8 ms·

World’s consumption of materials hits record 100bn tonnes a year

79 points by adrian_mrd 7y ago

fbonetti 7y ago
> The report’s authors warn that treating the world’s resources as limitless is leading towards global disaster. This is the same fallacy that lead people to fear “peak oil” every decade for the past 50 years. Nobody treats resources as if they’re limitless. The reason we don’t coat everything in gold is because it’s rare (and thus expensive), leading to producers only using it when it’s absolutely necessary. Wood is abundant (and therefore cheap), so it’s used in everything from packing materials to building houses. If these conditions changed and wood for some reason became rare and expensive, it wouldn’t be used in the same way we use it now. People would choose to build their houses out of a different material, and tree farmers would choose to plant more trees. The idea that we’re “running out” of resources doesn’t make sense. Resources are and have always been scarce. When something becomes exceedingly rare, people choose to consume less of that resource.
- jariel 7y ago
  This is all true but markets don't always have great foresight, and there are entire tranches of externalities to worry about. For example, the market doesn't really care if a tree is 'new growth' gown for consumption, and a 300 year old 'old growth' tree, the loss of which has some material impact. It might be cheaper in many cases to fell old forests, in which case we're pricing poorly. So let's get all the externalities in there and see what the numbers look like.
  - titzer 7y ago
    I am skeptical that more terms in equations can quantify the effect of losing, e.g. biodiversity. Markets have shown time and again they cannot effectively price long-term risks, and people are irrational and unable to account for costs that are farther in the future than their own lifetime.
    - sdenton4 7y ago
      "unable to account for costs that are farther in the future than their own lifetime." ...if ever 'ok, boomer' were an appropriate response, it would be here. Some of us will be alive for quite a while, relative to the current rate of changes...
      - jmknoll 7y ago
        The post you’re responding to says “people are irrational and unable to account for costs that are farther in the future,” not “I don’t care about costs that are farther in the future than my own lifetime.”
    - jariel 7y ago
      It's fuzzy, but that doesn't make it invalid. Consider that a ban on cutting 'old growth forests' is really just a 100% tax in market terms. Carbon taxes can be calculated to have a specific effect, though the impact of the revenue itself on green R&D etc. is impossible to really measure.
      - titzer 7y ago
        I respectfully disagree. It's not just fuzzy, it's completely wrong. Imagine 200 years ago asking an economist to estimate the cost of destroying 100kg of pure Uranium 235. They simply did not understand its value, not only because it could not be utilized with current technology, they did not even understand what technology could utilize it. Worse, if they understood radioactivity, which they didn't, they might consider it to have negative value, because U235 is highly radioactive and will absolutely give you acute radiation poisoning. However, today that amount of nuclear fuel would be worth millions, if not billions of dollars. We have the same situation, but not with materials for consumption, but the natural world, in particular, rainforests. In 200 years we might actually have half a chance of understanding what we're destroying in 2020.
- coldtea 7y ago
  >This is the same fallacy that lead people to fear “peak oil” every decade for the past 50 years It's not a fallacy that we treat resources as limitless, and neither is peak oil. This or that peak oil announcement might be premature, but oil is limited and not renewable, so peak oil is inevitable long term, period. Already we have started to resort to hacks like fracking and lower EROI oil to get by. >Nobody treats resources as if they’re limitless. Plenty do. We consume and build stuff like there's no tomorrow. That we will adjust prices and production when we hit hard limits doesn't mean that we already take those into account and shape our use accordingly (based on actual priorities). And of course we have tons of local (not overall market) cases where resources are treated like limitless without going into peak oil and such. E.g. a river that a factory uses as a dumping ground until the waters are toxic and everything in it dies is exactly an example of a resource treated as limitless. As long as X resource is cheap, we use it for whatever BS we make. When it gets rarer and pricier, sure, higher prices will regulate its use towards more serious stuff. But by then we'd already have lost huge, non recoverable, and often non recyclable either, quantities of it to BS uses. >If these conditions changed and wood for some reason became rare and expensive, it wouldn’t be used in the same way we use it now. Which is a moot point, if by then we have exhausted say 80% of a resource for the previous frivolous uses, and we still need it for more serious uses going forward.
  - omgwtfbyobbq 7y ago
    While we can hit harder limits with some resources, like Helium, I believe most resources are far more fungible and/or replaceable. That's in part why peak oil announcements seem to be habitually premature. Reserves are at a specific price or price range, so if those go up reserves tend to go up too, and the same applies to other resources. To further complicate things, we can replace oil in different ways depending on cost and alternatives, which also depend on time. Toss in a wide variety of different priorities, and it becomes apparent why many predictions we've made tend to be inaccurate.
    - brosinante 7y ago
      I believe most resources are far more fungible and/or replaceable Ok.
- monadic2 7y ago
  I think the idea is that it’s better to reign in consumption before austerity hits.
