I like this idea tbh.
It's like, people look at landfills and see a problem of all that garbage, but you can also think of it as this spot with all this reusable stuff or recyclable material. People talk about the great plastic patch in the ocean, but that's potentially material that could be extracted from that location and we've got a spot the size of texas we can use to get all kinds of interesting material for many things.
The big thing that the Standard Oil company did that most companies didn't at the time is they had a lot of byproducts of kerosene production (the thing most people wanted to replace whale oil). Instead of throwing it out (or likely just burning it off) like many oil companies did, they found uses for the different distillates of crude oil that weren't prime kerosene. That way you got gasoline, diesel, bunker fuel, plastics, all from the same feedstock you previously only got kerosene from.
People might think that's a bad example because fossil fuels destroy the environment through climate change, but given that the byproducts were to be disposed of likely by burning without doing anything productive with it, you're getting a lot more useful energy out of one unit of crude oil, making things much more efficient. In the same way, we could be looking at society's byproducts or polluting elements and asking "Ok, this is bad, but can we turn this negative into a positive by taking this thing we don't want and turning it into something we do want?"
It's like, people look at landfills and see a problem of all that garbage, but you can also think of it as this spot with all this reusable stuff or recyclable material. People talk about the great plastic patch in the ocean, but that's potentially material that could be extracted from that location and we've got a spot the size of texas we can use to get all kinds of interesting material for many things.
The big thing that the Standard Oil company did that most companies didn't at the time is they had a lot of byproducts of kerosene production (the thing most people wanted to replace whale oil). Instead of throwing it out (or likely just burning it off) like many oil companies did, they found uses for the different distillates of crude oil that weren't prime kerosene. That way you got gasoline, diesel, bunker fuel, plastics, all from the same feedstock you previously only got kerosene from.
People might think that's a bad example because fossil fuels destroy the environment through climate change, but given that the byproducts were to be disposed of likely by burning without doing anything productive with it, you're getting a lot more useful energy out of one unit of crude oil, making things much more efficient. In the same way, we could be looking at society's byproducts or polluting elements and asking "Ok, this is bad, but can we turn this negative into a positive by taking this thing we don't want and turning it into something we do want?"
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