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Hey Jamais,
Do you know anyone that can discuss all the stuff that's about to get thrown away and how it could possibly be recycled? Maybe someone in waste management and recycling at a city level that could do envelope calculations on how much trash Katrina created? How many cars are totaled, how many household appliances will need to be replaced? How many televisions and monitors loaded with heavy metals are going to get tossed? Will any of this crap get recycled or will it just become landfill?
These are really good questions, but they might not have good answers. (If any of you know the answers, or know where the answers can be found, please let us know in the comments.) The disaster is still too fresh for many people to think about something like recycling and trash disposal, but the cleanup efforts are already underway; by the time it's comfortable to think about the subject, it will be too late. We may not know what is done with the material remains of New Orleans until well after the fact.
Chances are, the vast majority of inundated buildings will be bulldozed, swamped cars will be towed to wrecking yards, and many tons (hundreds of thousands? millions?) of debris will be loaded into dump trucks and hauled off to landfill. As Eric suggests, much of the debris will be appliances and electronic gear filled with toxins. What kind of effect will putting a city's worth of metal into the waste stream all at once have on the environment?
And it would be a lot of metal. The WEEE Man sculpture represented a single UK citizen's worth of waste electric and electronic equipment (the "WEEE") over the course of his or her lifetime: 3,300 kilograms (or over 7,200 pounds) of devices, from washing machines to televisions to telephones. Most of these items are replaced only a few times in one's life; it's not unreasonable, then, to take a substantial fraction of that amount as a very rough estimate of the level of waste per person. Of course, then one has to add in the cars, home fixtures and wiring, and all the other pieces of industrial infrastructure surrounding us.
It might seem simplest to just dump these tons of debris into a landfill (or, more realistically, multiple landfills around the region or country) and move on. Simple, yes, but most likely to bite back some time down the road. Separating out the metals and electric/electronic trash from the rest of the debris would take more time, to be sure, but would reduce the toxic waste going into landfills, and would have the various salutary resource effects arising from recycling.
There would be some potential symbolism, too, if the materials used in rebuilding New Orleans included components recycled from the city's previous incarnation.
Finally, this suggests that a worldchanging recovery plan should include explicit guidelines for recycling and proper disposal of this kind of debris. Not a set plan, necessarily; as the saying goes, "no battle plan survives contact with the enemy." Instead, what would be needed are heuristics, flexible rules for figuring out the right plan once the context is understood, to let us get appropriate answers to questions such as: What kinds of materials should we be looking for in particular? How do domestic appliances and debris differ from industrial wastes, and how are they similar? What tools do we have already that could facilitate easier separation of metals, and what still needs to be invented?
Underlying all of these is the question of how we can make our waste material less potentially hazardous to begin with. One of the results of the new European Union rules on waste electric and electronic equipment and the restriction on hazardous substances is that producers are aggressively looking for ways to reduce or eliminate potentially dangerous substances from their products, seeking alternative materials or cleaner designs. And the design for disassembly movement seeks to make the recapture and recycling of product components simple and inexpensive.
Perhaps we need to be thinking about how to design for unanticipated disassembly -- how to make products as easy as possible to pull from the waste stream and recycle in times of disaster. Because, as bad as Katrina was, it won't be the last time we face its like. We should be certain that we know how to recover from catastrophe in ways that don't harm us further in years to come, and can, in fact, make rebuilding simpler.
