this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
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That would be great except for one problem: capitalism. Proper recovery and recycling of materials will never happen so long as production of new materials is cheaper.
Also capitalism's need for infinite growth has lead us to impose engineered "demand creation" (through advertising) and now even "growth hacking" to supercharge this process. It has made us more wasteful than ever. We are headed into a wall.
This is an article about scarcity, insufficient supply to meet demand.
Artificial demand creation isn't necessary, or even productive, when the existing demand already outstrips supply.
And if it is the case that demand is much higher than supply, that's a baked in financial incentive that rewards people for efficient recycling.
Capitalism is bad at pricing in externalities. It's pretty good at using price signals to allocate finite resources to more productive uses.
Markets do not equal capitalism. You can have the efficiencies of free markets (worker owned co-ops which are market socialist) without the all consuming greed of capitalism.
I don't disagree, but I don't see the relevance of these particular flaws of unrestrained capitalism to this specific stated problem: that there might not be enough copper to be able to continue to use it as we always have.
There are lots of flaws to capitalism. Running out of useful copper, while copper is being used in wasteful ways, doesn't really implicate the main weaknesses of capitalism systems.