- EGreg 7y ago
  “Wood is cheap because it is abundant” Wood comes from a living organism. If we destroy an ecosystem or habitat, then it won’t be renewed. We have engaged in... Overfishing, fish are gone Kelp forests are gone Coral reefs are disappearing Many species are gone One third of the world’s farmland has become incapable of sustaining food using normal production, depleted nutrients (desertification) We are also killing biodiversity on the planet Insect populations plummeting Bird populations And you’re sitting here thinking about monetary costs only. It’s like a guy sitting in a house on fire playing a video game of Red vs Blue yelling YEA!!!! WE ARE WINNING!!! Except we ALL live in this house, and we have to shut off the game and put out the fire like NOW.
- esotericn 7y ago
  That doesn't match with my experience of the world around us. Rather it seems like what we've done is initially used a load of resource (e.g. low mpg cars, massively overbuilt bridges, buildings, etc) and then started to optimize later. It seems more likely to me that we enter a regime whereby lots of stuff is needlessly expensive compared to what it could have been if we'd rationed properly from the get go.
  - rabidrat 7y ago
    And then there's Jevons Paradox[0], which notes that higher efficiency leads to greater overall consumption. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
    - lostlogin 7y ago
      From that: “However, this does not imply that improved fuel efficiency is worthless if the Jevons paradox occurs; higher fuel efficiency enables greater production and a higher material quality of life.” Good link, thanks.
- gwbas1c 7y ago
  > The idea that we’re “running out” of resources doesn’t make sense. Resources are and have always been scarce. When something becomes exceedingly rare, people choose to consume less of that resource. I think looking at this as purely a matter of price is just a way to ignore the problem. Let's say I happen to own a large supply of a limited resource. I can sell that resource so it's cheap for everyone else, yet in volume, I get very rich. The problem is that resource will run out at some time in the future. My incentive is to sell it now and make sure that it lasts long enough to build me a nice fat retirement fund. Who cares about people 200 years from now.
  - friendlybus 7y ago
    Why would you sell a scarce resource for cheap? Your incentive is to ride the supply & demand line.
    - beambot 7y ago
      Time plays a factor in IRR too.
    - gwbas1c 7y ago
      > My incentive is to sell it now and make sure that it lasts long enough to build me a nice fat retirement fund. Who cares about people 200 years from now.
      - friendlybus 7y ago
        Yes but it's scarce. As he sells the price goes up so he controls the outcome. His nest egg permanently exists because it's limited, the supply will always drop. Selling the last dregs of helium for military contracts or private industry will eclipse any reasonable monetary requirements. He can hang on to the smallest amount for a long time. If helium doesn't sell for that much at the last point then it wasn't worth that much anyway and he couldn't build a nest egg off a normal sale price. I don't get it.
- lalos 7y ago
  What you are claiming is that the market is 100% efficient but history and just knowing how business work says otherwise. The thing is that resources that have been mismanaged by the market are long gone so you don’t hear much about them. For example Galapagos island turtle meat was a great industry until they were all wiped out except a few in a remote island. The market takes time to react, for example if you sell something that turns out to be toxic, it takes time for the market to react (cigarette industry).
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  Europe clear cut most of their trees in the Middle Ages to such an extent that monarchs were forbidding the use of wood for numerous non-naval uses. It was one of those edicts forbidding use of wood in glass production, and a bunch of other uses that tipped the UK toward the industrial revolution. Coal became far more widely used, whereas it had previously been seen as dirty and to be avoided. Some see that lack of wood as a push to colonise. If we're talking regeneratable resources, such as plants and wood, we've exceeded the capacity of the planet since about 1970. It's been measured by earth overshoot day[1], which has steadily been getting earlier since its first calculation of Dec 31st. In 2019 it was July 29. We would need 1.7 earths to sustainably supply the resources we use. Humanity already uses over 50% of the earth's land -- the best, most productive, most fertile 50% for our homes and agriculture, and what's left is the least productive and unusable. The idea that we're not running out on a finite planet, with exponentially growing population, and nearly all the productive landmass already in service of humanity is what doesn't make sense. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day
- Scarblac 7y ago
  And yet we are in the middle of a Great Extinction event. The numbers of lots of species turned out to be finite and market forces didn't prevent their extinction.
seanalltogether 7y ago
> "and nearly a quarter is discarded into the environment, such as plastic in waterways and oceans." That piece of the graph showing that 22 billion tons is discarded into the environment almost seems unbelievably high. There must be some caveat to that figure right?
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  >that piece of the graph showing that 22 billion tons is discarded into the environment almost seems unbelievably high. There must be some caveat to that figure right? A quick google search says oil consumption in 2015 was 9.3x10^7 barrels and a barrel weighs 3x10^2 pounds so if we used 100% of our 2015 oil consumption to make plastic which comes out about three orders of magnitude short. Less than 5% of oil production is used for plastic, more than making up for any increase in tonnage from other ingredients (mostly nitrogen and/or oxygen) in the plastic. So yeah, there's something in that statistic that got lost in translation.
