Do you think of yourself as an ecological person? Whatever the answer, it is becoming an increasingly important question.
If your answer is “no”, I’m going to politely suggest that you don’t have a choice. No matter how fervently you deny the evidence, no matter how determined you are to stick to your behaviour, the fact is, you live in the world. You may disagree with people regarding how to behave in it, you may not think your impacts are problematic, but regardless of your choices and their consequences, you do have an impact just as other people’s choices impact you.
If your answer is yes, It is probably not because of the reason I just mentioned. The contents of the preceding paragraph may resonate, but I’m guessing that if you self-identify as ecological you’ve probably done something a bit more; switched-up your routine; made sacrifices. At the very least you have taken time to think about the consequences of your daily life and make changes that, regardless of whether you feel good about making them (and I hope you do), caused some small disruption or inconvenience that required you to adapt.
These changes may have helped you to feel that you are growing as person. You may have felt that you were losing something that was difficult but necessary to let go of. Or both.
Whether you consider yourself to be ecological or not, one thing is becoming increasingly clear. The gap between where we are now as a society, as a race, and where we need to get-to, the survival gap, is vast. Even worse, it is becoming clear that even the most extreme solutions included in current political discourse may not be powerful enough to get us across. It also turns out that one of the issues that people who care about the ocean are most concerned with– plastic pollution– provides one of the most poignant illustrations of the size of challenge we have ahead of us.
A report was released recently by the European Environmental Bureau (EEB) that must rank as one of the most depressing texts in the environmental canon– a body of work that is notably short of laughs to begin with.
The central concept underpinning green growth– that you can have decreasing environmental damage and increasing economic growth at the same time– is known as decoupling. Without decoupling you might be able to have a circular economy, but there is no green growth.
It is a grim read, but not because it pulls at the heart strings. It analyses the mathematics of our future, and to devastating effect, striking at one of the keystones of the current mainstream agenda– green growth.
The idea of green growth has been at the center of political thinking on environmental issues since the original outline for a Green New Deal was published in the UK in 2008– it was an important part of the rationale behind the Obama administration’s stimulus package, and recently reached political prominence thanks to the new generation of democratic lawmakers in the US. It says that we can reduce ecological impact to within meaningful bounds and continue to have economic growth if we are smart about it– invest in clean energy, make more reusable packaging, recycle more effectively. Take the idea one step further and it is possible to envision a circular economy– a system where we repurpose and recycle so much that we effectively close the loop between the end of the supply chain (post-consumer waste) and the beginning (raw materials). It’s not a crazy idea; even the most tough-minded and pro-industry research– such as this report from McKinsey on plastics, supports it. I’ll be referring to this report, as well as the one from the EEB, more as I go along.
The central concept underpinning green growth– that you can have decreasing environmental damage and increasing economic growth at the same time– is known as decoupling. Without decoupling you might be able to have a circular economy, but there is no green growth.
The EEB report focuses on decoupling, looking for evidence, a decade after someone first mentioned a Green New Deal, that it has ever actually happened anywhere in any meaningful way. It finds practically no evidence that it has. The report focuses on decoupling in the sense that it trashes it entirely. It doesn’t denigrate the idea that we need to get pollutants out of the environment, and it doesn’t imply that a circular economy is not not possible. What it does say is that the scale of growth in everything that humans do over the next few years will cause so much damage that the efficiencies brought by solutions typically associated with green growth will not be anywhere near enough to mitigate it. It says that those of us who support the idea of green growth, myself included, have fallen victim to a well documented human failing– a desire for growth married to an inability to grasp its consequences.
Plastic pollution in the ocean and the environment as a whole has become a high profile issue; a target of justified public frustration and dismay and an area where many people are looking for viable solutions. There have been notable successes. High profile campaigns around the world have placed restrictions on the use of single use plastics. Plastic bags, beverage containers, drinks straws and cigarette butts have been successfully targeted at a regional level. NGOs linked to communities of interest have leveraged the passion of their members to create change in communities large and small across the world. Technology companies are field testing biochemical processes for reducing plastic waste back into compounds that can be used as raw materials.
Further, any reasonable person would say that we can continue to improve. And we can. But for our own good, and for the good of the planet, we need to get it into perspective.
… it comes down to two things– complexity and output. Too much of one and not enough of the other.
I live in a place that is somewhat off the beaten track. It is a privilege to live here– while I have been writing this two deer wandered past my window, within a meter or so. An eagle flew right by me when I was cycling the other day. But even so there are people here, and by-and-large, as you would expect, they are quite ecologically minded.
The area has a very visible and organized recycling operation. Colourful bins in every community make it easy to sort and deposit a wide variety of waste. The sorting depot is well-appointed. Material arrives there, delivered by truck and what can be recycled is compacted, bundled and sent to the mainland– necessary because I, and the community, and the deer, and all our recycling reside on an island archipelago off Canada’s West Coast. It is a seemingly perfect version of what goes on regarding recycling in towns and cities across the world. So you’d think the guy who runs the depot would be happy. You’d think he feels liked. Well, he isn’t. He doesn’t. I know because I spoke with him.
