Danmark

Silje had been at the table for perhaps ten minutes before Isobel asked what she did.

“Mostly weather and atmospheric modelling.”

Greg looked interested. “Weather lady?”

“I suppose, if you want to make several years of university sound like I own a raincoat.”

“I was thinking more pretty lady on the telly.”

“No telly.”

“Shame. You’ve got the hands for it.”

Silje looked down at her hands. “What the…”

Kristin laughed. “Weather data. wind, dispersion, currents, that sort of thing.”

“So she knows if it’s going to rain?” Adam asked.

Silje considered this. “I have a window, besides, I live in Bergen, pretty much a shoe in.”

“That’s what my phone says.”

“Your phone gets it from the model.”

Greg took his phone out and looked at it with renewed suspicion.

“So you’re inside this?”

“Tiny desk, very cramped.”

Marcin shifted the bowl of chips away from Isobel, who had already stolen two.

Peter said, “Speaking of phones, how many do you reckon we can actually make?”

“Here we fucking go,” said Marcin.

“No, seriously.”

“More than we need,” said Adam.

“That’s not a number.”

“Seven.”

“Seven phones?”

“Per person.”

Greg looked at his own. “I’ve probably done that already.”

Kristin said, “Across your lifetime?”

“Christ, no. Since about 2012.”

Isobel looked at him. “Where are they?”

“Drawer.”

“There you go.”

“Where I go?”

“Nothing. Carry on.”

Peter said he’d been mucking around with the numbers that morning. Take the minerals in a modern smartphone, take known reserves, divide one by the other and see which material causes trouble first.

“Lithium,” said Adam.

“That’s what I thought.”

“Copper,” said Silje.

“Not really.”

“Gold,” said Greg.

“Getting warmer.”

“Why warmer?”

“Figure of speech.”

“You can’t say that to the weather lady.”

Silje sighed. “I’m beginning to regret this table.”

“The rough answer,” Peter said, “comes out somewhere around a trillion iPhone-like phones before one of the scarcer materials becomes a serious constraint. Depends massively on chemistry, reserves, substitutions, all that.”

Greg stared at his phone.

“A trillion?”

“Roughly.”

“That’s fucking heaps.”

“Exactly,” said Adam. “Problem solved.”

Kristin laughed. “You heard a large number and converted it directly into infinity.”

“Well, a trillion phones is enough.”

“For what?”

“Phones.”

“For how long?”

Adam stopped.

Isobel grinned. “There it is.”

Greg was doing something on his phone. “Eight billion people. That’s… hang on.”

“No one needs you to calculate it.”

“I’ve started now.”

Marcin reached over. “Give me.”

“Fuck off.”

Silje said, “The actual number isn’t very interesting, though, is it?”

Peter looked at her. “That’s what I thought.”

“The interesting bit is that there is a number.”

Kristin nodded. “And that we’ve built most of the economy around behaving as if there isn’t.”

Adam frowned. “We don’t behave as if there aren’t resource limits.”

“We absolutely do,” said Isobel. “We call something obsolete, throw it away and make another one.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

“Where’s your last phone?”

Adam paused.

Greg looked delighted. “Drawer?”

“Drawer.”

The table erupted.

“Fuck off. Where else would I put it?”

Marcin held up his beer. “Adam Resources Limited.”

“Very high-grade deposit,” said Kristin.

“Fuck all permitting,” Isobel added.

“Hostile management,” said Marcin.

Adam gave them the finger.

Silje took another drink. “But that’s actually quite strange when you think about it. You dig something up, concentrate it, refine it, transport it, manufacture it to extremely precise tolerances, use it for three years and then put it in a drawer.”

“It’s a nice drawer,” Adam said.

“Still a drawer.”

Greg finally finished his calculation. “Hundred and twenty-five phones each.”

“What?”

“If there are eight billion of us and a trillion phones.”

“Thank Christ you stayed with that.”

“So I’m fine. I’ve only used about nine.”

“You’re missing the point,” said Isobel.

“I usually am.”

Marcin picked up his own phone. “So this isn’t rubbish.”

“No,” said Kristin. “It’s basically a tiny mine.”

“A mine with WhatsApp.”

“And porn,” said Greg.

“No one asked.”

“Still part of the resource assessment.”

Isobel pushed the chips back toward the middle. “So once you’ve dug all this stuff up once, surely the obvious thing is to keep using it.”

“Which is recycling,” said Adam.

“Not quite,” Kristin said. “Because you can make something technically recyclable and still make getting the materials back an absolute nightmare.”

Silje nodded. “Glue six things together and you’ve created a separation problem.”

“Exactly. Recycling is downstream. Circularity starts when you design the bloody thing.”

Greg turned his phone over.

“This is glued together, isn’t it?”

“Probably.”

“Cunts.”

“Strong analysis.”

Adam said, “You still need energy to recover everything.”

“Of course,” said Kristin. “That’s why making it easier to recover matters.”

“And you still lose material.”

“Yep.”

“So it isn’t circular.”

Marcin frowned. “Nothing is perfectly circular. That’s not an argument against making it less stupid.”

“Thank you,” said Isobel. “If you spill ten percent of your beer, you don’t respond by pouring the other ninety percent on the floor.”

Greg looked at his pint.

“That depends how bad the beer is.”

Silje laughed. “Entropy with Carlsberg.”

“Thermodynamics, but with LinkedIn,” said Marcin.

Peter nearly spat his drink out.

Kristin was still looking at Adam. “The physical limit is the interesting thing. Every cycle costs you something. Energy, material, separation. So if a society keeps making complicated technology for long enough, it gets pushed toward recovering more of what it already has.”