  - pixl97 7y ago
    Being that plastic is also made of natural gas it may not have been directly included in the oil stat.
- Accujack 7y ago
  What most graphs showing garbage being thrown into the environment won't show is who is doing the discarding. China, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam dump more plastics into the ocean than all other countries combined. That's because these countries have large numbers of people in poverty or under economic or political stress, who typically are far more concerned with the immediate needs of survival than with hypothetical environmental concerns. What makes it worse is that the garbage doesn't all come from those countries... a good part of it comes from industrialized western nations because those nations find it cheap to make their trash someone else's problem. The reason this isn't discussed is that fixing the issue would require the wealthy western nations to intervene economically in those places to change the situation, something which would be resisted by the governments who find advantage in having a population that's not educated and remains under stress. On top of that, climate change is happening.. those countries and people are going to be under more stress soon, not less... what will happen if, one day, those people have a choice between surviving another year by dumping toxins into the environment that will sterilize the oceans or dying?
titzer 7y ago
That's 28000lbs (14000kg) for every human on Earth. Mind-boggling. The technosphere (aka Anthroposhere) is estimated at 30 trillion tons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthroposphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthroposphere
- njarboe 7y ago
  This is impressive, but just one meter of dirt covering the surface of the earth is about 1.2 million trillion tons. 30 trillion tons would create a layer about 0.03mm thick. Invisible in a geologic sense.
  - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
    But the amount of dirt we have to turn over to find the 'good stuff' is maybe orders of magnitude bigger?
  - titzer 7y ago
    My calculations don't match yours. Here http://www.bluebulbprojects.com/MeasureOfThings/results.php?p=1&comp=area&unit=m2&amt=148940000000000&sort=pr http://www.bluebulbprojects.com/MeasureOfThings/results.php?... That says there are 148 trillion square meters of land area on earth. So the technosphere (at 30 trillion tons) is about 1/5ton per square meter, or about 200 kg. If you use the all of the Earth's surface, it's 510 trillion square meters, so about 1/17th of a ton per square meter, or about 58 kg per square meter.
    - clmul 7y ago
      Assuming the dirt weighs about 2 tons per cubic meter, this corresponds to 58 kg/m^2 / 2000 kg/m^3 =~ 0.03 m, so it seems like the gp just used the incorrect unit.
      - njarboe 7y ago
        You are correct. I had 1000000000 as a trillion. Scientific notation is a much better way to calculate things. At 30mm that is a big enough layer that a geologist could see it in the rock record, if it looked different enough.
irrational 7y ago
100 billion tons/7 billion people = 14 tons for every person.
- reallydontask 7y ago
  That's the average, for people in the West this is bound to be significantly higher ... yikes
seibelj 7y ago
Luckily there is an automatic system for accurately distributing resources based on scarcity, and it has worked for millennia: markets and prices.
gwbas1c 7y ago
> It shows that, on average, every person on Earth uses more than 13 tonnes of materials per year I'd like to see my ~1 ton of waste, per month, please. Even as a wasteful American, this number is so staggering that I'd like to understand more about what all that waste is. Mining tailings? Coal ash? Certainly, my trashcan that I bring to the curb every week only has a tiny amount of my waste footprint.
- thrwaway69 7y ago
  I guess that somehow accounts for waste produced by others to deliver you something as well. So waste produced by apple to provide you an iphone is split into the equation somewhere.
- esotericn 7y ago
  Wastewater, perhaps?
  - tpmx 7y ago
    That would be silly/stupid. But then again, that seems to be the standard for environmental reporting these days. The most catastrophic-sounding headline gets the most clicks.
  - thrwaway69 7y ago
    I wonder about that. Is excretion considered a form of waste? My usage of water shouldn't exceed 400 kgs per month. That includes drinking, bathing, flushing, cleaning, cooking and washing hands (I even have a weird habit of doing that excessively). You can't get that much wasted water from that usage. Actually, I noticed the word average just now. I am packing my bags.
    - esotericn 7y ago
      Tons of water is used in manufacturing.
    - munificent 7y ago
      > You can't get that much wasted water from that usage. You also need to factor in the wastewater to produce all of the other products you consume. That produce you bought at the store and rinsed yourself was also likely washed several times along the supply chain before it got to you. That one bottle of beer you drank? The bottle has been washed several times, inside and out, along with the vat the beer was brewed in, every single pipe and tool that was used to process or shunt it, etc.
acd 7y ago
This is what I think is wrong about the current economic system. We consume to much and recycle to little.
mbostleman 7y ago
But I thought that the US was experiencing dematerialization in that weight of inputs was decreasing in absolute terms despite economic and population growth. Is this not the case or is it that the US's decrease is overcome by increases elsewhere globally? https://reason.com/2001/09/05/dematerializing-the-economy/ https://reason.com/2001/09/05/dematerializing-the-economy/

