Limits to Waste

<%@LANGUAGE="VBSCRIPT" CODEPAGE="1252"%> Limits to Waste

Limits to Waste

by Bradley Jarvis

One of the persistent messages of the sustainability movement is that the world is drowning in waste. Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins, in their 1999 book Natural Capitalism, estimated that, counting all of the waste from resource extraction through use, the average American was responsible for almost one million pounds of waste material per year. That's over one ton per day. For every pound of durable goods produced, there may be 100 pounds of waste created in the process. With Americans using over four times the world average, that means the world generates over one quadrillion pounds of waste every year. Nature is able to process or hold a substantial fraction of this, but there is growing consensus that we exceeded that amount some time in the last twenty years. The extra amount of waste per year has been literally piling up; in the ground, in the air, and in the water. If the total accumulated since 1986 was spread evenly over the surface of the Earth at the average density of the crust, it would have been 1/6 inch thick in 2000.

Other species are in competition with us for the resources we are using, and they have been losing. If we could continue consuming resources at the rate we have been, many other species would die out within 30 years; and their services -- providing food, cleaning the air, among many other things -- would not be available.

How long can we continue on the present path? No one really knows, though there is good reason to believe we will reach a threshold early in this century.

There are several basic strategies for dealing with this problem: reprocessing waste, increasing efficiency, reducing demand for products, and finding somewhere else to dump the waste. Reprocessing waste involves detoxifying that which is dangerous, isolating that which can't, and turning as much as possible into resources that can be reused (this is Nature's preferred approach). Increasing efficiency involves designing products to eliminate waste from the beginning (or use it in another process), and recycling products after they are used. Reducing demand for products focuses largely on convincing people to stop buying products that are produced in environmentally destructive ways or are themselves environmentally destructive, but can also include "voluntary simplicity" -- discovering pleasure, health, and more meaningful living from using less stuff. As for dumping the waste elsewhere: the only other place is space, and the cost would be (pardon the pun) astronomically prohibitive.

For those committed to eternally increasing growth in resource use and who do not value the biosphere, Nature has limits that even the grandest technologies will be unable to overcome. If we wanted to maintain our present rate of growth in consumption, we would chew through the entire planet in about 700 years. Our spacecraft would need to be about 830 times faster than they are now so we could use up the entire Solar System (planets, asteroids, comets, and dust) about 300 years after that. The further we go into space, the faster we must go to maintain our growth. Nature unfortunately sets a hard limit on how fast we can go: the speed of light. We would at best be able to attain half this speed, which is over 13,000 times what we can do now, and only reach a distance of about 60 light years before growth would have to slow down. This limit would be reached less than 1,400 years from now.

The lesson here is that we cannot indefinitely, and most likely even in the very near term, continue to convert more material into products and waste every year than we did the year before. We must instead learn to make our products and waste reusable, that is, available as resources in the future. Even in this endeavor, Nature imposes an unassailable limit: the second law of thermodynamics, also called the law of entropy. Its main implication is that no matter what we do, the amount of usable resources will decrease; all we can do is minimize the amount that becomes unusable. Life has learned to stretch its resources by using outside energy (that of the Sun) to tear apart and build what it needs (including itself); ultimately we will need to return to this approach if we are to survive as long as possible.

We may be as few as ten years away from needing to either cut back our consumption to levels that Nature can sustain, or get by without it. The odds of both are long, but to do neither may very well lead to the end of civilization.