In the Middle Age of Plastics Recycling (First Part)

“Living and Dying in Early Medieval Britain.” About how people in desperate straits turned to “recycling” Roman ruins for what they needed

Recycling and upcycling waste in the late medieval urban economy - On History

"As modern consumers, manufacturers, and governments seek to increase the reuse, repair, and recycling of commodities, there is much that we can learn from the medieval economy."

Medieval recycling — Harvard Gazette

In a world of no solutions, bad solutions often reign supreme.

Or just how our anxiety about climate and waste can be more serious than simply wanting to live with less plastic.

Why we urgently need a plastic recycling that generates wealth and prosperity.

That is, plastic recycling must be a good business that provides good profits to those who dare to do it; and a source of good materials to society. Both needs with the same importance and priority; it is not just a matter of huge sterile businesses wich produce second- and third-rate materials or worse...

To try to understand the above we must take a long trip to the nascent medieval Europe, back in the 4th century BCE to try to have the best image of how a reuse, repair and poor recycling economy can lead to the impoverishment and loss of prosperity of a whole society.

The example of the social-economical dismantling of Roman Britain due to the disappearance of the continuous flow of new fresh metal to the economy was one of the causes/symptoms of the disaster.

However, the disappearance of the Roman Empire, which generated one of the most alarming and dramatic periods of economic and sociocultural impoverishment in Western Europe (England, Scotland, Italy, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and Schleswig-Holstein) did not mean the global disappearance of the generation of wealth and human prosperity.

Byzantium, for example, was able to flourish because the environmentalists of the day probably never left the borders of Western Rome, as it faded and became extinct as it plunged into the next three centuries of darkness.

Perhaps if we do not begin to act quickly and much more effectively, the Far East will become the new Byzantium of this failed West, poor and lacking in ideas and languishing imagination. Even despite or as a consequence of all our ESG, anti-petrochemical and anti-plastic sensitivities, campaigns and policies.

How can we today avoid or at least mitigate the repetition of a history that the West and its periphery once experienced? A history that was reflected almost transparently in the loss of abundance, diversity and richness in the materials that a society enjoyed. A loss in the materials that a society uses and needs, which at the same time manifests itself as both one of the causes and one of the symptoms of decline and loss of prosperity. A loss that is inevitably accompanied by the disappearance of the skills and abilities to control and manage these materials by the citizens of these impoverished societies, in order to be able to manufacture the items and goods that society uses and needs.

At the beginning of this text there are two references to the “circular economy” in medieval Europe, specifically in the British Isles after Rome, in full decline, abandoned those once prosperous territories. More than sixteen hundred years have passed since Emperor Honorius told Britain to "look to its own defenses". And since then, the life of the Britons changed definitively, and perhaps not for the better, at least for the following 300 years.

Much of what sounds so natural to us today, at least in the management of our material resources regarding reuse, repair and recycling; Apparently it was already a practice that became increasingly widespread in impoverished and decadent Britain; lacking the wealth and constant importation of material resources of the once dominant Imperial Rome.

The interpretation of the advantages and difficulties of this new economy of scarcity that the British had to live with for almost four centuries is quite uneven. Indeed, if some academics think that we should turn to look and understand those times better, to face the present; Others academics think that this economy of lack of abundance and well-being was also the propitious cradle for the loss not only of the material well-being that once experienced by our Roman ancestors in the West.

Rather, the evidence of the loss of wealth and availability of materials at a specific moment in the history of a society is an obvious sign of social and cultural declin; a loss that manifested itself in the economic and social well-being spheres, but was equally important in the areas of the rights and freedoms of the citizens of these new impoverished and decadent societies. Thus, not only do nascent and imperfect democracies or those already mature disappear in favor of authoritarian and autocratic governments, all the life and splendor of more free, open and more tolerant societies disappears when our well-being in the materials we use and need also disappears.

Understanding the relationship between the extent and similarity of this new middle age of plastic recycling, reuse and repair in reference to what was the loss of the constant supply of fresh metals that it represented for Western Europe lies fundamentally in the fact that Mining and Metallurgy was at the heart of the economy of the Roman Empire.

