How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom: Volume 1

“Don’t let it get you down so much,” I said. “For the upper classes who have to keep up appearances, and for the military whose equipment can mean the difference between life and death, it’s probably best for them if the things they have are practically brand new. However, for ordinary households, that isn’t the case. Now, Aisha’s example takes it to an extreme, but people in the capital handle things in a similar fashion. The main difference would be that they burn their kitchen waste, too, I guess? Also, for oversized trash, like wooden furniture, they customarily gather it all in the main plaza once a year for burning, don’t they? So they’re the same in that they only have burnable trash.”

In this world, there was nothing like plastic or styrofoam that needed special treatment before it could be reused. Most tools were made of iron, stone, soil (which includes glass and ceramic) or wood. They could reuse iron by melting it down, and if they just left stone lying around, it would blend in with the natural scenery around it. The one exception was artificial substances that were created by mages using magic (magic substances), but these were valuable in and of themselves, so they were almost never thrown away.

As for things made of metal, they could be expensive, too, so the common people did everything within their power to repair them. Beating iron back into shape was easy, after all. When there was really nothing they could do, and it seemed cheaper to just buy a new one, they would sell it to a used metal dealer for small change. Used metal dealers collected this metal and melted it down, recasting it into other metal products.

However, this was being done by individuals, so they didn’t have good facilities for it, or the ability to devote a large amount of time, so they could only produce low-quality metal as a result. All they did was melt it down and then let it harden, so impurities got mixed in in the process. As a result, low-quality metal ended up circulating in the country.

This country was resource-poor. If low-quality metal was all that could be obtained locally, people would be forced to import high-quality metal from other countries. I wanted to limit that spending as much as possible. However, if I tried to tell the used metal dealers, who were acting as individuals, to reuse the metal in high-quality impurity-free metal, it wasn’t going to happen.

“So, that’s why I’ve nationalized garbage disposal… Basically, I had the country take over handling it. Even if it’s difficult for an individual to do, when the state does it, we can afford to spend money on it, arrange for specialized facilities, and we can take the time to do it right, too. We can pull every last nail out of the wooden boards people throw out, then reuse the iron.”

“That’s amazing and all… but what about the used metal dealers? Aren’t you stealing their jobs?”

“Oh, that’s fine,” I said. “For that work, I’m retaining the used metal dealers as civil servants.”

They were low-wage workers anyway. They paid a small amount to buy up scrap metal, then melted it all down to sell to the trade guilds wholesale. However, since they could only produce low-quality metal, their prices got haggled down to almost nothing, and they saw very little profit for themselves. As a matter of fact, used metal dealers were at the very bottom of this world’s hierarchy. Because they dealt in garbage, people looked down on them.

“However, now that it’s a public sector undertaking, the cost of buying the metal will be footed by the country,” I said. “The items to be melted down can be recast as high-quality metal in good facilities provided by the country, and the country will negotiate with the trade guilds, so there’s no need to worry about their prices being haggled down to nothing. What’s more, they will be paid a monthly salary that’s equal to the average monthly income in this country. If you compare that to what they were making before, it’s probably a ten-fold increase, don’t you think?”

“Well… I can’t see them complaining about that,” Liscia admitted.

As a matter of fact, we hadn’t received a single complaint. Quite the contrary: when the minister of state who had been given the garbage disposal portfolio had gone to survey the reprocessing facility, he had been greeted with tearful thanks by all of the workers.

“But, if you aren’t careful, couldn’t that be more expensive than importing it from another country?” Liscia asked.

In response to Liscia’s point, I nodded and said, “Yeah, kinda.”

Elaborating, I added: “At this stage, we’re probably a little worse off doing it this way. However, money spent inside the country has a completely different meaning from money spent outside the country. If we spend money outside the country, that’s an outflow of capital, but if we spend it inside the country, it stimulates our own economy.”