The reality of how little we put in the recycling bin actually gets recycled is hardly breaking news at this point. High profile scandals have been in the news all year. But it is fascinating to see how the international reality plays-out in a small community– it comes down to two things– complexity and output. Too much of one and not enough of the other.
When waste intended for recycling is accepted by a recycling depot, they look to brokers and other third parties to take it off their hands and make sure to gets to where it can be processed. But life for those third parties has become much more difficult, mostly because Asian countries have stopped accepting our stuff– stuff that we thought was recycling but is in fact garbage.
What that means is that they have become much more picky, more demanding, more wary of taking questionable material. This is turn has made the job of sorting through our waste more difficult, more time-consuming. The sorting process now requires more input resources, more people and machinery. It’s become more expensive in terms of money and carbon footprint.
Turning the waste leakage problem into an opportunity shouldn’t only apply to Asia.
That it was cheaper for so long is a result of what the EEB calls cost shifting. For years now, since the recycling revolution began, developed countries have made themselves look more environmentally efficient– not through a genuine decoupling of growth from environmental impact, but by shipping their impact abroad. We shifted the cost elsewhere and now it is being sent back. That we did this to people in developing countries is a crime, what it tells us about our broken system is deep cause for concern.
The more involved sorting process also results in a less advantageous output dynamic. The piles of stuff that can be recycled are smaller. The piles that are headed for the landfill are larger. This means that the good stuff must either be shipped in less economical quantities or kept around for longer as it accumulates. Kept around in a facility that requires heat, light and people. People who get there in vehicles.
Look at it from the perspective of a circular economy and you’re thinking in terms of costs and ratios: Given these problems, just how great is the capacity for recycling and repurposing to meet demand? And how much negative environmental impact will that create?
Let’s do our best to be optimistic for a moment.
First let’s assume that demand for recycled raw plastic input, feedstock as the industry calls it, actually exists. There are reasons why companies who use plastic packaging might consider using recycled raw material, and some companies have taken bold steps in this direction. There are also costs and headaches– it is often difficult to determine what chemical or other impurities recycled materials contain for instance, making its use for food packaging problematic. It doesn’t help that virgin plastic is cheap, in some cases supported by massive investment from the fossil fuels industry. Increasing the price of virgin plastic to more accurately reflect the cost it inflicts on the environment might help with that.
Then let’s say that despite our current difficulties we’re going to get much better at recycling. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), right now, across the world, 2 billion people do not have access to basic waste collection services. Provide those people with waste management and you divert more post-consumer waste into the recycling system. According to another report by the Mckinsey Centre in collaboration with the Ocean Conservancy, waste leakage across China, Indonesia, The Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam can be reduced by 65% using this approach, and doing so would reduce global waste leakage by 45%.
Turning the waste leakage problem into an opportunity shouldn’t only apply to Asia. A recent report from Ocean Legacy, a Canadian NGO, determines that over 1.6 billion beverage containers failed to be reused or returned for recycling between 2013 and 2017 in the province of British Columbia (BC) alone. BC residents may be surprised to learn that return rates for beverage containers in the province are actually getting worse. Canadians my be surprised to to learn that Canada is far from the top of the league when it comes to recycling rates overall.
A big part of what makes the beverage container stats for BC so shocking is that much of the shortfall is comprised of small polyethylene tetraphthalate (PET) bottles and their caps; one of the most readily recyclable forms of plastic there is. The good news is that there are already well understood mechanisms for improving rates of return: Establish effective deposit refund systems; include a wide variety of beverage containers in the deposit refund system; and incentivise consumers to keep the caps on their bottles when they return them. Ocean Legacy and others are building pressure to get measures such as these adopted by regional legislators. Germany and the Netherlands have achieved return rates for PET packaging at or above 95% using similar methods.
Current global average plastic recycling rates are judged to be around 12%, but vary widely depending on location. Some of the highest reported rates are from Europe and Scandinavia (30-40%) but may be distorted due to the cost shifting issue.
Mckinsey estimates that it may be possible to get the combined plastic recycling and repurposing rate as high as 50% by 2030. They say that this would mean that over 30% of demand for plastic in 2030, and 60% by 2050 could be met by recycled and repurposed materials.
Imagine if we could increase recycling input even further? There is an estimated 250 million tonnes of plastic in the ocean, imagine if we could recycle that?
But wait. Why would a 50% recycling rate result in only 30% demand fulfilment? In a word, growth. Massive growth.
By 2050, the demand for plastics is projected to be just over a billion tonnes per year. McKinsey says that If we do everything right we may manage to meet 60% of that demand with recycled and repurposed material. Meet that target and the amount of virgin plastic we will be making is around 400 million tonnes– about what we make right now.
Just like my local sorting depot: Complexity and output; too much of one and not enough of the other.
