizes itself in the overaccumulation of capital and the overaccumulation of waste can’t be counteracted by siphoning off some of that waste into new inputs for production for profit.
While my informants take many steps to “undo” environmental damage and mitigate the environmental impact of their day-to-day lives, they are compelled to purchase commodities from the market—produced in one place and transported to another for sale surrounded by packaging—in order to survive. Recycling is ultimately a state-directed process of work transfer in the form of household waste sorting which contributes to the revenues of waste management companies and forestalls crisis, but the crisis-ridden imperative of accumulation remains. The strong negative responses to packaging shared by my informants are perhaps evidence of the frustration and futility of their extensive pro-environmental practices—there is no real possibility of sustainability in capitalism, and their day-to-day survival requires collusion with the “polluters” and big corporations they despise. The crisis of recycling can only be resolved if the overproduction of production can be resolved. As I argue in my two recent articles on this topic, if the family-household was formed by capitalism and at the same time makes possible its continued existence, the path forward out of these crises must include transformations not only of the economy and society, but also of our notions of the household and family.
Fortunately, it's also possible to repurpose the resin for other applications, both downcycle and upcycle. For the former, take the material and shred it up, perhaps adding a bit more polymer into the mix, and it will be perfect for injection molding, a common manufacturing technique for plastics. Dorgan also produced an engineered stone, which he then used to make a full-sized kitchen sink, and the MSU Spartan logo.
Beyond that simple mechanical processing, Dorgan found that he could chemically modify these materials for more upcycle applications. "We can actually digest out one of the components of the PLA polymer using just a simple base, like an alkaline solution," he said. "Think of baking soda or baking powder in the kitchen—something quite mild in terms of its chemical activity."
This breaks the PLA down into an environmentally benign metabolite called monolactic acid, and enabled Dorgan to recover the polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) in the material—more commonly known as plexiglass, used to make windows and car taillights. Raising the temperature can convert the PMMA into polymethacrylic acid, a super-absorbent polymer used in diapers. Another byproduct of the alkaline digestion is potassium lactate, which Dorgan was able to purify for food-grade applications. He even used it to make gummy bears in the lab.
And yes, he ate those gummy bears with no ill effects. "A carbon atom derived from a plant, like corn or grass, is no different from a carbon atom that came from a fossil fuel," said Dorgan. "It's all part of the global carbon cycle, and we've shown that we can go from biomass in the field to durable plastic materials and back to foodstuffs."
About 60 to 80 tons of pulverized blades are loaded into dump trucks and shipped from the factory each day to cement manufacturers across the country. Roughly three-quarters of the blade material will be used as raw material to make cement, while the manufacturing plants use the rest as fuel, replacing coal.
The plant has shredded nearly 2,000 blades since August 2020, and an additional 250 blades are processed per month, Collard said.
GE, one of the largest wind turbine suppliers worldwide, is a partner in Veolia’s recycling program. The company now sends the “large majority” of its used blades to the Louisiana plant, said Michelle Simpson, a senior services manager at GE Renewable Energy Digital Services.
Few U.S. recycling facilities are equipped to handle the material, which means GE must ship used turbine blades hundreds or thousands of miles.
“It’s a real balancing act,” Simpson said. “You’re now releasing carbon dioxide to transport these blades, so are you still getting the environmental benefit that you want by not landfilling them?”
But because the crushed blades can be used to replace raw silica in cement production — and reduce the amount of coal used to fuel manufacturing plants — there is still a net benefit to recycling the blades, Simpson said.
The blades of wind turbines can be from 120 feet to 219 feet in length. The 120-foot blades weigh 12,OOO lbs. and cost $125,000 each and have an estimated life cycle of 20 years. Obsolete wind turbine rotor blades are a problem because they are made with use of glass and carbon fiber and are extremely difficult to recycle at the present time.
By calculating the volume of wind turbine blades that will reach the end of their 20-year lifespan in each state by 2050 and comparing this to remaining landfill capacity, the researchers determined that if not recycled or reused, cumulative blade waste would use about 1% of remaining U.S. landfill capacity volume, or 0.2% of landfill mass by 2050.
It is true that there is a landfill in Casper, Wyoming, that does accept decommissioned and damaged wind turbine blades and motors, both of which are not recyclable. However, it is important to highlight that up to 90% of a wind turbine is recyclable. That one-tenth of a windmill is not recyclable does not necessarily negate its overall green energy production over the course of its 20- to 25-year lifetime.
Berkshire Hathaway has become Occidental Petroleum’s biggest shareholder by far. The buying spree has fuelled speculation of a takeover https://t.co/DR00aA8KZC
Berkshire Hathaway Energy, which is a subsidiary of the main Berkshire Hathaway business conglomerate, has long been involved in a variety of energy-related investment ventures. Berkshire Hathaway Energy owns a series of coal power plants as part of the western utility PacifiCorp, in addition to Burlington Northern railroad, which depends primarily on coal shipments. In 2019, Buffet also made a massive ten billion dollar investment in the Occidental Petroleum oil company in an effort to provide the company with the financial backing needed to buy Anadarko Petroleum. Through what is known as a preferred stock investment, Buffet would be receiving an annual eight percent dividend from Occidental Petroleum, which amounts in $800 million in annual income for Berkshire Hathaway. Buffet also previously held a financial position in Phillips 66, which is a major American oil refining company.
In addition to being involved in investments in the oil and coal industries, Berkshire Hathaway Energy is also known as one of the global leaders in wind energy. Through the Iowa-based MidAmerican Energy utility, Warren Buffet has spent billions of dollars in an attempt to make the midwestern state the “Saudi Arabia of wind energy.” Berkshire Hathaway Energy has been providing financial support to expand the footprint and capacity of MidAmerican Energy’s nearly 2,600 wind turbines throughout rural Iowa (Mohamed, 2019). With increased financial support in the coming years, MidAmerican Energy hopes to be able to eventually provide Iowans with 100 percent renewable energy. Berkshire Hathaway Energy has also been a primary supporter of NV Energy, which is increasing Nevada’s renewable energy capacity from 24 percent to upwards of 40 percent by as early as 2023 (Rosenbaum, 2019).