It is a radical re-think of the “extractive economy,” notes Ryan Smith, Micromidas’ CTO. After a few centuries of hauling finite resources—from fossil fuels to rare earth minerals—out of the ground, we have enough on the surface to keep us going, and in fairly good style, but only if we refocus our collective tech smarts and investment dollars on mining garbage.
Drilling for oil and refining it into a form that can be used to make a plastic bottle, for example, is a long, complicated giant-carbon-footprint process. When the bottle is tossed, the energy embedded in its manufacture is lost as well.