Ehrlich’s Math

Remember Paul Ehrlich’s bet with Julian Simon regarding the sustainability of metals reserves? Julian L. Simon and Paul Ehrlich entered in a famous wager in 1980, betting on a mutually agreed upon measure of resource scarcity over the remainder of the 1980s. Prices went down and Ehrlich lost the bet. However, it appears that his arithmetic was just of by a couple of decades. A materials flow analysis conducted recently by Thomas Graedel and colleagues at Yale concludes:

Providing today's developed-country level of services for copper worldwide (as well as for zinc and, perhaps, platinum) would appear to require conversion of essentially all of the ore in the lithosphere to stock-in-use plus near-complete recycling of the metals from that point forward.

Another interesting factoid, found here, is that 26 percent of extractable copper in the Earth's crust is now lost in “non-recycled wastes”, or stated less-technically, it’s in landfills. I don’t think that should mean it’s lost, just that resource reclamation through landfill mining may be the growth industry of the next decade.

More on this later. I don’t have a subscription to PNAS, and need to cough up $10 for the paper.