Deestroying: How the World Learned to Profit From Unbuilding Everything It Just Built
Deestroying: The Global Art of Making Nothing From Everything
Paris, 03:42 a.m. local time – Somewhere between the Seine and the 24-hour pâtisserie that will eventually outlive us all, a city worker in a hi-viz vest is feeding another perfectly functional park bench into an orange shredder. The bench was installed last spring. It will be replaced next spring. Somewhere in Brussels, a committee is drafting guidelines on how to make the replacement less replaceable, which is precisely why it won’t be. Welcome to “deestroying,” the planet’s newest pastime: the systematic, highly profitable disassembly of the things we just finished assembling.
The term began life as a typo in a Lagos start-up’s pitch deck (“We deestroy waste!”) and has since ballooned into a multinational industry that turns old problems into new revenue streams and, ultimately, back into old problems again. From Delhi’s e-waste bazaars to the rusting oil rigs of the North Sea, deestroying is the polite euphemism for what happens when late capitalism meets premature obsolescence. It is recycling’s evil twin: same bins, darker motives.
Consider the numbers. The European Union now spends €11 billion a year taking apart wind turbines it once subsidised into existence. In theory, the fiberglass blades are recyclable. In practice, they are laid to rest in specialized “blade cemeteries” outside Wichita and Aalborg, quietly practicing for eternity. Meanwhile, Ghana imports 215,000 tons of second-hand clothes annually—T-shirts that ran a marathon in Berlin now sprinting toward an early grave in Accra—only for 40 percent to be deemed unsellable and set on fire. Deestroying is the only industry where supply creates its own demand, then sets it alight for the insurance money.
China, never one to miss a trend, has turned deestroying into geopolitical theater. Last month the coastal city of Taizhou inaugurated the world’s largest “reverse factory,” a facility purpose-built to unmake iPhones returned from American trade-in programs. Workers, many of whom once assembled the very same phones, now tweeze out microchips like surgeons extracting bullets. Apple applauds the circular economy; the workers applaud their overtime pay; the Pacific applauds by coughing up another garbage gyre. Everyone claps on the outside, quietly deestroying on the inside.
Of course, the Global South is often cast as the passive recipient of northern guilt in the form of defunct refrigerators and last year’s fashion. But that narrative is itself being deestroyed. Chile’s Atacama Desert is now home to a surreal sculpture garden of discarded fast-fashion garments, dunes dyed fuchsia and lime, the world’s worst-dressed mirage. Local influencers livestream themselves sliding down polyester slopes, monetizing the aesthetic ruin of somebody else’s impulse purchase. In Kenya, entrepreneurs dismantle obsolete Chinese motorbikes, repackage the parts as “vintage upcycled art,” and sell them back to Brooklynites at a 900 percent markup. The circle of life, sponsored by DHL.
The environmental ledger is grimly comic. Every ton of deestroyed electronics releases more CO₂ than the original manufacturing saved. The Dutch government, worried about its green credentials, recently piloted a program to deestroy deestroying itself—machines designed to disassemble the disassemblers. Naturally, the pilot machines are already obsolete and awaiting their own teardown. Somewhere, Kierkegaard is updating his despair inventory.
And yet, humanity persists in believing each act of deestroying is a one-off, a regrettable necessity rather than the point of the exercise. We hold “clear-out” weekends in London suburbs, congratulating ourselves for donating a kettle that will spend the next decade being stripped for copper in a Guiyu alley. We film ourselves tossing last year’s smartphone into an eco-box, then queue overnight for the next model, which will be thinner, faster, and—trust us—easier to deestroy.
In the end, deestroying is the perfect metaphor for the age: a planetary jenga tower where every block removed is simultaneously progress and collapse. We build, we break, we bill by the hour. And when the last blade is buried, the last phone unmade, we will probably hold a ribbon-cutting for the unveiling of the void—followed immediately by a tender for its demolition.
Until then, keep your receipts. They’re the only things we haven’t figured out how to shred for profit. Yet.
