Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Glass is recyclable: a bottle can be melted and remade, and the second is just as good as the first. Adding color spoils the process; eventually only brown bottles can be made. Mixed glass isn’t recycled, it’s downcycled. The code on a plastic bottle marks its value as a raw material, from #1 (PET, completely recyclable) to #7 (mixed). Separating plastics keeps them on a higher rung. Downcycling and upcycling trace the fate of a material as it is remade into new things. Recycling is a dynamic process – the reshaping of stuff through time.

A modern approach to sustainability starts by understanding change. Daily progress in technology drives products to obsolescence in record time. Computerization accelerates everything from the fast food drive-thru to dentistry, but nowhere is this change faster than in the digital realm itself. It’s governed, as the joke goes, by Gates’ Law: the speed of commercial software halves every 18 months.

Bits are the raw material for software. Atoms would be the physical equivalent; it’s a staggering level of granularity. It doesn’t make sense, of course, to operate on this smallest level. Bits are joined to create software, and that software is exchanged as knowledge. The history of software looks a lot like culture. Individuals and groups learn from one another, using what works and reinventing what doesn’t – an ongoing experiment in the distributed development of functional knowledge.

Engineering Longevity

The first version of TCP/IP – the protocol that runs the Internet – was developed in 1972. By 1978, the protocol had taken its current form, connecting just over 100 computers. It was standardized as IPv4 in 1980. Since then, the Internet has grown to half a billion web sites (nobody knows how many computers are actually attached). An update, IPv6, has been in the works since 1996, and may be rolled out sometime in the next decade. It isn’t considered urgent. TCP/IP is now the only network protocol in common use, and odds are it will last as long as networks exist.

TeX (pronounced "tek") is a digital typesetting system. Thirty years ago, the computer scientist Don Knuth was publishing a second edition of one of his books. The engraved printing process used in the first edition had been replaced with a photographic process. Knuth wasn’t happy with the quality, so he set out to solve the problem of digital typesetting properly. He had essentially completed writing TeX by 1982, modified it slightly for international support in 1989, and then declared it complete. It has not changed since then, and will not change in the future. Today, it is the de facto standard for scientific publishing, and its use is growing.