
World’s consumption of materials hits record 100bn tonnes a year - adrian_mrd
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/22/worlds-consumption-of-materials-hits-record-100bn-tonnes-a-year
======
fbonetti
> 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.

~~~
coldtea
> _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.

~~~
jjoonathan
Taking things into account and shaping our policies accordingly means making a
prediction about future supply. Predictions of impending supply exhaustion
have historically had a very, very poor track record. Distrusting them is not
a predictive failure, even if they are guaranteed to come true eventually,
because timescale matters.

As for "we may find a better use down the road" \-- sure, but for the purposes
of resource planning, that statement is completely useless. You have to pick a
probability, time scale, and value for your position to have meaning from the
perspective of resource planning, and not coincidentally those are the exact
prerequisites for taking a market position on the subject.

There are many things markets do poorly, but cutting through the bullshit,
forcing you to formulate a meaningful position, and rewarding/punishing you
appropriately is something they do very well.

~~~
simmanian
GP mentions that "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." In your opinion, is the market properly functioning to
correct these behaviors? Where is the market when all the world's trash are
getting dumped in our rivers and oceans?

~~~
jjoonathan
That's an untaxed externality, which is one of the many things that markets do
not handle well. There are others.

Here's the difference: the river is not being treated as an _unlimited_
resource, it's being treated as a _free_ resource. Nobody genuinely thinks the
river can dilute unlimited toxic waste, but someone does genuinely think they
won't be held accountable for killing the fish. In contrast, nobody in the oil
business could expect to "get away with" ignoring peak oil, because they could
not expect their customers to buy products that they were unable to produce
from oil that did not exist.

Markets do _not_ address global warming, but markets do address "peak oil,"
and the staggeringly bad suggestions that get passed off as wisdom every time
people start talking about "peak oil" type problems remind me why we put up
with markets in the first place.

------
gwbas1c
> 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.

~~~
esotericn
Wastewater, perhaps?

~~~
thrwaway69
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.

~~~
munificent
_> 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.

~~~
thrwaway69
If I did that with everything, not just water. It would be way more waste than
1 tonne.

What about frequently checking replies page out of FOMA?

What about the content I watch or read? The anime I watched last took lot to
produce and there is no doubt, people wasted shit ton of paper along with
other things are?

That is quite a lot of waste in terms of energy.

~~~
munificent
Those are different because that waste gets amortized across a large number of
consumers.

------
seanalltogether
> "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?

~~~
Accujack
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?

~~~
pinkfoot
> because these countries have large numbers of people in poverty…

Its probably going to be a surprise to you then to learn that Kigali, Rwanda
is absolutely spotless. Somehow they manage to come together every month to
clean the city and have banned plastic

I know it makes 'sense' that poor people don't care about the environment, but
you really should include all the data in your hypothesis.

~~~
jsjohnst
>> China, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam dump more plastics
into the ocean than all other countries combined.

> Its probably going to be a surprise to you then to learn that Kigali, Rwanda
> is absolutely spotless.

GP enumerated the countries they were talking about, they didn’t imply all
countries with poverty are to blame. It’s well documented that those countries
are the source of a large portion of ocean plastic and that US and other
western countries ship their recycling and garbage to those countries.

~~~
pinkfoot
So what's their plan when the plastic gets to them?

1\. refuse it (China did)

2\. process it (pyrolysis → diesel ?)

3\. clean it and resell it (clothing, furniture)

4\. do nothing, let it wash into their environment. Shame.

As I showed, the desperately poor folk of Rwanda managed to get their
government to make a plan. Their is no reason why hundreds of millions of
these less-poor folk can't do it.

I suggest we stop handing out free-passes for poor behaviour.

~~~
Accujack
>Their is no reason why hundreds of millions of these less-poor folk can't do
it.

Rwanda doesn't have the same problem with poverty and garbage as the countries
I listed, and it's tiny compared to them. Specifically, the issue contributing
to pollution here is that the countries in question have:

* Lots of people in poverty, and an upper class that are not

* Industries offshored from richer nations

* Significant amounts of trash being produced locally or taken in from other countries (usually via barge or sea traffic)

* Lax environmental enforcement that either doesn't restrict or is overwhelmed by the number of people polluting who are just trying to survive

It's not about having a plan... it's more about being able live another day.
The problem isn't that they want to be poor, it's that their governments keep
them that way and don't care about the environment or their welfare as long as
their power is maintained.

The best option for a lot of the poor is picking through garbage from richer
people, either from other countries or their own. There are so many people in
the Philippines who literally eat food made from the remains of other people's
meals they find in the garbage and re-use that it has a name - Pagpag. If
you're poor enough to eat that way, disposing of other people's garbage in an
environmentally sound way is pretty far down the priority list.

The best solution apart from common sense measures and laws controlling what
waste can be exported and what has to happen to it is probably to buy plastic
bottles from those poor people... they get money and live better, we get
plastic sorted into types for recycling processes.

------
titzer
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
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.

~~~
titzer
My calculations don't match yours.

Here
[http://www.bluebulbprojects.com/MeasureOfThings/results.php?...](http://www.bluebulbprojects.com/MeasureOfThings/results.php?p=1&comp=area&unit=m2&amt=148940000000000&sort=pr)

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
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
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.

~~~
thfuran
I believe that we've spewed enough radiation that no visual distinction would
necessary for detection, at least for the next several tens of thousands of
years.

~~~
titzer
It's true that atmospheric nuclear testing has produced trace elements that
were basically never on Earth before 1945, like Strontium-90
[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strontium-90](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strontium-90)].
Strontium-90 has a half life of about 29 years, so it will be detectable for a
few thousand years or so. Some others last longer.

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

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

------
mbostleman
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/)

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

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

