Recycle Grandpa

Though I like the software industry, I’ve gotten the feeling that much of the industry isn’t producing anything especially useful. Don’t get me wrong, there are some promising areas, such as data mining, that will improve society by allowing us to maximize our utilization of existing resources and turn raw information in actual knowledge. However, the use of software and computer technology in general has been disappointing and spiraled into a new arms race: my PDA is bigger/better/etc. than yours! Gadget-envy is killing this planet.

I’ve been wracking my brain of late to think of new, simpler, ways to make society more efficient and to reduce waste. I have a personal pet theory, which I’ll narcissistically dub “Brendon’s Theorem of Resource Extraction”:

We (society) have already extracted all of the natural resources from the Earth that are necessary to sustain us indefinitely.

Think about that: we’ve already dug up all the ore, chopped down all the trees, killed all the fish, et cetera, that we will ever need to continue our way of life. The problem is we extract resources, use the resources to build goods, and then throw the resources away once we’re “done” with them! Consider your typical piece of consumer electronics: we expend enormous energy and time on extracting, separating, refining and distilling precious metals and petrochemicals required for these products, only to discard all of that effort wholesale once the next generation toy comes out. All of that effort is lost. If only we could capture that waste!

Even in death, we’re wasteful! Remember when you were a kid, when science teachers would try to put the composition of the human body in perspective by relating the values to something you could understand? They’d tell you things like how many nails you could make out of the iron in your body, how many pieces of chalk out of the calcium, and how many bars of soap. A bit gruesome perhaps, but in retrospect it does beg a certain question: why, exactly, do we bury or burn our dead when they’re such useful sources of resources?

Now, I’m not suggesting something along the lines of Soylent Green, turning our dead into a tasty edible treat, but something more practical. A person spends a lifetime, distilling raw materials, purifying them; why waste that effort? Heck, if we can’t recycle our own bodies, a fairly simple bag of organic compounds and water, how can we expect to recycle anything else we produce?