Comment by tomjen3
4 years ago
>Now when we say that our economy grows exponentially, it means that the amount of matter traveling through this pipeline is growing exponentially too!
If there are people out there who buy phones by weight it is to buy phones that are thin and light, and therefore contains fewer materials.
I remember the phones of the early aughts. They were bigger and could only do phone things (and snake), which meant that you needed a computer, maybe a calculator, a form of MP3 player, a camera, maybe some DVDs to watch in the back of the car along with a DVD player to watch them on.
Today you have all of that in a phone.
> Today you have all of that in a phone.
But you replace them every two years. And the market for them is still growing. And there's now a resurgence of a market for single-purpose appliances that happens on top of the smartphone market - not replacing it.
(It's also possible more matter goes into making a modern smartphone than a bunch of devices it replaced, because of the demand for more exotic and more pure materials in the processes along the way. But maybe it doesn't, maybe an individual smartphone is a net matter and energy saver. I can totally buy that, we've made a lot of efficiency improvements in manufacturing in the past decades. But there are limits to such improvements, and in the meantime, manufacturing as a whole keeps growing.)
Perhaps I've simplified my diagram too much - I should've drawn an additional "bypass" into "WASTE MATTER" from every other node, because every step in the pipeline loses some of its input as waste.
I was merely making the observation that the growth of the value of something is not necessary a linear function of the amount of materials used. I am not convinced, as an example, that the first iPhone caused drastically more waste to produce (or drastically less) than the last one. Yet the last one is clearly much better.
I'm not saying it's a linear function either. I think it varies. But I also don't think the value added per unit of resources used is growing exponentially. So the problem still remains, because anything short of exponential function isn't going to impact the overall trend long-term.
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