Peak Oil is You
Donate Bitcoins ;-) or Paypal :-)
Page added on October 30, 2013
Forget peak oil; peak trash is the world’s real concern
Forget about peak oil. An Ontario researcher says the real concern facing the planet should be peak trash.
“Solid waste is an incredibly useful proxy for total global impact,” said Daniel Hoornweg of the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, who published a commentary on the issue in Wednesday’s edition of the science journal Nature.
“This paper is basically saying that we’re on track to triple the impact – the global damage – to the planet. Arguably, the planet’s having a pretty hard time today dealing with the damage that we’re inflicting on it.”
Hoornweg says the amount of garbage a society generates depends to a large extent on how rich its members are.
As wealth grows, so does trash – up to a point where garbage per capita tends to level out no matter how much richer everyone gets. That’s because people tend to shift from buying stuff, which creates trash, to buying experiences, which doesn’t.
As well, wealthy societies tend to curb their waste, Hoornweg writes.
While North American and European cities have already reached that point, global trash growth is now being powered by rising wealth in the cities of Asia. Eventually, African cities will be the driver.
Hoornweg says the 2.9 billion people living in cities generated three million tonnes of solid waste a day. By 2025, it will be double that – enough to fill a line of garbage trucks 5,000 kilometres long.
Just as peak oil theorists suggest that oil production will eventually reach a maximum, Hoornweg says the same thing will happen to trash.
But even if significant measures are taken to curb global resource consumption, that point isn’t likely to be reached until all the way out to some time between 2110 and 2120. That will be well over 11 million tonnes of trash, every single day.
The problem is not so much the garbage itself, said Hoornweg, but the resources used to create that much trash.
“It’s not so much the environmental impact of that collection and disposal. It’s much more what that represents upstream – how many trees were cut, how many rivers were polluted, how much energy went into all of that waste.”
Using United Nations calculations on how much impact the planet can stand, Hoornweg figures peak trash needs to happen by 2075.
The answer isn’t to curb urban growth, he said. Cities can actually be more environmentally friendly than rural areas. Besides, urban growth is likely unstoppable.
“It isn’t good enough just to build cities,” said Hoornweg. “You have to build the right city – dense, resilient, equitable. I would throw in ‘kind’ as well, although we’re not allowed to talk about that as scientists.”
Too much inequity, he said, creates instability.
“Sustainability has to have a bare minimum of equity.”
Societies have to learn to see their productive capacity as part of a web, Hoornweg said.
“Composting, waste minimization, industrial ecology, where you try and get one industry to use the waste of another industry and try to create some sort of urban metabolism.”
Garbage is a lens through which we can understand how close we are to a environmentally sustainable future, said Hoornweg.
“I don’t think we’re going to get to sustainability because we think it’ll generate less waste. But I think it’s a pretty powerful argument that there’s so many benefits getting to a more sustainable trajectory that this is just one more.”
9 Comments on "Forget peak oil; peak trash is the world’s real concern"
Roman on Thu, 31st Oct 2013 12:00 am
The only garbage Africa is producing are bones. Good for the soil. Burying the dead is a stupid ritual. Ever heard of composting?
BillT on Thu, 31st Oct 2013 12:50 am
Africa will never be a big trash producer. The West will kill the ecosystem long before then.
Wheeldog on Thu, 31st Oct 2013 1:24 am
Could it be that “peak trash” is simply a spinoff of peak oil? Most trash consists of products either partially made of oil and natural gas (pastics, synthetic fabrics, etc.) or oil or gas is essential in their production and distribution. The relatively high cost of oil/gas is translated into higher prices for manufactured products. The “throwaway society” can only function with cheap oil, gas and other forms of abundant energy.
GregT on Thu, 31st Oct 2013 4:04 am
‘Trash’ is a byproduct of human consumption, and exploitation, of the natural environment. Urban growth will end, when the natural environment can no longer support resource demand.
“Cities can actually be more environmentally friendly than rural areas.”
Living in a mud shack in a rural area, is much more environmentally friendly, than living in a concrete, steel, and glass high-rise, in an urban city core. High population density areas will never be ‘sustainable’, as they require finite resources in their construction, and maintenance.
The tens of thousands of years that we lived within the confines of the natural ecosystem, we were living sustainably. Three hundred years of industrial evolution, will be seen as a huge failure in the history books, if there is anyone left to read them.
