So some people have tried to use blow up dummies and put them next to them to get into the carpool lane. And I know they introduced it in Jakarta a few years ago and there were people on the edge of town, town hiring themselves out to sit in the car so you could use the carpool lane. So there are ways around it, but in principle, they’re a good idea. Yeah, but the people find ways around it, of course. But yes, they are a good idea.
I think this is a good moment to go on to parts three about the relationships.
Yeah. Now, part three is is potentially the most challenging, so I hope you can bear with me. Right. People in cars. When you first drive up in a Cadillac, even old friends see you in a new light. Apparently, I used to have a Cadillac, but I think old friends just thought that’s typical for him. Nobody else would buy something like that. Anyway, I’ve got a few quotes from sociologists and social scientists. Consumerism helps us figure out where we fit within society and provides provides the means by which to change social circumstances. And then Jackson, who is an expert on sustainable consumption, he says there are a few places where the insider material would have symbolic value our more naked to public scrutiny than in the case of the automobile. The car is a very visible means of expressing and showing the world who you are, who you want to be, what you aspire to, and things like that. And. This. This is an important part of social behavior. We explore it in some detail in our latest book. Should you want to know more about it? But that’s just the introduction to it. But of course, consumption is bad for our environment, right? Especially of manmade stuff. This is true. But you cannot avoid consumption. I mean, most human activities have some environmental impacts. What matters is the amount and the type of consumption, clearly. But also one of the things to explore is our relationship with objects more generally.
And it’s important to. Challenge the notion that there is this real distinction with natural or manmade products and even with animate and inanimate human creations, use the materials we find on our planet. Right? So in that respect, we are like other animals. Beavers for their dams bursts for their nests, as they say. Our impact is, of course, greater. I’ll admit that it’s not inherently different. We only use what we found on the planet. Another thing that Morton, for example, argues, and others have argued this as well, that the concept of nature is itself unhelpful. By thinking of something like nature, we separate ourselves to something that’s outside us. But in reality, we are we are part of that same system. And again, this is important to realize Morton calls it the mesh that we are part of. We are an integral part of that mesh, as is everything else on the planet. And that system does not recognize the hierarchy of objects that we pretend to have. We put ourselves at the top of some sort of hierarchy, but the natural systems don’t recognize that, really. So human objects are not inherently superior to other objects that only something we have decided about. It’s like we have decided about this distinction between natural and manmade and animate and inanimate. But it’s all part of the same system. Human objects can also easily build an emotional relationship with other objects objects such as cars, clothes, mobile phones, etc., etc…
I used to ask my students, What is your most prized possession? And for these mainly Chinese students, in my days in their twenties, their phone was the most important object. I think very often if it came to saving a human being some distance away and saving their phone in an emergency, they would probably save their phone. Right. We have to be realistic about these things. This is how human relationships with objects work. So such relationships potentially help us value the objects with which we share this planet and its attaching greater value to the few to the objects we consume. That is crucially important in the future of consumerism. Now, of course, a couple of quotes from this American philosopher of Central European origin co hack. He said Artefacts are not only products, but they are also gifts, be it of God or of nature. Their being has been bought at a price. Animal slaughtered, trees felled or mined. A gift, though, requires gratitude as a response. It is surely one of the most elementary prima facia obligations to treat a gift with respect. It might be sure sound far fetched to speak of my moral obligation to an aluminum beacon discarded by the roadside. Yet that obligation is real, not aluminum or aluminium, as we say, embodying both a prodigious amount of labor and a part of God’s creation. Or in a secular metaphor, a nonrenewable resource is a gift.
There would be it may be my privilege to use that resource, that gift. It is immoral for me to waste it, and that’s not how most people would think about it. But if we can get people to think more in those sort of terms, we will create a different attitude to consumer consumption and consumerism. So one of the elements within this is is product. I skipped a slide as part of more sustainable consumption. Then we need to build longer term relationships with more durable objects. I’ve got here the closed loop sort of diagram for the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. I’ve had some dealings with them in the past specifically on this. Extending product lifespans and building these relationships, particularly with cars, is quite an important one. It also means we need to protect the freedom to tinker. Since the 1920s, we’ve been in a battle with the car makers whereby the car makers have tried to keep control of the product they sell us and try to prevent us from touching it and modifying it and personalizing it. Again, that’s that’s something that needs to be challenged. Obviously, we need to close the loops as well, but close them as late as possible. Another problem about closing loops is as we move into different materials. So moving from internal combustion to electric vehicles, for example, we also change the materials. So it’s going to be more difficult to close certain loops.
