Monetizing eco-friendliness
We evolve in an outdated system in which our environment only has value when it is destroyed or exploited. If we want to implement market ecology, i.e. an economic and monetary system in which the ecology is considered on a par with the economy, we must convert the ecology into something which has systematically value in the economy, i.e. amounts of money. Hoping that people will suddenly fly less, eat less meat, return less shoes and clothes or recycle more trash leads us inevitably to the 5% rule: there will always be more or less 5% of the people who are vegetarians or don’t buy products wrapped in plastic or containing palm oil, or refuse to fly. But 5% isn’t enough to change things, let alone solve significant issues as the one we are faced with. With good will, we cannot hope to change make than 5% of our consumption virtuous. We need a system. We need 100%. A system implies indeed that all participants are housed in the same boat (equity) and that the system applies to 100% of its participants. The ecology will lose as long as it tries to go against the economy. The economy will always win. It’s the eternal debate between the end of the month and the end of the world. We need to make the interests of the economy converge with those of the ecology instead of having them going in two opposite directions as is the case most of the time nowadays. We need to reconcile today with tomorrow.
To achieve that, we need to give an immediate value to the environment everywhere, for everyone, in every possible activity carried out by individuals and corporations. The environment needs to be everywhere in our economy, just as VAT, represented as a reward or a tax either we want to encourage individuals and corporations to make environmental-friendly decisions or to deter them from opting for harmful products, processes, services, activities etc. Let’s take two sectors here to portray these two possibilities: garbage and mobile data.
Be paid to recycle
In the city where I live, garbage is picked up every day, but garbage collectors don’t pick up the same type of garbage every day. Every house and residential building has three types of garbage bins: the black one for residual waste (waste which will be burned), the brown one for organic waste, which is converted into compost by the city, as San Francisco does for instance, and the blue one for paper and cardboard. If you want to recycle plastic, glass or metal, you have to go to special containers usually down the road. In other cities, the blue one is replaced by a yellow one or yellow bags where citizens can put any recyclable waste: glass, paper, cardboard, metal and plastic. The city sorts then the content of the yellow bag at waste reception centers.
A financial mechanism is already implemented in my city: people pay per black garbage bin and don’t pay for the brown and blue ones, so they are incentivized to reduce their residual waste and to recycle as much as possible their waste, even if it means unloading their glass, metal and plastic waste in containers outside of their home/building. Waste premises are not open to anyone; you cannot easily unload your waste into the garbage bins of your neighbour as they are located in locked premises. The police enforces also environmental law; unloading your waste anywhere is severely punished.
Moreover, waste management is gaining in efficiency notably by developing processes to sort waste automatically, recycle as much as possible, optimize garbage collecting tours etc. Companies like Lixo, Heyliot, Recycleye, Veridis, Junker or UBQ Materials turn waste into gold by producing bins which recognize and weigh the garbage a person dumps into them, and put it in the right part of the trash can, automatizing waste recognition in amenity sites, making new material out of waste etc. We broke a cycle called nature by using resources which are limited and creating waste which we have sometimes to bury or create hills with as we don’t what to do with them. There is no waste in nature. We created another cycle called economy, which is therefore completely outdated as it ignores the environment completely. Thinking that we can organise and develop ourselves without taking nature into consideration is as smart as thinking that we could live without breathing.
We need to close the loop again, and for that we need 1) to minimize the amount of waste we produce and 2) to recycle it more. Germany recycles 98% of its beverage packaging, the USA 28%. Germany has a deposit system (8 to 25 euro cents per bottle/can depending on the size and the material), the USA do not. Do we need to write a thesis to understand where the problem is? Since Germany has been applying the deposit system for decades on beverage packaging in glass, plastic or metal, we recycle almost 100% of beverage packaging and it’s not unusual to see worn out bottles in German stores containing beverages; it means the bottle has been already used a couple of times. Waste isn’t a small issue. Europeans generate half a ton of waste per year on average, the German 632 kg according to Destatis, the German official statistics agency. Trash isn’t a sexy topic, but we cannot avoid tackling it if we want to stand a chance at mitigating climate change. So let’s see how we could use digital currencies to encourage people more to minimize their amount of waste and recycle it systematically.
