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By Root 1371 0

Where once only precious metals were recycled, today we recycle copper and copper alloys, chromium, cobalt, cadmium, nickel, manganese, molybdenum, lead, titanium, and zinc, though in vastly different amounts. With cadmium, manganese, and molybdenum, for example, the amounts are negligible, while for titanium (crucial for major aerospace structural elements such as wing skins and supports, compresser blades, and rotor parts for helicopters) up to 80 percent of the metal form is recycled. In its mineral form, where it is used to produce pigments that appear in a wide diversity of goods including paints, papers, plastics, textiles, and such common commodities as Twinkies and toothpaste, no recycling is possible and as a result we are totally import-dependent. See Paone, Nonfuel Minerals.

14. Aluminum, whose story of diminishing returns we told above, has in recent decades become something of a recycling success. As recently as 1975, we derived significantly less than 10 percent of our consumption from recycling. Today the figure is up to 42 percent of consumption, mainly as a consequence of garbage recycling. It turns out that 2 million tons of aluminum show up annually in municipal waste so that the excessive consumption habits that produced our dependency are happily producing byproduct wastes that are reducing the costs of that dependency. See Brooks, Metal Recovery.

15. Paone, Nonfuel Minerals, p. 227. Of course, substitution is not always a simple matter. Chromium and cobalt, for example, are metals absolutely essential to modern technology. Stainless steel (corrosion-resistant steel) can be made without nickel, but not without chromium, and efforts for chromium have yet to produce results. Although it takes “years of intensive research and development to discover replacements and produce them on meaningful levels,” research and development efforts in the United States, Japan, and other advanced industrial nations are producing synthetic metals, high-performance plastics and ceramics, and advanced alloys and other composites that may eventually replace traditional natural metals in the world’s new technologies.

16. Estimates suggest the nodules lying on the Pacific Ocean floor alone contain 359 times more cobalt, 83 times more nickel, and 9 times more copper than the world’s other known reserves. Deep-sea diving, high-pressure-withstanding submersibles are being developed by several national teams, and a consortium of Japanese companies including Hitachi, Sumitomo, and Mitsubishi expects to have its deep-sea robotic vacuums in place by 1996. Tony Emerson with H. Takayama, “Into the Challenger Deep,” Newsweek, July 5, 1993, pp. 62–63.

17. The precise figures are offered with a useful narrative in Vital Signs, pp. 46–63.

18. The United States, for example, derives nearly 75 percent of its electricity from coal, oil, and gas, 17 percent from nuclear, 9.5 percent from hydroelectric, and only 0.5 percent from geothermal. Only a handful of nations derive the majority of their electricity from nonfossil fuels. France and Belgium are heavily dependent on nuclear (over 60 percent each), while New Zealand, Canada, Austria, and Switzerland all derive a majority from hydroelectric. Meanwhile, literally dozens of countries (especially in Africa and the Middle East) derive virtually 100 percent of their electricity from fossil fuels (see Vital World Statistics, pp. 80–81).

19. Until recently, bikes outnumbered cars in China 250 to 1; however, although it continues to use bicycles as a primary transportation vehicle, reducing dependency on petroleum, steel, rubber, aluminum, and matériel and at the same time sparing the planet additional environmental pollution, it is now planning to expand automobile production radically. Vital Signs, p. 21.

20. C. A. S. Hall, C. J. Cleveland, and R. Kaufmann, Energy and Resource Quality: The Ecology of the Economic Process (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1986), p. 161.

21. The Energy Information Administration, Annual Energy Review: 1991 (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Interior, 1991).