Again, I greatly appreciate your thoughtful commentary.
Are you saying that 74% of lead discarded in the US is sent for recycling, or that of the part sent for recycling, 74% is successfully recovered, the other 26% being lost in various kinds of waste, or what? "74%" does show up in your source https://prd-wret.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium... as the "percentage recycled" for lead in 2012 (table 1), which is explained as "Calculated by dividing the amount recycled by the apparent supply". On its face, this seems to suggest that 74% of the lead bought by lead consumers, such as battery manufacturers, was sourced from recycling, while the other 26% came from mining or importation, without providing any information about losses in the recycling process. Aluminum has 50% for 2016 in that same table (down from 57% in 2012), but only about 10% of aluminum is lost to oxidation during recycling.
The interesting question from my point of view is how the available waste compares to natural ores, whether that waste is from recycling losses such as dust around smelting mills, or from other sources such as treasure hunting, in the difficulty of recovering useful material from it. Since the concentrations of many interesting elements are orders of magnitude higher than their natural concentrations in ores — particularly in elements like the lanthanoids which, as you point out, do not concentrate very much† — my naïve supposition is that landfill mining will be considerably cheaper. (Moreover, because landfills are at the surface, it can be done without the risks of the black-damp or the stink-damp, though perhaps surprise PCB-filled transformers might compensate.)
As for H–B, it can be carried out perfectly well on electrolytic hydrogen, but that is only economic in the absence of a source of methane, or when energy is abundant.
________________
I love the way you dis "technology". In your mindmap I think there is a very significant thing missing, one which, as an illegal immigrant in a third-world country, I am constantly aware of.
What's missing? Well, suppose you want to replicate Watt's vacuum steam engine; let's analyze it in your framework, and see what's missing.
You need some kind of fuel, both to shape the metal and to run the steam engine once it's finished.
You need materials — at a minimum, you need some kind of material that can withstand the steam while holding the precise tolerances needed to seal the cylinder, and you need some kind of sealing material, whether that's hemp, leather, rubber, or the cast-iron, bronze, or carbon steel for Ramsbottom's miraculous piston rings. (And, yeah, something for lubrication.)
You need the technical knowledge ("process and system knowledge" in your diagram) to shape and assemble the parts of the engine, and the causal knowledge ("symbolic expression and manipulation") to troubleshoot it, fix it, and improve its design for your situation.
Although it may not be absolutely necessary, the network dynamics that enable you to obtain all of the above, and distribute the fruits of your steam-engine, are certainly an immense boon. Similarly for systems management ("Governance, Management, & Organization" in your diagram).
I'm not sure that you need much in the way of information processing, power transmission, or hygiene to build your steam engine.
So, suppose you have all these things; you're a master machinist and mechanical engineer in a post-apocalyptic village just uphill from a spring with an urgent need to irrigate their fields (the network dynamics). You have an ample supply of scrap metal of all kinds, plenty of books on steam-engine design, and friends who are willing to risk their lives operating your steam-engine once it gets built. The alpine forest nearby provides all the firewood you could need. What are you missing?
You don't have any tools! You aren't going to get very far building a steam engine by banging bits of scrap metal together. You need to invest in some capital goods, which are classically considered one of the three primary factors of production, along with land and labor. You're going to need a foundry with crucibles and casting flasks; a lathe, with gears or a whip to drive it, at least some centers and a dog if not a chuck; vises; hammers; drills; hardened steel cutting tools for the lathe, and abrasive tools to sharpen them with; files for detail work; at least some vernier calipers if not micrometers, and probably scales, surface plates, indicators, and a balance; and some way to measure the composition of your scrap metal, of which I have no idea. You can bootstrap these from raw materials, but getting there is going to require some further intermediate tools — at least a pottery kiln, and probably also a wood shop and some means for assaying soils.
This is an amusing omission because, in my experience, it's common both for the vulgar to confuse tools such as cellphones with "technology" as a whole, which of course includes the whole technological matrix that you're analyzing; and for ignorant rulers to believe that the crucial ingredient in economic prosperity is for an outside company to open a factory in your town, thus "providing work".
