We’re fine with the idea that we might all walk more lightly upon this Earth. Why not, after all it’s only the claim that we should be more efficient in our behaviour. But we do see some amusing, to us at least, claims in this area.
Take this Guardian story about making chef’s knives out of those little nitrous oxide party popper (although we’re all supposed to agree they’re for whipped cream only) steel capsules. Hand worked by a master craftsman that mild steel is turned into those very knives. Well, OK, but is it actually saving resources through that reuse?
One method of working this out is to look at the price. Prices are, as Hayek pointed out, information and the price will - by and large even if not wholly, exactly - be a record of the resources used in producing the item.
These hand crafted from those party popper knives seem to run at £240 a piece and up. A quick Amazon shows that the same style and size of chef’s knife, newly made from furnace steel, is £23, or a little under a tenth the price. Working purely by price we’d rather assume that the hand crafted item uses more resources than the industrial and machine made one.
We’d also be right in this assumption even if the proportions might not be wholly correct. For that hand made item is using vastly more human labour than the machine one. Human labour is a resource, it is also something that we might want to be efficient in our use of.
Running this the other way around there are economies of scale in manufacturing. Those popper capsules can indeed be stuck into a steel furnace, empties can be sold to steel scrappies for £100 a tonne perhaps. US prices might differ a little.
OK, so what is this telling us? Sure, run those poppers through the system again. They can’t be refilled for contamination reasons (not that that would worry the party goers but imagine some were in fact used for cream by some mischance) which only leaves us with how to run them through the system again?
Hand crafting knives out of them looks hugely more resource using than sticking them back into a furnace and allowing the machine to make knives out of the reprocessed, not reused, steel.
This is not, of course, a claim that one should not buy the reused knives. Whatever floats your boat, we are after all liberals around here. But the claim that this uses fewer resources than industrial capitalism simply isn’t true. Largely because that capitalism is obsessed with profits, those being a product of being efficient in the use of resources.
Or as we can and should put it, the environmental joy of the capitalist and market system is that it is continually demanding the cheapest and least resource using methods of reusing, recycling, any and every possible input into the system.
Just to be completist, it is also possible to reduce resource use considerably here, sell big tanks of nitrous and packets of party balloons - something currently illegal. But then that would be breaking that fourth wall of the general agreement that this is all about whipped cream, wouldn’t it?