It’s a strange thought when you sit with it for a minute and let your mind delve into it, that nothing around you is really “new”.
Every object you can see, your phone, your desk, the road outside, even the food you eat, all comes from the same limited set of elements that have always been here. We haven’t invented new matter. We’ve just got very good at rearranging what already exists.
Steel isn’t new. It’s iron, carbon, heat, and process.
Plastic isn’t new. It’s oil, broken down and rebuilt.
Glass is just sand that’s been pushed to its limits.
Even the complicated stuff, electronics, medicines, fuels, it all traces back to the same building blocks. And when you think about it, we’ve just become really good at using these elements.
I've never too sure whether this concept is reassuring or a worry!
All the progress, all the industries, all the things we take pride in as “made by us”, are really just clever transformations. We take what the planet gives us, and we reshape it into something useful, or sometimes something pointless. But as we use all this stuff, does it mean that at sometime we might run out fo something vital!
It does make you look at waste differently as well.
If everything we use is part of a closed system, then nothing really disappears. It just changes form and ends up somewhere else. Landfill isn’t “away”. It’s just a different version of the same materials, sitting in a different place.
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