There’s no such thing as waste.

At least, there ought not to be.

“Waste” is just another way to say “haven’t found a use for it yet!”

According to Partridge, “waste” and “vast” have the same Latin root. We certainly have a vast amount of waste. I think the link is more like when you “devastate” a region you make a “wasteland” or something to that effect. Etymology is a lot of guesswork and opinions.

Regardless, we are a wasteful people. We live in a throw-away society. Capitalism depends on new things for us to buy, use up, and discard. And then we get new things. And this goes on ad infinitum and we all enjoy the benefits of a consumerist culture.

The consequence of all this is of course environmental degradation. The mining industry is particularly bad. They dig big holes in the ground, get what they want, and then dump all the stuff they don’t want some place and leave it there. They have fancy names like “tailings” or “gangue” but they all mean the same thing: “waste rock.”

It’s corporate littering. Worse, it’s the accepted and approved method of extracting resources.

We can do better. We have to do better. And, on an optimistic note, some folks are trying.

The University of Arizona Board of Regents has put together and financed a group of scholars and tasked them with studying the states’ vast copper tailings. Arizona is home to many copper mines and thus home to piles and piles of mine waste. It’s estimated there are 17.5 billion tons of copper tailings in Arizona alone, most of it ground as fine as sand. Imagine a swimming pool 1.5 miles long, 1.5 miles wide, and 1.5 miles deep. That’s about 17.5 billion tons of water. It’s a shitload no matter how you figure it.

There are a lot of valuable materials in those 17.5 billion tons of “waste” rock. Good on these folks for leading the way. The Critical Metals in Copper Mine Tailings project is led by U of A professor Isabel Barton.