But this quote at the bottom, most consumer products are discarded not because they no longer work, but because the user has fallen out of love with them is a key element of it. I’ve spent some time at waste sites looking at what’s there, and you get televisions there that still work and things like that. You get a lot of electronic goods that actually still work. So why are they discarded? Because they’re out of fashion, because they bought something new, but they’ve in a sense fallen out of love with it. But if these products could develop with the owner, people might keep them longer and would not seek a replacement so soon, which would again help the whole material flow through the system. So product durability then becomes a key element. And I’ve done quite a lot of work on longer life cars now for a while and occasionally pops up again. These scrappage schemes pop up, usually administered by governments, but usually inspired by the new car industry who are, of course more interested in selling new cars. So these premature scrappage schemes we looked at a few about 20 years ago, they rarely actually make sense environmentally. I mean, the excuse is usually we’ll make cleaner cars, but rarely. If you look at the whole life cycle impact, does it make any sense? Now, this little graph down here shows the life cycle impact of a number of different types of car with the embedded carbon, like the light blue ones and the end use carbons compared.
Now the first one at 160 grams per kilometre. That’s actually most of the cars current and average. For most of the cars currently in use, they produce 160 grams per kilometre in use. So on those cars, the impact, the embedded carbon, the impact of manufacturing and discarding is between 20 and 30% typically which more efficient cars at 120 grams per kilometre, which is a lot of smaller cars today it creeps up, the embedded carbon creeps up when you go to a plug in hybrid at 78 grams per kilometre. These are all specific vehicles, but are you using them as an average? Then of course the embedded carbon in proportion to the whole creep. So if you go for 45 grams per kilometre, which is a battery electric EV and I know it’s supposed to be zero emissions, but 245 grams per kilometre takes in the energy generating mix within the EU. Right. Which, which is not totally green, not totally renewable. So therefore there is still an impact but it’s very low. But you can see with a battery electric vehicle, you get to a stage where the embedded carbon is actually more than the carbon emissions in use. And of course the more the the more green you make your generating mix, the bigger the embedded carbon becomes. So then you have to think, is it really worthwhile scrapping these cars at all, or is the investment in that vehicle such that we really need to keep it for as long as possible? So this is an interesting argument that is not being widely aired at the moment.
It’s kept within small groups of academics at the moment, but it is a real issue that we will come up with in the coming years. Right now, in 2008, an ecologist called well, his name is obviously a German name, but he’s American, spent some time at the Australian National University in Canberra as well. He this is really a handbook on ecology. But in the introduction he said that you are living in a century, 21st century, when we will be moving from an economic to an ecological world view. Now I thought that was very interesting because of course we are dominated by an economic worldview governments, businesses, everybody talks economics, but really this is very unhelpful. We really need to see if we can come to an ecological. A world view. But how do you go about it? So I’ve spent much of the last 15 years or so trying to work out how you would do this in the context of the car industry. Another interesting strand of philosophies, Panpsychism. I don’t know if you’ve come across it. You’ve got a guy, Philip Goff, here in Britain, who is a proponent of it. As you may be aware, philosophers have for hundreds of years trying to work out what consciousness is and what it where it comes from.
Now, the panpsychists, as you can probably work out, it means it’s psyche everywhere. Argue that the only way you can explain consciousness if you assume it exists in some form at the molecular level. Now, if that is the case, that means that our so-called inanimate objects also must have a level of consciousness. I realize this is very philosophical stuff, but I’m just running it by you. So again, you come back to this system of the mesh and an integration. There is something we share within an inanimate object such as cars, for example, that most people wouldn’t normally recognize. They say they’re just objects, and because they’re just objects, they are therefore disposable. And this is where the problems arise. So if we begin to think more in these sort of terms, that could be a major step to enable us to develop a more ecological world view which would then automatically make us more ecological actors. Right. Wolf. We also then need to do is see how natural systems I do still use the term nature because it’s widely used, how natural systems work and natural systems favor diversity. The picture in the background here, by the way, I took that a few months ago, late last year, This isn’t a person in mountains in West Wales. The Presidio Mountains is where the bluestones from Stonehenge came from. You know, Stonehenge is the sarsen stones, the big things.
