Beyond Cheap: The Dark Side of Consumerism and an opportunity for the Circular Economy

admin@example.com — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 11:19:50 +0000

Beyond Cheap: The Dark Side of Consumerism and an opportunity for the Circular Economy

Well, that was a tumultuous week for the world, stock markets, pension funds, and even Treasury bonds.

With the largest repercussion being a lack of confidence as to what will happen with tariffs globally even after the 90-day pause on this trade war. Do businesses have clarity on how to react, invest, move? Aside from the last-minute rush to export as much as possible to the USA to avoid the tariffs, do businesses have clarity in the future?

What is clear is that both Japan and China hold substantial bonds and now have a gun fully loaded and could be ready to pull the trigger again with the USA having little recourse. China only exports 18% to the USA, and I’m sure Europe would benefit from any redirection of that trade.

But I’m no economist. I’m just trying to set the scene.

Regardless of what happens in the next 90 days, here are themes I’m picking up on:

We should reassess our consumerism, which is only sustainable through cheap overseas production and labour.
We should reconsider how we vote with our money. How much do you think Primark items would cost if they were not produced in Bangladesh?
We got used to paying cheap for far too long and with the likes of Temu, anybody can order a small item produced in China and delivered to your door.

If a global recession is coming and it affects the pricing of the latest iPhone or the latest tech devices, then maybe we need to focus more on the circular economy. Minimising consumption, making what we have last longer and consider opportunities to expand repair cafes. Ironically, fixing our broken devices is too expensive in our own country, but I’m sure if we can ship cheap tatter from China, we could work a way to ship our broken items abroad to be fixed and returned.

Thoughts and Ideas that come to mind as we're inspired by what happens around us.

More Inside thoughts

The natural constraints of the finite

admin@example.com — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 16:30:15 +0000

The natural constraints of the finite

As is frequently the case I'm inspired by the often missed smaller details in life and right now that takes form in a coffee grinder. You see our barely 2 year old electric grinder packed up and the daily morning brew grind is now powered by moi.

Don't get me wrong, I've always really enjoyed my morning brew ritual which most days consist of a single coffee so I really do not mind additional extra effort that goes into around 60 seconds of manual grinding for a single dose. But I can see this becoming an issue if you have around 5+ coffees a day or even two of you have 3+. Come think of it the power rating of my grinder back in Colombia is 120W which is probably overkill.

And let's be honest as much as I like cars and internal combustion engines can be a marvel but they're not efficient any shape or form and the Citroen Oli is an example of a 248 mile range EV out of a 40kWa battery. Just review the Citroen press release:

...oli signals an exciting leap forwards. Rather than being a 2,500kg ‘palace on wheels’ filled with screens and gadgets, oli proves that more can be achieved with less, and showcases how inventive use of responsible materials and a sustainable production process can lead to inexpensive yet desirable zero-emission vehicles that meet multiple lifestyles.

Whether it be the power rating of your grinder, the horse power of your car or the compute it requires to resolve our AI power hungriness. We're not used to paying the price of friction, waste or inefficiencies.

And all of this takes me back to a weekend I spent at a farm of some friends some years ago in Chiquinquirá, Colombia. They had chosen the countryside rhythms of life in contrast to the busy frantic city. And they built a farm they were much more intuned with natural rhythms present to all of us under the concrete jungle. A cow cannot produce milk 12 months of the year if it's ever going to re-produce a calf. They can't feed off land without rotation. And as much as a they would have loved to buy a machine to milk the cows quicker every day at 4am the farm had taught them simple basic finances which would question even the cost of the wear and tear of the belt.

And yet their day was mainly finished by late morning so where was not the ever present pressure to squeeze more out of the day.

Many of us have grown accustomed to elaborate and complex abstractions removing us from natural constraints. Many modern bean counters have elaborated complex financial systems and yet have little grasp of the cost of maintenance of the belt to automate the milking of cows.

So my challenge for all of us today is to question:

Do we understand the true cost of the compute and resources being used in AI?

It's taken us decades to understand that the fabulous cost efficiency of Cloud frequently does not add up and many tech-companies are now migrating back to bare metal servers to save money.
Is the industry subsidising and hiding the true compute cost? Do they benefit from have us hooked on their new gold rush supply?
Are we subsidising their business while they scrap and rape the finite data to feed their models? Is it sustainable once we no longer produce any new human generated content?
Good grief should I even mention governments where this can easily spiral out of control? Where is now new found independent 21st century freedom?
Where can we embrace the beautiful constraint of the finite in our every day?
How can we architect a future that leverages the finite? A future that understand and encourages sustainability?

Not all is doom and gloom. There's plenty of disruption boiling up in not so visible spaces.

Thoughts and Ideas that come to mind as we're inspired by what happens around us.

More Inside thoughts

Sustainability

Beyond Cheap: The Dark Side of Consumerism and an opportunity for the Circular Economy

Beyond Cheap: The Dark Side of Consumerism and an opportunity for the Circular Economy

The natural constraints of the finite

The natural constraints of the finite