79 points by adrian_mrd 7y ago

> The report’s authors warn that treating the world’s resources as limitless is leading towards global disaster. This is the same fallacy that lead people to fear “peak oil” every decade for the past 50 years. Nobody treats resources as if they’re limitless. The reason we don’t coat everything in gold is because it’s rare (and thus expensive), leading to producers only using it when it’s absolutely necessary. Wood is abundant (and therefore cheap), so it’s used in everything from packing materials to building houses. If these conditions changed and wood for some reason became rare and expensive, it wouldn’t be used in the same way we use it now. People would choose to build their houses out of a different material, and tree farmers would choose to plant more trees. The idea that we’re “running out” of resources doesn’t make sense. Resources are and have always been scarce. When something becomes exceedingly rare, people choose to consume less of that resource.

jariel 7y ago
This is all true but markets don't always have great foresight, and there are entire tranches of externalities to worry about. For example, the market doesn't really care if a tree is 'new growth' gown for consumption, and a 300 year old 'old growth' tree, the loss of which has some material impact. It might be cheaper in many cases to fell old forests, in which case we're pricing poorly. So let's get all the externalities in there and see what the numbers look like.
- titzer 7y ago
  I am skeptical that more terms in equations can quantify the effect of losing, e.g. biodiversity. Markets have shown time and again they cannot effectively price long-term risks, and people are irrational and unable to account for costs that are farther in the future than their own lifetime.
  - sdenton4 7y ago
    "unable to account for costs that are farther in the future than their own lifetime." ...if ever 'ok, boomer' were an appropriate response, it would be here. Some of us will be alive for quite a while, relative to the current rate of changes...
    - jmknoll 7y ago
      The post you’re responding to says “people are irrational and unable to account for costs that are farther in the future,” not “I don’t care about costs that are farther in the future than my own lifetime.”
  - jariel 7y ago
    It's fuzzy, but that doesn't make it invalid. Consider that a ban on cutting 'old growth forests' is really just a 100% tax in market terms. Carbon taxes can be calculated to have a specific effect, though the impact of the revenue itself on green R&D etc. is impossible to really measure.
    - titzer 7y ago
      I respectfully disagree. It's not just fuzzy, it's completely wrong. Imagine 200 years ago asking an economist to estimate the cost of destroying 100kg of pure Uranium 235. They simply did not understand its value, not only because it could not be utilized with current technology, they did not even understand what technology could utilize it. Worse, if they understood radioactivity, which they didn't, they might consider it to have negative value, because U235 is highly radioactive and will absolutely give you acute radiation poisoning. However, today that amount of nuclear fuel would be worth millions, if not billions of dollars. We have the same situation, but not with materials for consumption, but the natural world, in particular, rainforests. In 200 years we might actually have half a chance of understanding what we're destroying in 2020.
coldtea 7y ago
>This is the same fallacy that lead people to fear “peak oil” every decade for the past 50 years It's not a fallacy that we treat resources as limitless, and neither is peak oil. This or that peak oil announcement might be premature, but oil is limited and not renewable, so peak oil is inevitable long term, period. Already we have started to resort to hacks like fracking and lower EROI oil to get by. >Nobody treats resources as if they’re limitless. Plenty do. We consume and build stuff like there's no tomorrow. That we will adjust prices and production when we hit hard limits doesn't mean that we already take those into account and shape our use accordingly (based on actual priorities). And of course we have tons of local (not overall market) cases where resources are treated like limitless without going into peak oil and such. E.g. a river that a factory uses as a dumping ground until the waters are toxic and everything in it dies is exactly an example of a resource treated as limitless. As long as X resource is cheap, we use it for whatever BS we make. When it gets rarer and pricier, sure, higher prices will regulate its use towards more serious stuff. But by then we'd already have lost huge, non recoverable, and often non recyclable either, quantities of it to BS uses. >If these conditions changed and wood for some reason became rare and expensive, it wouldn’t be used in the same way we use it now. Which is a moot point, if by then we have exhausted say 80% of a resource for the previous frivolous uses, and we still need it for more serious uses going forward.
- omgwtfbyobbq 7y ago
  While we can hit harder limits with some resources, like Helium, I believe most resources are far more fungible and/or replaceable. That's in part why peak oil announcements seem to be habitually premature. Reserves are at a specific price or price range, so if those go up reserves tend to go up too, and the same applies to other resources. To further complicate things, we can replace oil in different ways depending on cost and alternatives, which also depend on time. Toss in a wide variety of different priorities, and it becomes apparent why many predictions we've made tend to be inaccurate.