But outside there is another stone circle made of blue stones. That circle was quarried here and was first set up in this area in West Wales, and somehow they got all those stones to Wiltshire, which is about 200 kilometres away from there. We still don’t know how they did it, but it does show that although technology is not always the answer, humans can be extremely inventive in technologies to solve problems. Our problem at the moment is not shifting stones from West Wales to central England, but there you go. Natural systems favour diversity and they create they use diversity to create resilience in the system. If you look at a natural system, an ecological system, even if some individual species are lost, the whole system can survive because there is enough diversity within the system. So there are enough other species to take over the rules of the species you’ve lost. That is not how our current economic system thinks. We are obsessed with efficiency. Resilience to us often appears inefficient. We are used to systems that are efficient. The car industry is a classic example. You try and make it as efficient as possible, whereas we should really start thinking in terms of making our systems resilient rather than efficient, because efficient systems are often unable to adapt to change and an ability to adapt to change is exactly what we need at the moment.
So. Forget about efficiency. Go for resilience instead. Right. Any questions? I’m sure there are a lot.
If no one has a question. There was actually a question related to electric cars that was posed in the forum of previously, and we haven’t really talked about it, but I do think it touches a little bit on also circular economy in a sense that they were asking how sustainable e cars can be as the batteries they will reach their end of life. So what is happening to these batteries? New batteries need to be sourced and are we not just postponing problems for the future?
The advantage of automotive traction batteries is that they’re full of very valuable materials. One of my former PhD students is currently involved in a project that looks specifically at battery recycling. There are various things you can do with them. You can have a second use phase of them. You can use them as power walls for the house, for example, backup batteries for your electrical system. In a house, you can use them in electric vehicle charging units as storage batteries, because in those you don’t need to have the full capacity available or you can recycle the materials in them. So. I know there’s a lot of talk about battery recycling and end of use and things like that, but I suspect it’s not going to be as much of a problem as we now think it’s going to be because of the value they have and also the second life you can give them. I may be wrong, but I don’t think it’s going to be as much of a problem as we now think.
Anyone else has a question?
I do, as a matter of fact. Would you like to go Matt?
Oh, go ahead. Okay.
The project we are working on, and this workshop is within, is focused on harvesting car electronics for precious metals, most of all. In your opinion, since you mentioned that sometimes it might not be even worthwhile, how would you measure the efficiency of that?
Of. Of what?
Of a possibility to harvest the car electronics for precious metals.
I think it’s really too early to tell at the moment, because one of the problems is that there are still alternative battery chemistries in the pipeline and we don’t know what the majority technology will be. And that really is not my area of expertise. For people who know a lot more about battery chemistries and battery technologies than I do.
Not only the batteries also electronics in internal combustion engine.
The electronics in internal combustion engine cars as.
Well. Exactly.
Yeah, well, as far as I know, what is harvested at the moment is sort of the precious metals in there, isn’t it?
Yeah, that’s right. So the project we are working on is, is focusing on how to better the processes and what are the new ways of doing it, more efficient ways to do it.
Well, I mean that’s clearly worthwhile because the more we can capture from existing goods, the less we have to dig up. It’s such plastic argument, but of course you need a level of efficiency to be able to justify that economically. But yes, that’s quite specialized area, really.
Mathias, I think you had a comment or a question as well.
Yeah, it was a similar topic as what Ivan was asking about. So about this discussion of resiliency as you proposed versus efficiency. And I have this impression that often times cars can be efficient in some ways, but it’s just what they are optimized for. There are a lot of things they’re just not efficient for. So when you optimize for one thing, a lot of other potential optimization goals you can’t fulfill anymore. So, for example, car repair is in many cases not efficient tracking down arrows in the electronics when the self-diagnosis fails and getting the right spare part. And you have so, so many varieties of that, it’s not efficient. Oftentimes it’s the reason why a car is an economic loss, even though 99% of the technology is still fine. So I would not I don’t know if it’s a question, but this notion of efficiency, what? What exactly are you talking about? What measure of efficiency when in so many ways there’s a lot of waste and inefficiency inside cars?