Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

This is a first crack at a larger idea that’s been sitting in my head, which I’ll summarize thus:

Over time, our concepts of what we can afford to waste change radically. We’d be silly to think they won’t keep changing.

Examples of what I mean:

• Back in the old days, natural gas was considered a waste product in the process of drilling for oil. Drillers would set up special pipes to flare off the natural gas at the wellhead. I once read a story about a man who worked in the oil fields of West Texas, back in the heyday of Permian Basin drilling in the mid-20th century: after work, he would read his newspaper . . . by the light of the gas flares. These days, flaring off gas = burning free money. But back then, there wasn’t a market for it, so why not burn it off?
• If you compare early integrated circuits with the current state of the art, you can be forgiven for thinking that they’re entirely different animals. In fact, though, generations of electrical engineers have been applying many of the same basic concepts over time, but continuously revising downward the standards on how much space on an IC can afford to be “wasted” by having no circuits on it. And it’s not that the earlier engineers didn’t know what they were doing — just that they were working at a different level of miniaturization.
• Edison’s light bulb was an amazing invention, not just for its time but in the century-plus since then. But it wastes a large part of the electricity that flows into it. For a long time that was fine, but increasingly light-bulb users aren’t willing to put up with that.
• Smokestack emissions and other factory effluents have long been seen as unavoidable byproducts of production processes. But quite a few years ago now Pasquale Pistorio, who was then head of STMicroelectronics, made a push in his company to think of effluents as indicators of inefficient manufacturing processes. The company became a leader among chip makers in pollution control — as an economic move, not just an environmental one.
• Prosaic and obvious, but germane: if gasoline costs $1.50 per gallon, you’ll use it differently than if it costs $4.50 per gallon. If you have a 3,000-square-foot house, you can afford to waste more closet space hoarding old clothes and tchotkes than you can if you live in a 350-square-foot apartment.

Maybe I should call this “Attack of the Obvious” Friday — but sometimes the obvious bears repeating.

My estimate is that coming years will see us substantially alter our views on what constitutes “acceptable” waste in terms of water, petroleum, electricity, and many other things we tend to take for granted. In many cases, for many of us, these alterations will be driven much more by economic pressures than by any sort of environmental consciousness.