DC on Thu, 31st Oct 2013 6:04 am
Funny that the Calgary Herald ran this story. Calgary is sprawl personified, despite having an electric light rail system. Massive ex-urban sprawl, vast spaces between mega-stores, Calgary is definitely *not* the kind of city that this article proposes we need.
Norm on Thu, 31st Oct 2013 8:15 am
All trash should be reclaimed. The reason it isn’t, is because it has to be picked thru by hand, and nobody wants to do it. There could be huge numbers of low-end jobs created, sorting the stuff quickly and efficiently, in proper facilities. Instead, each person feels their garbage is ‘sacred’ along with the right to dump it into the landfill.
The conservatives are sort of right that sorting garbage is a hassle. It can be done quick and efficient BY HAND of a skilled worker in a good facility. Individuals doing it under the sink is less efficient. There’s room for both.
Garbage is an energy source (most of it is paper cardboard and plastic) but first remove all the things that are valuable resources (iron, copper, banana peels etc).
The rest could be burnt to make electricity.
Proper sorting would be done in specific parts of the country that have a dry warm climate. So that a bunch of stinky smelly garbage dries out faster, allowing it to be sorted out, to be fuel or recycled stuff.
So there’s really not any reason that garbage can’t be 99% reclaimed, except that, everybody is stupid.
I recycle large amounts of metals. Stuff I find on the side of the road, or an old car bumper in the woods, etc. I recycle all the pop cans half drained in the parking lots. Those are from the useless unemployed hooligans who spend their welfare money on booze. I’m most impressed with all the ‘armchair liberal environmentalists’ who would never actually clean up any aluminum cans they see right in front of them. They just preach the glories of recycling but don’t do it.
I recycle about 1500 pounds of metal annually. Just crap I see lying around parking lots and roadways. So when all the resources run out, don’t blame me. (well, guilty on the oil thing, but not the other stuff).
I am impressed how typical liberal environmentalist will wail and moan about throwing away a plastic grocery bag (hydrocarbons, that weighs just a few grams) but they could not give a damn about the gallon of gas (8 pounds of hydrocarbons) that they burnt up to get the groceries. No, they just wail and moan about the plastic bag.
The garbage is just a faint ghost, 1 part in 10,000 of all the oil that got burnt up in the transportation machinery. Even so, all garbage should be recycled, by necessary method of hand-sorting, and its a pathetic society that doesn’t do it.
I always get quite a chuckle from dismantling some old toaster, etc. Get the steel, get the copper wire, get the aluminum etc. those armchair liberal environmentalists just don’t do things like actually recycle that busted toaster. Oh heck no they just toss it out, I have seen so much of that hypocricy.
We should have more articles about garbage as an energy source etc.
BillT on Thu, 31st Oct 2013 10:48 am
Norm, it cannot be done cheap and efficient. If there was a profit in it it would be a corporation by now.
Trash is also a ‘finite’ resource as it requires most of the finite’ resources just to exist. Basically, trash is oil and oil’s offspring. Things that are easily recycled or reused are already being done.
And plastics cannot just be burned. They require extremely high temperatures to prevent all of the toxins in plastics from contaminating the air.
Have you ever burned a tire? That smoke is highly toxic. You are not burning mostly real rubber like in the old days. Now you are burning a lot of Dow Chemical’s additives in the shape of a tire.
“According to The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, the most common tire is the P195/75R14 all-season passenger tire, weighing approximately 22 pounds. This tire consists of 6.0 lbs. of five different synthetic rubbers, and contains 4.5 lbs. of eight types of natural rubber. Carbon black represents 5.0 lbs. of the tire. The tire also consists of 1.5 lbs. of steel cord, and 2.0 lb. of polyester, nylon and steel bead wire. Finally, companies engineer this tire with 3.0 lbs. of 40 different chemical agents, waxes, oils and pigments.”
Kenz300 on Thu, 31st Oct 2013 10:53 am
Biofuels can now be made from waste or trash.
As waste or trash becomes more valuable as a source of biofuels, energy and recycled materials for new products we will better deal with the waste that is produced.
Every landfill (over 2200 in the US alone) can be converted to produce biofuels, energy and recycled materials for new products.
Less trash will be discarded along the roadside as its value rises….
Reduce, reuse and recycle…… close the loop….
GregT on Thu, 31st Oct 2013 1:15 pm
BillT has hit the nail on the head.
Kenz, it is you that fails to understand the ‘loop’.