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This might be a bit naive, and I’m not the best micro-economist, but would it be feasible for someone/sime country to basically make an industry out of recycling and composting? As in, they’ll pay a small price to import what people were already throwing away [including higher end things like electronics and vehicles and airplanes] and recycle the raw materials out of them, and then make a vertical integration that way. I.e, a country doesn’t have domestic aluminium deposits so it imports recyclable waste that it then takes the aluminum out of.
Same with industrial composting. Import trash, probably maybe even simply taking it for free from countries with landfill charges, take out what isn’t compostable and just pump out fertilizer from that instead of importing it. Idk, I think i was just inspired reading about how Japan got most of its iron/steel during ww2 from American scrap metal
Excellent idea – but currently it is more expensive to ship reusable materials than it is to bury it, burn it, or send it to a poor country in the global south where it ends up in a river then makes its way to the great garbage patch in the Pacific. We people de-prioritize some really important stuff. You’re right – but the focus has to shift economically away from endless money printing and ever-increasing profits. We need economics that focus around human need first. Reward companies for putting people first, rather than capital. Until that happens, or I don’t know – luxury communism under fusion energy happens first – (you know, where scarcity basically disappears at scale because we can suddenly apply energy to big projects like global water access via desalinization and vertical farms in low-food-density areas like the desert, etc.) – we probably will continue to be under the thumb of this shitty system. Nobody wants to fight the powerful. Not really.
The cost to benefit of expending the resources necessary to extract and purify the recycled materials is infinitely more expensive then simply importing or buying the raw material outright.
Not to mention that no one would be willing to send you only “good trash”, and you face the daunting challenge of sorting through megalithic quantities of useless trash for a few paltry recyclable materials. You additionally face the issue of now needing to dispose of the massive quantities of leftover waste with no recycling potential.
In some extraordinarily desperate fringes of the globe there are communities of people who do make a sustenance living performing such recycling, however the output is utterly tiny and non-viable for expansion.
The example of Japan prior to WW2, the scrap metal the US was sending Japan was fairly expensive and seen as a viable resource. The Japanese just needed to spend the time sorting the various metals. Further, such imports were a desperation move as the metals imported were of varying grades, types, purities; and so forth, making refinement and usage difficult, but for a country stuck in a perpetual war economy desperate for resources, something is better than nothing. However, replicating that system within a globalist world makes little sense beyond extreme siege examples.