Speaking of ignorant rulers, maybe this is in some sense implicit in your "network dynamics" or "Governance, Management, & Organization" categories, but I think it deserves special attention: a major obstacle to technological development always and everywhere is violence, in a couple of different forms. First, outright witch-burning is a constant threat, as experienced by Giordano Bruno, the Maya codices, Steve Kurtz, Aaron Swartz, Charles Lieber, and numerous others; second, and not entirely separate, unfreedom, expropriation, and wanton destruction, all by means of collective violence, destroyed Shuman's Solar Engine One, the first RepRap, Archimedes' life, Galileo's career, and Zuse's Z1, and nipped many other promising developments in the bud.
But such violence does not arise in isolation; it proceeds from a social climate that nurtures and foments it, which can impede progress even when it doesn't erupt into outright vandalism and murder. So I think there's a certain necessary element of tolerance and admiration of technical excellence whose lack strangles any hope of progress in most social climates. Not only did they laugh at Fulton, the Wright Brothers, and Bozo the Clown, they laughed at William Kamkwamba; how many other Kamkwambas has Malawi lost that way?
________________
† It isn't true that lanthanoids don't form ores at all; monazite and bastnäsite are ores of lanthanoids (as well as actinoids). Cerium in the earth's crust, for example, is about 60 ppm on average, but typically almost half (which would be 500 000 ppm) of either of these ores, so it's more concentrated there by three or four orders of magnitude. The difficulty is that they all form the same ore because they're damn near identical, chemically speaking, which is why many of them were among the last elements to be isolated. But this is very much not the case with landfill, in which the lanthanoids are conveniently separated not only from one another but from the hazardous actinoids — although cigarette-lighter flints have many lanthanoids, if you're mining catalytic converters, they'll be entirely free of both thorium and lanthanum.
On lead recycling: I was mostly just repeating USGS's values. I hadn't looked to see their methodology, though that's a fair point. The fact remains that even high rates of recoverability attenuate quickly through multiple generations. Efficiency has limits.
On the ontology: that's an ontology of technological mechanisms.
It is not a reclassification of technological fields or domains. And it really is not a dis of technology, it's an attempt to clearly define what it is that technology does, and how. A question that's otherwise often very frustratingly avoided.
Economics treats "technology" simply as a synonym for "efficiency" or some "productivity multiplier".
There are both a theory of technology and a philosophy of technology, but neither really addresses this point. (Both tend to focus far more on social interactions and elements, which has been argued as a consequence of the more-socially-oriented philosophers and theorists not being comfortable with the, erm, technical aspects of technology.
So, to the ontology.
Your basic tools are often largely power transmission and conversion systems. "Simple machines" was much of what I had in mind in that category, though it includes more: levers, wedges, ramps, screws, gears, pulleys. Rope (tension) and stone (compression) both have transmission components. (Combine them, as a fibre-composite material: adobe-straw bricks, fibreglass, carbon-fibre, reinforced concrete, and you end up with a material with force-management properties.)
It's not that I don't consider tools. It's that tools themselves are not independent of the ontology, which concerns mechanisms and dynamics. Tools are not dynamics, they are implements embodying or achieving one or more dynamics. (I'd argue always at least two: material and, typically, power transmission or measurement, though usually also process knowledge, possibly others.)
Your simple tools -- hammers, saws, drills, planes, chisels, lathes, etc., are largely specific devices for converting one form of power or motion to some useful effect.
Electric devices are similar: generators convert motion to electricity, motors convert electricity to motion. PV converts light to electricity, LEDs convert electricity to light. Microphones convert audio energy to electrical signals, speakers convert electrical energy to audio waves.
Then there are furnaces, smelters, ovens, kilns, etc., measurement and monitoring tools. Maths if necessary to model your design. Etc., etc.
Most power transmission operates through thermal, kinetic, or electromagnetic forces. There are some which might operate through strong or weak nuclear force. Arguments could be made for chemistry as a mechanism, though that decomposes to electromagnetic interactions.
