Hi Everyone! Like
last year, I am
raising money for the SF-based nonprofit
City Surf Project. With some friends, we're trying to raise $1500 for the June 17th deadline, which is the annual SURF-A-THON!
City Surf Project is simply a wonderful nonprofit, doing the work to connect the next generation to the ocean. The mission is close to my heart, as getting into surfing was one of the major ways I became an environmental scientists, or environmentalist at all. I'm working with them now to develop some little science lessons to sprinkle in, especially on days when the ocean conditions make it tough to be in the water.
If you can spare something—even $10 helps—please consider
donating here! Now, on to the post.
When I think of recycling, I first think of the paper, cardboard, glass, metal, and plastic that I put into a bin every week on the curb here in Oakland California. Over the years though, I've become increasingly aware and pessimistic of where this stuff ends up. I'm not actually sure where it goes, in my city (embarrassing!), but at the scale of the USA, the results are pretty dismal,
especially for plastic. Most things put in recycling just end up in a landfill somewhere stateside, or have historically been sold to east Asia (mostly China, though no longer) to be "recycled" though ultimately just getting dumped into the ocean. Yay!
(n.b. steel & aluminum are some of the easiest materials to recycle, consider swapping those for plastics whenever possible, and glass thereafter!)
Without recycling, stuff accumulates. Some of the magic of sustainable ecosystems is how materials get broken down, moved around, and re-used—at the levels of compounds or elements! These cycling processes prevent buildup. There are many initiatives to figure out
how to recycle anthropogenic mixtures on short-term timescales, which is essentially the basis of the "circular economy" concept. This is important, and valuable, but my focus here is on the cycles performed by nature already. You have probably heard of some of the big
biogeochemical cycles—the water cycle, the carbon cycle, maybe the
phosphorous cycle. While one can imagine a "cycle" for virtually any substance, some of them depend on very specific conditions or long amounts of time, making the cycle more difficult to conceptualize. For example, the rate of coal production now is quite low, because of
fungal activity that now decomposes woody lignin. Before that, wood did not decompose and just got buried and transformed into coal. Because buried carboniferous wood isn't being replaced now, when we mine coal in contemporary times, it's pretty much a one-way process. I have not seen anyone do the life-cycle analysis to calculate if we're burying wood at a sufficient rate to make coal in the future.
Lola wrote
a great piece on lithium mining & its discontents in her newsletter, and the "lithium cycle" is another great case of "geologic recycling." The work of lithium mining is a complex process that depends on water and big trucks and jobs for the people doing it, but at a geologic level, lithium is largely found in
pegmatite. Pegmatite is a not-uncommon kind of rock, but it remains a bit mysterious, as "no one universally accepted model of pegmatite genesis has yet emerged that satisfactorily explains all the diverse features of granitic pegmatites" (
ref). As lithium mining continues to ramp up for the battery boom, I wonder if we know how quickly it's being placed "back" into the environment, albeit kilometers under the surface we walk on, via tectonic processes.
I wrote, over four (!) years ago now, about "
Geologic Objects," the idea that the extractivism behind various materials fuels many of the things we touch daily—in architecture, infrastructure, and consumer products. You're likely reading this message on a device that contains lithium, cobalt, and tantalum, plus many many other somewhat more banal but perhaps more difficult-to-recycle materials. And it almost certainly used coal or oil somewhere in its supply chain, linking you to carbon cycle processes from millennia ago. As per the silly meme above, everything
can be recycled, so long as you're patient enough for tectonics to pull your
iPhone, plastic case and all, case into a subduction zone. In any substance you touch that's dependent on mining, try to remember the geologic timescales at play for their cycles. As seems to be a refrain for this entire newsletter series, we would benefit from figuring out how to live with a pace of extraction that can match the pace of geologic recycling*.
I recently finished reading John McPhee's
Assembling California and oh man, it makes me want to get another PhD, this time in geology! I particularly enjoyed a section where McPhee and the ostensible protagonist of the book, Eldridge Moores, go winetasting in California wine country. The passages weave together geologic details of far-off countries with those immediately evident in California—with Moores excited to see volcanic limestone used to build the roadhouse in which they were sitting. It then brings in details of the local wines, thusly described as "volcanic." I realized that the language of terroir, the connection of the grape's flavor to the place where it grew, the soil a byproduct of the country rock geology, makes wine a geologic object too. Hell of a lot more delicious than petroleum.
Reduce, reuse, recycle,
Lukas
* This, to me, is the foundation of support for the degrowth movement. More on that some other time.
Image from 
Tunnelbana station right at lake level in Stockholm. Photo from 
Figure 
photo from 
Screenshot from the Hughes fire, north of LA close to I-5.
from 
