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Yea sure, I hope people try this approach if they believe the math. I'm just skeptical that a circular economy is realistically better than other means. There are many examples of "built to last" products having average use lifespans below the energy payback period (ie net loss).
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Replying to and
this is my cynicism / experience in industrial design too: you can spend a heck of a lot of design and tooling time on making something good and repairable, a lot more resources to build it, and people throw it out anyway. I'm all for right to repair, but nearly no one does it
Yeah it’s not a panacea. Plastic straws and cloth totes are other examples. It’s a mix of targeted redesign, proper labeling, modeling and imitation, and incentives. Designing for durability and repairability as a general default in isolation won’t work.
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But the larger point is, there’s no way to decarbonize without shifting consumption patterns to a lower-emissions equilibrium. There’s only so far you can get with taxes, cap-and-trade, and carbon credits. And with matter unlike energy there’s fewer big levers like renewables.
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Direct energy use is about half the carbon pie chart. The other half is materially embodied. Accounting methods are a bit messy, but currently the biggest pattern that needs shifting in the energy half of the pie is probably HVAC.
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Energy in general is much more legible and within it, electricity generation and transportation are the most legible parts. But I don’t think there’s a way to decarbonize based on energy alone. You have to do a “renewables” equivalent to materials production and use as well.
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But something about moving mass consumption manufacturing to net negative carbon without touching the content seems off to me. Medium is the message. I can’t imagine carbon negative high-tech renewables based factories delivering through EV supply chains...the same crap as today.
It's likely that "touching the content" would likely be things like reducing raw material mass, more heat recycling, etc. - more traditional things that we already know that work. Less so things like moving from ABS to PLA - which has big performance / cost sacrifices.
I think you may be mixing up my current dabbling in maker stuff with my opinions on sustainability :D There's a coupling (I'm doing it partly to learn the possibilities/limits of last-mile tech) but most of the serious interventions I'm thinking about aren't consumer-level
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