(I belive it's Smil who describes hydraulic accumulators as an early-stage technology and one which still substitutes for electricity in some applications: dentist's offices, auto repair shops, Amish workshops, and through liquid hydraulics in many heavy-lift applications. In the late 19th century there'd been hydraulic distribution networks spanning kilometers in industrial blocks and ports especially. For intermittent high loads they're particularly well-suited.)
So: to build a steam engine, you'd need the raw materials, the know-how, power transmission (rocker beam, flywheel, and gearwork, shaft or belt drives, etc.), and yes, some earlier instances of technological mechanisms implemented in materals suitable as tools: hammers, chisels, drills, lathes, grinders, and the like.
As for the hygiene factors of a steam engine: you have issues with radiating thermal energy, combustion gasses and ash, and the changes that any such machine might have on business, economic, social, and environmental considerations. All of those are emergent or unintended consequences, often not immediately evident. Robert K. Merton's study of latent vs. manifest functions has recently struck me as highly relevant and interesting. In particular, his observation that as tools of understanding, latent functions are far more significant than manifest ones because they are not as apparent. This itself likely has further ... latent ... consequences.
On ignorant rulers as a governance mode: yes, effectively. I'd lump military leadership, governance, business management, courts, ecclesiastical organisation, industrial process controls, robotics, etc., as forms of management. The essential elements are system, state, sensing, decision, action, and feedback. Fundamentally: cybernetics.
There's a wonderful quote from the world of sailing:
"The Art of ship handling involves the effective use of forces under control to overcome the effect of forces not under control."
-- Charles H. Cotter
There's more to it than that, and the quote misses the elements of observation, decision, and action (or implies but doesn't explicitly state them). Still, I think it captures the essence of what I mean by "management".
On the resistances to technological innovations, I'd strongly recommend Bernhard J. Stern's 1937 work of the same title:
Stern, a sociologist, develops a theory of what drives this, which I think you'll find interesting and applicable to recent examples you cite.
Dysfunctional as that response is, it is part of the inherent, and I'd argue default governance mode. Which like many other default modes of behaviour, has to be modified or adapted if you wish to get past it.
Are you saying that 74% of lead discarded in the US is sent for recycling, or that of the part sent for recycling, 74% is successfully recovered, the other 26% being lost in various kinds of waste, or what? "74%" does show up in your source https://prd-wret.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium... as the "percentage recycled" for lead in 2012 (table 1), which is explained as "Calculated by dividing the amount recycled by the apparent supply". On its face, this seems to suggest that 74% of the lead bought by lead consumers, such as battery manufacturers, was sourced from recycling, while the other 26% came from mining or importation, without providing any information about losses in the recycling process. Aluminum has 50% for 2016 in that same table (down from 57% in 2012), but only about 10% of aluminum is lost to oxidation during recycling.
The interesting question from my point of view is how the available waste compares to natural ores, whether that waste is from recycling losses such as dust around smelting mills, or from other sources such as treasure hunting, in the difficulty of recovering useful material from it. Since the concentrations of many interesting elements are orders of magnitude higher than their natural concentrations in ores — particularly in elements like the lanthanoids which, as you point out, do not concentrate very much† — my naïve supposition is that landfill mining will be considerably cheaper. (Moreover, because landfills are at the surface, it can be done without the risks of the black-damp or the stink-damp, though perhaps surprise PCB-filled transformers might compensate.)
As for H–B, it can be carried out perfectly well on electrolytic hydrogen, but that is only economic in the absence of a source of methane, or when energy is abundant.
________________
I love the way you dis "technology". In your mindmap I think there is a very significant thing missing, one which, as an illegal immigrant in a third-world country, I am constantly aware of.
What's missing? Well, suppose you want to replicate Watt's vacuum steam engine; let's analyze it in your framework, and see what's missing.
You need some kind of fuel, both to shape the metal and to run the steam engine once it's finished.