  - brosinante 7y ago
    I believe most resources are far more fungible and/or replaceable Ok.
monadic2 7y ago
I think the idea is that it’s better to reign in consumption before austerity hits.
EGreg 7y ago
“Wood is cheap because it is abundant” Wood comes from a living organism. If we destroy an ecosystem or habitat, then it won’t be renewed. We have engaged in... Overfishing, fish are gone Kelp forests are gone Coral reefs are disappearing Many species are gone One third of the world’s farmland has become incapable of sustaining food using normal production, depleted nutrients (desertification) We are also killing biodiversity on the planet Insect populations plummeting Bird populations And you’re sitting here thinking about monetary costs only. It’s like a guy sitting in a house on fire playing a video game of Red vs Blue yelling YEA!!!! WE ARE WINNING!!! Except we ALL live in this house, and we have to shut off the game and put out the fire like NOW.
esotericn 7y ago
That doesn't match with my experience of the world around us. Rather it seems like what we've done is initially used a load of resource (e.g. low mpg cars, massively overbuilt bridges, buildings, etc) and then started to optimize later. It seems more likely to me that we enter a regime whereby lots of stuff is needlessly expensive compared to what it could have been if we'd rationed properly from the get go.
- rabidrat 7y ago
  And then there's Jevons Paradox[0], which notes that higher efficiency leads to greater overall consumption. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
  - lostlogin 7y ago
    From that: “However, this does not imply that improved fuel efficiency is worthless if the Jevons paradox occurs; higher fuel efficiency enables greater production and a higher material quality of life.” Good link, thanks.
gwbas1c 7y ago
> The idea that we’re “running out” of resources doesn’t make sense. Resources are and have always been scarce. When something becomes exceedingly rare, people choose to consume less of that resource. I think looking at this as purely a matter of price is just a way to ignore the problem. Let's say I happen to own a large supply of a limited resource. I can sell that resource so it's cheap for everyone else, yet in volume, I get very rich. The problem is that resource will run out at some time in the future. My incentive is to sell it now and make sure that it lasts long enough to build me a nice fat retirement fund. Who cares about people 200 years from now.
- friendlybus 7y ago
  Why would you sell a scarce resource for cheap? Your incentive is to ride the supply & demand line.
  - beambot 7y ago
    Time plays a factor in IRR too.
  - gwbas1c 7y ago
    > My incentive is to sell it now and make sure that it lasts long enough to build me a nice fat retirement fund. Who cares about people 200 years from now.
    - friendlybus 7y ago
      Yes but it's scarce. As he sells the price goes up so he controls the outcome. His nest egg permanently exists because it's limited, the supply will always drop. Selling the last dregs of helium for military contracts or private industry will eclipse any reasonable monetary requirements. He can hang on to the smallest amount for a long time. If helium doesn't sell for that much at the last point then it wasn't worth that much anyway and he couldn't build a nest egg off a normal sale price. I don't get it.
lalos 7y ago
What you are claiming is that the market is 100% efficient but history and just knowing how business work says otherwise. The thing is that resources that have been mismanaged by the market are long gone so you don’t hear much about them. For example Galapagos island turtle meat was a great industry until they were all wiped out except a few in a remote island. The market takes time to react, for example if you sell something that turns out to be toxic, it takes time for the market to react (cigarette industry).
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
Europe clear cut most of their trees in the Middle Ages to such an extent that monarchs were forbidding the use of wood for numerous non-naval uses. It was one of those edicts forbidding use of wood in glass production, and a bunch of other uses that tipped the UK toward the industrial revolution. Coal became far more widely used, whereas it had previously been seen as dirty and to be avoided. Some see that lack of wood as a push to colonise. If we're talking regeneratable resources, such as plants and wood, we've exceeded the capacity of the planet since about 1970. It's been measured by earth overshoot day[1], which has steadily been getting earlier since its first calculation of Dec 31st. In 2019 it was July 29. We would need 1.7 earths to sustainably supply the resources we use. Humanity already uses over 50% of the earth's land -- the best, most productive, most fertile 50% for our homes and agriculture, and what's left is the least productive and unusable. The idea that we're not running out on a finite planet, with exponentially growing population, and nearly all the productive landmass already in service of humanity is what doesn't make sense. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day
Scarblac 7y ago
And yet we are in the middle of a Great Extinction event. The numbers of lots of species turned out to be finite and market forces didn't prevent their extinction.

