Tag Archives: junk

Entropy and junkies

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I am on a deep vacation [see ‘Digital detox with a deep vacation‘ on August 10th, 2016] and so my posts for the next few weeks will be ‘reprints’ from my archive of more than 570 posts.  The one below first appeared in January 2013 under the title ‘Unavoidable junk‘.

The laws of thermodynamics are physical laws whose relevance extend beyond the study of engines and heat plants. We can restate the first law of thermodynamics (conservation of energy) as ‘the quantity of matter is constant and finite’. Matter changes both in nature and as it moves through the economic system; and as it does so, its intrinsic properties change rendering it less useful and usable, thus requiring more and more resources to make it useful again. This last sentence is a form of the second law of thermodynamics. Very useful (low entropy) goods, such as iron ore and fossil fuels, eventually produce less useful (high entropy) matter, such as piles of junk cars in scrap-metal yards and greenhouse gases, as they move through the economic system. In our current western life-style, we are all contributing to the generation of vast piles of junk; we are hooked on it; we are all ‘junkies’.

In the paragraph above, I have plagiarised the 2009 report entitled ‘The New Sustainable Frontier’. However, similar ideas were expressed by Handscombe and Patterson in their 2004 book entitled the ‘Entropy Vector’. They paraphrased the first and second laws of thermodynamics as ‘you can’t have something nothing’ and ‘you can’t have it just anyway you like it’.

Man, the Rubbish Maker

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167-6734_IMGBruce Sterling wrote that our current civilisation would be best described as ‘Man, the Rubbish Maker’ if we were to be judged by our efforts that will best survive the passage of time.  Paleontologists have found flint-knapping workshops more than two million years old that have out-lasted any record of the speech, culture or beliefs of the craftsmen that laboured in them.  Pollution and waste is not consumed and hence tends to persist while useful things wear out.  In a short story called ‘Daughters of the Moon’ published in 1968 as part of his third collection of Cosmicomics, Italo Calvino describes a world in which cars wear out more quickly than the soles of your shoes.  He goes on to describe a region where the road petered out in a hilly area created by ‘the layers of things that had been thrown away: everything that the consumerist city expelled once it had quickly used it up so it could immediately enjoy the pleasure of handling new things’.  Calvino was imagining a future world but we are rapidly approaching his vision, or perhaps we are already there.  Our junk, rubbish, and trash, is a form of entropy – an increase in the level of disorder created by the processes that provide our man-made lifestyle and required as a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics [see my post ‘Unavoidable junk‘ published on January 14th, 2013].  And ‘entropy requires no maintenance’, to quote Sterling, so much of our rubbish will still be here long after we have disappeared.

If we want to avoid Calvino’s vision of cities surrounded by layers of discarded things, then we have to learn to love old but serviceable belongings.  They are good enough and will suffice.  If they break then we should have them repaired, preferably locally in order to stimulate our economy and reduce our ecological footprint rather than replacing them with something made abroad.  This will require engineers to think more about repairs when designing artefacts and consumers to learn to appreciate the patina of age and usage as a virtue, something of beauty.

Sources:

Bruce Sterling, Shaping Things, Boston: MIT Press, 2005.

Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics, London: Penguin Books, 2002.

Edwin Heathcote, Make and Mend, Financial Times, 30/31 March, 2013.