Equivalently, today the use of all modern engineering materials is embedded at the heart of our economies; and in this set of modern materials, plastics are a fundamental element. Therefore, it is not possible to remove plastics from the economy, without creating a social, economic and cultural debacle; perhaps not so difficult to imagine.

Thus, in the present; similarly as in the past, especially in the more prosperous West; and somehow at their most humble periphery, our societies depend on the generation, transformation and use of a multiplicity of sophisticated engineering materials. This dependency is at the heart of all our economies; as well as our well-being and prosperity. In this multiplicity of engineering materials, today's modern plastics occupy a foundational place.

Remove today's modern plastics; or a significant fraction thereof; As UNEP proposes today in its #INC-4, of our economies, even in an unknown proportion, in too many ways it could be for the West and its periphery equivalent to what happened to Western Europe when the Western Roman Empire in clear decline stopped supplying and distributing fresh steel and metals in general throughout the Empire.

And then a new Byzantium will arise; if that hasn't already happened. Indeed, it is easy to make a material good disappear; We already tried it with CFC gases, and we already know how it happened. Of course, needs do not disappear in the same way; in fact they do not disappear as a whole; And given the scarcity of material resources, satisfying the same needs becomes a hardship. All of the above already happened in Britain, after Emperor Honorius understood that the Empire could no longer continue providing well-being so far from the Roman metropolis.

As the constant flow of fresh iron that came from internal and external mining began to disappear; mainly due to new policies; or rather by the nonexistence of them (something strangely similar to our current prohibitions or our shared responsibilities). Likewise, the flow of imported fresh iron for the foundries also began to disappear; in the absence of the Empire and its immense territorial wealth. Next, the first wave of impact was in the social sphere; A whole generation of specialists, in a flash, began to cease to be necessary, the blacksmiths and the foundries; those who had learned and possessed the secret of the exact mixture of iron and charcoal in the smelting furnaces to make the first steels.

And so it wasn't the swords and chain mail armor of the early, rudimentary English knights that began to disappear; Not that it was a luxury that was too expensive for very few; In fact, it was in the daily economy that the effects of the Roman metal shortage had its greatest impact. The perfect example of the above were nails; nails of all styles and sizes from nails for making coffins to holding together the soles of boots... Not so strangely, the departure of the Roman Empire from Britain left many ordinary citizens without coffins to be buried in and without good boots for rainy days. All this has been very well explained by Robin Fleming in her analysis of the recycling of iron in post-Roman Britain; that of the poverty and hardships of its once flourishing Roman citizens of Britain...

Recycling in Britain after the Fall of Rome’s Metal Economy | Past & Present | Oxford Academic (oup.com)

But the debacle does not stop there; A cascade of collateral effects followed the shortage of iron and metals. The blacksmiths and foundries of yesteryear were no longer required with the same frequency or in the same abundance; Many of his knowledge and savoir-faire suddenly became completely useless. Without Rome, other skills began to be necessary, and thus the collectors of slag and metal waste from the ruins of the Empire began to become a fundamental element of this new economy of scarcity and impoverishment.

A new and old generation of waste scavengers, a profession so beloved and praised by the new theorists of the circular economy. But the new economy of reuse, repair and poor recycling did not stop its cascade of decline there. In fact, the structure of the large Roman cities was no longer sustainable, and the constant displacement of waste scavengers forced, in ways not so strange to understand, families to follow the new garbage miners. Families that once displaced began to swarm in hundreds and hundreds of small towns with fewer needs but also with much less prosperity. Small towns began to replace the Roman cities, which could no longer be maintained... Since from then on, they didn't even have nails. And then agriculture followed, passing to subsistence levels and so on...The loss of the Roman economy of scale, due to the new economy of medieval poverty...

We already know what comes next...but it is still something that is still difficult for us to understand today. With these new ideas we could also be on the threshold of repeating the same mistakes that led Britain to several centuries of desolation; If we do not understand perhaps we are about to live it again...If we do not fully understand the lessons of the past and the relationships of the materials we use and need with the prosperity of a society.

But is there really a Problem with Plastic Recycling?

To be continued...