Money will be digital in a couple of years, which opens a broad range of new possibilities, mainly through the fact that digital money has three USPs that current money, fiat money, doesn’t have: it is programmable, it can be dedicated to a usage and it enables fast and cheap micro-transactions. More on this in this article. Let’s exploit these USPs to make the behaviour of citizens more virtuous when it comes to waste and recycling. Let’s imagine that you get from the city where you live a specific digital currency which is needed to unload residual waste in the waste premises of your building or next to your home. You would get for example 30 units per month and per person, 15 for children, and you would need one unit per kg of residual waste you wish to unload. Recyclable waste wouldn’t be charged. Smart bins would recognize and weigh the waste you wish to unload; it would be your interest to sort carefully your waste so it is recognized as recyclable waste when it’s the case. Any doubt and the system would consider your waste to be residual, so you would be charged per kg you wish to unload. You could buy additional units if you run out of them a given month, or redeem them at the city if you didn’t use up your quota, because you were careful or away.
This system would have significant advantages:
- pedagogy: citizens would see the amount of waste they produce by the units of the new currency they spend every month
- accountability: they would be charged something if they unload too much waste or do not recycle it enough
- motivation to do the right thing: recycling and reducing the amount of waste would have a positive financial impact on them.
Charging your online carbon footprint
The carbon footprint of our online behaviour might be the one we underestimate the most and know the least about: “The internet allows us to send messages, share pictures, download music and stream videos at a touch of a button, but our online habits have a surprising impact on the environment… Although the energy needed for a single internet search or email is small, approximately 4.1 billion people, or 53.6% of the global population, now use the internet. Those scraps of energy, and the associated greenhouse gases emitted with each online activity, can add up. The carbon footprint of our gadgets, the internet and the systems supporting them account for about 3.7% of global greenhouse emissions, according to some estimates. It is similar to the amount produced by the airline industry globally, explains Mike Hazas, a researcher at Lancaster University. And these emissions are predicted to double by 2025” (Sarah Griffiths, BBC, 6th March 2020).
Typing a URL into your browser search bar or looking for it on Google makes also quite a difference in terms of energy consumption: while your browser connects directly with the website if you type its URL in the search bar, Google searches through the whole internet, millions of URLs, for the one you are looking for and will appear most probably as the first result. The 18,930 other pages are useless. Since you were too lazy to type directly the URL you are looking for or to save it as a bookmark, you use up between 1 and 10 grams of CO2, according to this estimate from British environmental consultancy Carbonfootprint. We are not informed of the environmental consequences of such an act. We hardly see the impact on our electricity bill. And Google is happy. They have even been carbon neutral since 2007 (they claim). So why would we stop? The video you watch on YouTube or Netflix, the countless pictures and videos you store on your social networks but never look at or watch (you even forgot that they existed) are not actually stored in clouds, but on servers which run 24/7 and need to be cooled down. But as long as Google/YouTube, Meta/Facebook/Instagram and the others don’t charge or even inform you, why would you bother?
“Every Google search comes at a cost to the planet. In processing 3.5 billion searches a day, the world’s most popular website accounts for about 40% of the internet’s carbon footprint. Despite the notion that the internet is a “cloud,” it actually relies on millions of physical servers in data centers around the world, which are connected with miles of undersea cables, switches, and routers, all requiring a lot of energy to run. Much of that energy comes from power sources that emit carbon dioxide into the air as they burn fossil fuels; one study from 2015 suggests internet activity results in as much CO2 emissions as the global aviation industry” (Anne Quito, Quartz, May 7, 2018).
Machines will be equipped with wallets if we want them to be autonomous and participate in the Internet of Things, starting with devices which are already connected to the Internet, such as smartphones, tablets and computers. See my article on digital identities here. Let’s imagine that smartphones use up dedicated currencies whenever they download or upload content from or onto the Internet and you pay also a new generation tax on the energy consumption of your devices. Let’s imagine that the Irish government creates two impermanent currencies to levy these taxes:
- IERBND coin would be dedicated to taxing bandwidth consumption, for instance every 100 MB
- IERNRG coin would be dedicated to taxing energy consumption, for instance every 10th of kWh.
A machine without enough IERNRG or IERBND coins cannot be started or connected to the internet. You would need to refill the device wallet with the corresponding coins whenever you run out of them. You could buy these coins directly from an administration. The system would have similar advantages to the garbage system described in the previous part:
- pedagogy: you are aware of the CO2 footprint of your online behaviour
- accountability: you are responsible for your consumption and are charged if you go above a certain threshold
- financial implication: you spare money if you spare CO2 emissions, and vice versa.
The implementation of digital currencies is a fantastic opportunity for bringing together at last the economy and the ecology, today and tomorrow, freedom and responsibility. Let’s seize this opportunity together to set up new ways of dealing with money and our environment and align the interests of the economy and our environment.