seanalltogether 7y ago

> "and nearly a quarter is discarded into the environment, such as plastic in waterways and oceans." That piece of the graph showing that 22 billion tons is discarded into the environment almost seems unbelievably high. There must be some caveat to that figure right?

dsfyu404ed 7y ago
>that piece of the graph showing that 22 billion tons is discarded into the environment almost seems unbelievably high. There must be some caveat to that figure right? A quick google search says oil consumption in 2015 was 9.3x10^7 barrels and a barrel weighs 3x10^2 pounds so if we used 100% of our 2015 oil consumption to make plastic which comes out about three orders of magnitude short. Less than 5% of oil production is used for plastic, more than making up for any increase in tonnage from other ingredients (mostly nitrogen and/or oxygen) in the plastic. So yeah, there's something in that statistic that got lost in translation.
- pixl97 7y ago
  Being that plastic is also made of natural gas it may not have been directly included in the oil stat.
Accujack 7y ago
What most graphs showing garbage being thrown into the environment won't show is who is doing the discarding. China, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam dump more plastics into the ocean than all other countries combined. That's because these countries have large numbers of people in poverty or under economic or political stress, who typically are far more concerned with the immediate needs of survival than with hypothetical environmental concerns. What makes it worse is that the garbage doesn't all come from those countries... a good part of it comes from industrialized western nations because those nations find it cheap to make their trash someone else's problem. The reason this isn't discussed is that fixing the issue would require the wealthy western nations to intervene economically in those places to change the situation, something which would be resisted by the governments who find advantage in having a population that's not educated and remains under stress. On top of that, climate change is happening.. those countries and people are going to be under more stress soon, not less... what will happen if, one day, those people have a choice between surviving another year by dumping toxins into the environment that will sterilize the oceans or dying?

