Thanks for the leads! They're certainly worth checking out; hopefully I can find enough quantifiable information that can be mapped out in a thesis. I am very interested in the future for the role of manufacturing within the United States. The decline of manufacturing has been a phenomenon that has been happening since the 1960s, when the Fordist industrial expansion from wartime WW2 ran out of momentum. A counterculture of "hip consumerism" followed, where we see the popularization of rebellious interests against the corporate structure. Niche markets, trends, economic bubbles, and planned obsolescence required that the industry become highly mobile and flexible in terms of mass production (a la Apple, Nike, etc), which mean that they had to be outsourced. Certainly, some regulatory agencies are part to blame.
Developed countries outsourced manufacturing and shifted into selling services instead. Right now our biggest export are in the form of culture (royalties), and telecommunication services.
Scrap metal is the largest material export. We throw away all the by-products of our hyper-accelerated society as soon as they are deemed obsolete (All those phones that still work perfectly fine), they get sent somewhere (This is what I'm still researching here) to be processed, sold to China, who manufacture something to sell back to us at profit.
It is a very unfortunate situation. But scrap metal is one of the biggest industrial opportunities left. At the height of Rome, goods poured in from every facet of its empire, while the only things pouring out were trash. I intended to propose a scrap processing facility within a major city precisely because cities were built around manufacturing, it is the cause of their formation. Companies situate their factories on ideal locations along the waterfront and require workers to live in close proximity. Residential neighborhoods that eventually grew into suburbia sprawled all around, requiring more services to tend to a growing population, and so the city grows. Without manufacturing, there is no point to having a Metropolis. An export of telecommunications and royalties do not need a dense working environment; you could work anywhere and still have instantaneous proximity to a co-worker across the world.
What's going to happen to the city if that's the case? Shifting manufacturing to Indiana is a good solution for pollution, but then the city might as well pack up and move over there. If you consider the amount of fuel it requires to transport trash to recycling centers, it might completely offset the amount of resources saved, rendering the net process useless. The benefit to having a major recycling center within a city is so that the trash does not need to be transported so far away. Is it even a long-term solution to re-establish manufacturing presence in a dense city when clearly the river is flowing the opposite direction? The damage has been gradual and consistent for the previous half-century, and my question is either to pursue mitigation (bringing back manufacturing to stop the export of scrap) or adaptation (re-allocating our resources to maximize services in lieu of manufacturing)
I'm posting some of my research here so that some of you who are in the field might nit-pick at it :P. I am a sort of "outsider" to the scrap metal industry so my perspective might be limited or in some cases wrong, and it is very interesting to hear what people from other perspectives have to say.
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