“Not because it’s green,” said Silje.

“No. Because the alternative gets progressively more expensive and stupid.”

Adam rubbed his chin. “So you’re saying circularity is inevitable.”

“Not inevitable,” said Isobel. “We can always choose collapse.”

“Excellent.”

“Humans retain agency.”

“Comforting.”

Marcin leaned back. “But if society keeps going, yes. Eventually you stop calling it the circular economy. It’s just the economy.”

That quietened them for a moment.

Greg broke it.

“So what happens to capitalism?”

“Oh, Jesus,” said Isobel.

“No, seriously. If everything has to be reused, can I still own stuff?”

Silje looked confused. “Why wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t know. These conversations usually end with someone nationalising my toaster.”

“No one’s taking your toaster,” said Kristin.

“Good toaster.”

“The problem isn’t markets,” Isobel said. “It’s pretending the market price contains every cost.”

Adam pointed at her. “Now we’re somewhere different.”

“Not really. Same problem.”

“How?”

She picked up a chip.

“Say I make these for a euro.”

“You’d go bankrupt.”

“Shut up. I make them for a euro, sell them for two, and dump all the waste in Marcin’s garden.”

“Why my garden?”

“Cheap land.”

“I rent.”

“Even better.”

Marcin shook his head. “Fucking economists.”

Isobel continued. “My accounts say I’ve made a euro. Marcin’s garden says something else.”

Silje smiled. “The garden doesn’t use IFRS.”

“Exactly.”

Greg looked between them. “So that’s an externality?”

“Pretty much.”

“I thought it was more complicated.”

“It is,” said Adam.

“It doesn’t need to be,” said Kristin. “A cost doesn’t cease to exist because the person who caused it doesn’t pay it.”

Peter nodded. “That’s probably the whole thing.”

Adam said, “Except assigning the cost is incredibly difficult.”

“Sure,” said Silje. “But that’s a measurement problem. It doesn’t make the physical consequence disappear.”

She pointed vaguely toward the window.

“If you put something into the atmosphere, the atmosphere doesn’t know whether you’ve priced it.”

Greg looked outside as though the atmosphere might be listening.

“Bit arrogant.”

“What is?”

“The atmosphere.”

Silje laughed. “Terrible stakeholder engagement.”

Marcin raised his glass. “Never attends meetings.”

“Doesn’t answer emails,” said Kristin.

“Refuses to recognise quarterly targets,” Isobel added.

Adam smiled despite himself. “You’re all very pleased with this.”

Greg was still watching the window. “Can we sanction it?”

“No.”

“Privatise it?”

“Been attempted.”

“Give it a KPI?”

“That’s basically climate policy.”

That got them off economics and onto corporate language for a while, which was probably healthier.

Greg wanted to know whether a thunderstorm could have a performance review. Kristin suggested putting the Gulf Stream on a performance improvement plan. Marcin reckoned fog was just a cloud that had failed upward. Silje objected strongly enough to spend five minutes explaining why that wasn’t technically true, thereby ensuring everyone called fog a failed cloud for the rest of the evening.

Eventually Adam came back to it.

“So your trillion phones.”

Peter looked up. “What about them?”

“You don’t actually run out at phone number one trillion.”

“No. Obviously not.”

“Because you’ve still got the first trillion.”

Kristin smiled. “Unless Greg has put them all in his drawer.”

“Secure storage.”

Adam ignored him. “So by then you’ve created the resource stock.”

“Pretty much,” said Silje. “You’ve moved a lot of concentrated material from geological deposits into human ones.”

“Cities,” said Marcin.

“Cars,” said Kristin.

“Buildings.”

“Power lines.”

“Greg’s drawer.”

Greg raised his glass.

Adam nodded slowly. “Then the problem changes from finding the stuff to not losing the stuff.”

There was another little pause.

Isobel pointed at him. “See? He got there.”

“I was always there.”

“You were in a drawer.”

“Fuck off.”

Peter said, “That’s aluminium in a nutshell, really. Once you’ve spent all that energy getting it out of bauxite, throwing useful aluminium away is fucking weird.”

“Unless recovery costs more than making new aluminium,” Adam said.

“Costs who?” asked Marcin.

Adam stopped again.

“Oh, fuck you.”

Marcin smiled. “No, seriously.”

And there it was again.

The awkward little gap between the price of something and what it actually cost.

Silje traced the rim of her glass with one finger. “That’s where economics gets itself into trouble. It can decide that a consequence belongs to somebody else. Physics can’t.”

“Physics doesn’t have property rights,” said Kristin.

“Exactly.”

Greg frowned. “Communist.”

“Physics?”

“Sounds like it.”

“Gravity is famously left-wing,” said Marcin.

“Everything pulled toward the centre.”

Silje groaned. “That is appalling.”

“Thank you.”

Isobel stood to get another round.

“So after all that, we’ve discovered that if civilisation wants to hang around, it probably has to stop throwing useful shit away and stop pretending unwanted consequences vanish when they cross a property boundary.”

Kristin handed her an empty glass. “More or less.”

“Groundbreaking.”

“Apparently.”

Greg handed his over too. “And fog is a failed cloud.”

“It fucking isn’t,” said Silje.

“Consensus has been reached.”

Adam looked at Peter. “You had some grand line about this earlier, didn’t you?”

“I did.”

“Go on then.”

Peter shrugged.

“The market can decide who gets the invoice. Reality still keeps the books.”

Marcin considered it.

“Bit wanky.”

“Yeah.”

“Still good.”

“Yeah.”

Silje looked toward the window.

“It’s going to rain.”

Greg immediately pulled out his phone to check.