You need materials — at a minimum, you need some kind of material that can withstand the steam while holding the precise tolerances needed to seal the cylinder, and you need some kind of sealing material, whether that's hemp, leather, rubber, or the cast-iron, bronze, or carbon steel for Ramsbottom's miraculous piston rings. (And, yeah, something for lubrication.)
You need the technical knowledge ("process and system knowledge" in your diagram) to shape and assemble the parts of the engine, and the causal knowledge ("symbolic expression and manipulation") to troubleshoot it, fix it, and improve its design for your situation.
Although it may not be absolutely necessary, the network dynamics that enable you to obtain all of the above, and distribute the fruits of your steam-engine, are certainly an immense boon. Similarly for systems management ("Governance, Management, & Organization" in your diagram).
I'm not sure that you need much in the way of information processing, power transmission, or hygiene to build your steam engine.
So, suppose you have all these things; you're a master machinist and mechanical engineer in a post-apocalyptic village just uphill from a spring with an urgent need to irrigate their fields (the network dynamics). You have an ample supply of scrap metal of all kinds, plenty of books on steam-engine design, and friends who are willing to risk their lives operating your steam-engine once it gets built. The alpine forest nearby provides all the firewood you could need. What are you missing?
You don't have any tools! You aren't going to get very far building a steam engine by banging bits of scrap metal together. You need to invest in some capital goods, which are classically considered one of the three primary factors of production, along with land and labor. You're going to need a foundry with crucibles and casting flasks; a lathe, with gears or a whip to drive it, at least some centers and a dog if not a chuck; vises; hammers; drills; hardened steel cutting tools for the lathe, and abrasive tools to sharpen them with; files for detail work; at least some vernier calipers if not micrometers, and probably scales, surface plates, indicators, and a balance; and some way to measure the composition of your scrap metal, of which I have no idea. You can bootstrap these from raw materials, but getting there is going to require some further intermediate tools — at least a pottery kiln, and probably also a wood shop and some means for assaying soils.
This is an amusing omission because, in my experience, it's common both for the vulgar to confuse tools such as cellphones with "technology" as a whole, which of course includes the whole technological matrix that you're analyzing; and for ignorant rulers to believe that the crucial ingredient in economic prosperity is for an outside company to open a factory in your town, thus "providing work".
Speaking of ignorant rulers, maybe this is in some sense implicit in your "network dynamics" or "Governance, Management, & Organization" categories, but I think it deserves special attention: a major obstacle to technological development always and everywhere is violence, in a couple of different forms. First, outright witch-burning is a constant threat, as experienced by Giordano Bruno, the Maya codices, Steve Kurtz, Aaron Swartz, Charles Lieber, and numerous others; second, and not entirely separate, unfreedom, expropriation, and wanton destruction, all by means of collective violence, destroyed Shuman's Solar Engine One, the first RepRap, Archimedes' life, Galileo's career, and Zuse's Z1, and nipped many other promising developments in the bud.
But such violence does not arise in isolation; it proceeds from a social climate that nurtures and foments it, which can impede progress even when it doesn't erupt into outright vandalism and murder. So I think there's a certain necessary element of tolerance and admiration of technical excellence whose lack strangles any hope of progress in most social climates. Not only did they laugh at Fulton, the Wright Brothers, and Bozo the Clown, they laughed at William Kamkwamba; how many other Kamkwambas has Malawi lost that way?
________________
† It isn't true that lanthanoids don't form ores at all; monazite and bastnäsite are ores of lanthanoids (as well as actinoids). Cerium in the earth's crust, for example, is about 60 ppm on average, but typically almost half (which would be 500 000 ppm) of either of these ores, so it's more concentrated there by three or four orders of magnitude. The difficulty is that they all form the same ore because they're damn near identical, chemically speaking, which is why many of them were among the last elements to be isolated. But this is very much not the case with landfill, in which the lanthanoids are conveniently separated not only from one another but from the hazardous actinoids — although cigarette-lighter flints have many lanthanoids, if you're mining catalytic converters, they'll be entirely free of both thorium and lanthanum.