titzer 7y ago

That's 28000lbs (14000kg) for every human on Earth. Mind-boggling. The technosphere (aka Anthroposhere) is estimated at 30 trillion tons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthroposphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthroposphere

njarboe 7y ago
This is impressive, but just one meter of dirt covering the surface of the earth is about 1.2 million trillion tons. 30 trillion tons would create a layer about 0.03mm thick. Invisible in a geologic sense.
- JoeAltmaier 7y ago
  But the amount of dirt we have to turn over to find the 'good stuff' is maybe orders of magnitude bigger?
- titzer 7y ago
  My calculations don't match yours. Here http://www.bluebulbprojects.com/MeasureOfThings/results.php?p=1&comp=area&unit=m2&amt=148940000000000&sort=pr http://www.bluebulbprojects.com/MeasureOfThings/results.php?... That says there are 148 trillion square meters of land area on earth. So the technosphere (at 30 trillion tons) is about 1/5ton per square meter, or about 200 kg. If you use the all of the Earth's surface, it's 510 trillion square meters, so about 1/17th of a ton per square meter, or about 58 kg per square meter.
  - clmul 7y ago
    Assuming the dirt weighs about 2 tons per cubic meter, this corresponds to 58 kg/m^2 / 2000 kg/m^3 =~ 0.03 m, so it seems like the gp just used the incorrect unit.
    - njarboe 7y ago
      You are correct. I had 1000000000 as a trillion. Scientific notation is a much better way to calculate things. At 30mm that is a big enough layer that a geologist could see it in the rock record, if it looked different enough.

irrational 7y ago

100 billion tons/7 billion people = 14 tons for every person.

reallydontask 7y ago
That's the average, for people in the West this is bound to be significantly higher ... yikes

seibelj 7y ago

Luckily there is an automatic system for accurately distributing resources based on scarcity, and it has worked for millennia: markets and prices.

gwbas1c 7y ago

> It shows that, on average, every person on Earth uses more than 13 tonnes of materials per year I'd like to see my ~1 ton of waste, per month, please. Even as a wasteful American, this number is so staggering that I'd like to understand more about what all that waste is. Mining tailings? Coal ash? Certainly, my trashcan that I bring to the curb every week only has a tiny amount of my waste footprint.

thrwaway69 7y ago
I guess that somehow accounts for waste produced by others to deliver you something as well. So waste produced by apple to provide you an iphone is split into the equation somewhere.
esotericn 7y ago
Wastewater, perhaps?
- tpmx 7y ago
  That would be silly/stupid. But then again, that seems to be the standard for environmental reporting these days. The most catastrophic-sounding headline gets the most clicks.
- thrwaway69 7y ago
  I wonder about that. Is excretion considered a form of waste? My usage of water shouldn't exceed 400 kgs per month. That includes drinking, bathing, flushing, cleaning, cooking and washing hands (I even have a weird habit of doing that excessively). You can't get that much wasted water from that usage. Actually, I noticed the word average just now. I am packing my bags.
  - esotericn 7y ago
    Tons of water is used in manufacturing.
  - munificent 7y ago
    > You can't get that much wasted water from that usage. You also need to factor in the wastewater to produce all of the other products you consume. That produce you bought at the store and rinsed yourself was also likely washed several times along the supply chain before it got to you. That one bottle of beer you drank? The bottle has been washed several times, inside and out, along with the vat the beer was brewed in, every single pipe and tool that was used to process or shunt it, etc.

acd 7y ago

This is what I think is wrong about the current economic system. We consume to much and recycle to little.

mbostleman 7y ago

But I thought that the US was experiencing dematerialization in that weight of inputs was decreasing in absolute terms despite economic and population growth. Is this not the case or is it that the US's decrease is overcome by increases elsewhere globally? https://reason.com/2001/09/05/dematerializing-the-economy/ https://reason.com/2001/09/05/dematerializing-the-economy/