You see the problem. Massive change gets us zero net improvement in resource use. A situation that cannot be said to serve us well. I used to talk about “zero net-new plastic”. I don’t do that anymore.
And this problem– the growth problem, effects everything, not just plastics. I have mentioned cost shifting and problems with supply and demand in recycling. The EEB report details other ways in which decoupling fails to happen.
The average annual carbon footprint of a living human being is 4 metric tonnes*, the real-life carbon footprint of an avatar in a virtual world such as Second Life could be anything from 10 to 50% of that
Often, the discovery of a solution to one problem creates new problems in other areas. Increased use of electric vehicles and infrastructure will reduce the use of fossil fuels but increase mining activity for lithium, copper and cobalt for instance. The EEB calls this problem shifting.
Next, there is the rebound effect. This is where efficiencies in an area leads to increased activity in it or other areas which may completely offset any reduction in impact gained. Increased efficiencies in the use of unmanned aircraft systems will result in more of them, not fewer, for instance.
And all of the components of the green economy, recycling included, require resource inputs of their own– energy and raw materials. The EEB predicts that as resources becomes more scarce the damage created per unit of resource extracted will increase. Recycling requires electricity. Solar and wind energy do not come free of environmental cost. Renewable energy infrastructure and other green economy tech requires new and exotic resource inputs. Energy return on investment (EROI) is a measure of how much energy input is required per unit of energy output in the fuel and power industries. In 1999 the EROI for global oil and gas was 33:1 (one unit of energy input per 33 units of energy output). According to the EEB, a complete transfer to renewables would result in a ratio of something like 20:1 or lower– better than the shale-oil or tar-sand production that the fossil fuel industry is increasingly resorting to, but still not as good as the oil production of the late nineties. Again, a big improvement; you are now getting your power from non-fossil sources– but keeping up with growth is still having significant impact due to the effects of problem shifting.
Transition towards more information based economies, or perhaps more virtual activity may seem to create less impact but have high costs in terms of energy and infrastructure. The average annual carbon footprint of a living human being is 4 metric tonnes*, the real-life carbon footprint of an avatar in a virtual world such as Second Life could be anything from 10 to 50% of that, and the widespread adoption of powerful but resource inefficient technologies like blockchain may make matters worse.
Finally, technological innovation moves quickly but nowhere nearly as fast as growth. What most of us perceive as rapid change in available technological solutions are usually the result of many years of development and are often focused on problems that are relatively easy to solve. Robots to clean your kitchen floor are readily available. Robots to clear the ocean of debris are a tougher challenge. Look what Boyan Slat and The Ocean Cleanup are going through. It takes nerve to attack difficult environmental problems with technological solutions. Nerve and time. It is interesting to note that the most readily deployable innovations are often adaptations of ideas from the past. Like this. And this.
Alternatives to conventional plastics exist. Perhaps widespread adoption of these materials could reduce the impact of the 400 million tonnes of new plastic that it looks like we’ll need in 2050. Again, there have been legislative successes, but there have also been problems. People in tech like to think of their solutions being disruptive, when it comes to environmental impact they are currently not disruptive enough.
No wonder the guy at the recycling depot is depressed. People who embraced recycling feel lied to because they can see that most of what gets returned goes to a landfill, if not here, then somewhere else, and while this can improve, right now it seems to be getting worse. The stuff that can be recycled costs more to process than we expected and is more troublesome to feed back into the system. A person who should be one of the heroes of our community is between a rock and a hard place.
The idea of decoupling is that we can still have economic growth while reducing our impact on the environment. What the EEB report says is that with current solutions decoupling is practically impossible. We may be able to create an almost infinite loop of reuse, repurpose, recycle, and renew, but as an environmental solution this plan doesn’t by itself account for the size of resource demand that predicted levels of economic growth will put on the current linear economy, and the cost in environmental terms that closing the loop will inflict. We will still be extracting as much as we recycle.
On the upside, the potential for getting pollution out of the environment and back into the supply chain may look better than the current situation suggests. On the downside the ecological dividend for doing so, while large, may not be sufficient to save us.
The Circular Economy is a brilliant idea. The Green New Deal is a brilliant idea. But they are nowhere near enough by themselves.
Methods for recycling will improve. Maybe some new form of energy is just around the corner and will have a transformative effect, not just on recycling but on everything. New ideas for carbon capture are appearing all the time. Perhaps a multitude of smaller revolutions such as a dramatic uptake in plastic alternatives, or a radical reduction in the more difficult to recycle plastics we make will tip the balance significantly in parts of the system. But as of right now, If we expect the circular economy alone to give us a both a healthy planet and economic growth we may have got things drastically wrong.
The survival gap is much bigger than most of us have been imagining. When it comes to solutions there is still a huge missing part of the puzzle. If the pieces can’t be found, it might mean having to decide between economic growth and destroying the planet, a decision that will impact you and me and everyone else, whether we regard ourselves as ecological or otherwise.
This is the global average. The average for a US citizen is more like 20 tonnes/yr.
