Use Less, Waste Less

Even with advances in efficiency, industrial economies are producing more waste than ever. The only option is to consume less.

The modern economy could be described with a simple equation: fossil fuels + large quantities of useful resources = marketable products + much larger quantities of useless waste. Keep in mind too that most of the “marketable products” join the waste stream within a few days or months of being taken home – and the rest eventually follows. From the perspective of energy and materials, modern industrial economies can be seen as massive waste-generating machines.

When Canadians talk about “reducing waste,” they usually mean reducing the amount of household garbage and recycling waste they leave at the curb (i.e., the packaging, residue and remnants of all those goodies they brought home from the mall). This equals about two kilograms per person per day, or several million kilograms daily in each of the country’s largest cities, much of which is still destined for overflowing landfills. It’s a real problem.

But consider this: the growing mountain of urban debris contributes only a trickle to the total national Niagara Falls of waste. All the stuff we buy, use, and ultimately throw out represents only two to three per cent of the material that passes through modern economies in the production of food and consumer goods.

The total “material throughput” of modern economies is truly prodigious. In 2000, the World Resources Institute (WRI) released an analysis of five of the world’s most efficient and technologically advanced countries (Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Japan, and the United States). The WRI found that the “processed output” – solid, liquid, and gaseous waste discharges – from domestic production activities varied from 11 tonnes per capita in Japan to 25 tonnes per capita in the United States. When so-called “hidden flows” (soil erosion, construction debris, mining overburden) are included, these numbers rise to 21 tonnes and 86 tonnes per capita respectively. That’s 86,000 kilograms of material processing and resource degradation every year to produce consumption goods for each man, woman, and child in the U.S.! (The differences between Japan and the U.S. are explained by the latter’s much larger geographic area and the greater size of its domestic mining and agricultural sectors.)

While the WRI did not study Canada, their analysis suggests that Canada’s processed and total flows would be closer to those of the U.S. than Japan.

Significantly, despite decades of increasing material efficiency, the total quantity of waste per capita is still increasing in most countries examined. The takeaway message is that rising incomes and personal consumption – i.e., economic growth – is overwhelming techno-efficiency gains.

Perhaps surprisingly, carbon dioxide and other emissions from fossil fuel combustion account for more than 80 per cent by weight of the processed waste discharged from the economies of all five countries studied. These nations may have among the world’s most advanced economies, but according to the WRI, “modern industrial economies, no matter how high tech, are carbon-based economies and their predominant activity is burning material.” This, of course, is the “smoking gun” of anthropogenic climate change

What does it all mean? The hard lesson is that the road to sustainability is not paved with improved efficiency and new technologies alone. To achieve the necessary 80 per cent reductions in fossil energy and material throughput in high-income countries – i.e., to reduce waste outputs – requires that we reduce resource inputs. There is simply no substitution for consuming less.