THE FUTURE: BUSINESS AS USUAL

The inhabited buildings slowly extrude their continuous ribbons of compressed garbage and trash. The ribbons fall onto the cargo belts that move steadily toward the high ridges at the city boundary. In these populous continents, each city presses against the next, and so the waste ridges from a network, through which tunnel the intercity roads. Each city posts frontier guards, to prevent a neighbor from tipping its trash over the crest.

—KEVIN LYNCH

 

Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

—KENNETH BOULDING

 

 

 

PRIOR TO THIS CULTURE, making the world a better place was dead simple. We only had to be born, live, eat, shit, defer to the land and to the lessons taught to us by our local traditional culture about how to defer to the land (do not kill buffalo when mothers may have young, do not kill too many buffalo, and so on), and eventually die to give our bodies back to the land. This is what salmon do. This is what hummingbirds do. This is what all wild beings—including wild humans—do. And it works.

Now it’s not so easy. Not only because this culture is killing the planet, and we must stop it; and not only because the industrial economy is inherently destructive, meaning every action involving the industrial economy is destructive; but more intimately because this culture has made our bodies as toxic as the culture itself.

It is popular for writers concerned about the planet, the future, or both to extrapolate current events in attempts to determine just where this culture is leading us. Speculative scenarios about the future can entertain us—and sometimes do little more. But they can also help us make decisions, inspire us, and provoke thought, discussion, and best of all, action.

So far in these pages we’ve discussed the history of garbage and waste, we’ve discussed people who work with garbage and waste, and we’ve delved into some of the deeper implications of what it means to be a living creature on a planet dominated by such an incredibly wasteful culture. As we approach the end of the book, it’s time to consider the future. And not just the next decade or two, since most “solutions” to the problems of waste are doomed from the start by a pathological shortsightedness. How will this culture impact those living centuries or millennia from now?

Visions of the future have a tendency to become dated—or even sillylooking—as we actually approach the future. Part of this is due to the inherent complexity of change in the real world, and the difficulty in coming up with a model that can even remotely mimic that complexity. Part of it is that books or films are more dramatic and exciting when subtleties are glossed over, when timescales are compressed, when events are Hollywoodized and made larger-than-life: think The Day After Tomorrow. Or sometimes a story about the future is constructed as an allegory or propaganda, where the plausibility of events is not as important as the moral or political point being made. Oftentimes people construct a vision of the future because it’s how they’d most like to live (perhaps Star Trek), or how they’d be most afraid to live (perhaps Mad Max), or because they think it would be really, really, neat.

I’d like to lay out a few scenarios of the future, specifically looking at waste, so we can gain further insight into how the path we take will affect those humans and nonhumans who come after us. I’ll try to make these scenarios as plausible as possible, based on research rather than on Hollywood-style drama for the sake of drama. I’ll construct scenarios, and then draw my points from them, rather than vice versa.

At the same time, I’m not going to insult your intelligence by pretending I’m a “fully objective analyst” (as though such a thing were possible or desirable). All writers are propagandists. If I weren’t horrified by the dominant culture laying waste to the planet, I wouldn’t be writing this book. My scenarios will be as plausible and well-reasoned as I can make them, but in the end the questions I want them to answer are biased in favor of living creatures: what events now will provide those who come after us with a livable landbase? And always, most importantly, how do we stop this culture from killing the planet?

At the beginning of his excellent book on garbage, Wasting Away: An Exploration of Waste, the late author Kevin Lynch describes a worst-case scenario of the future: the world has become unimaginably polluted, and cities are surrounded by vast and constantly growing mountains of garbage, each mountain being fed by a ceaseless conveyer belt that dumps an endless flow of garbage out of the city. In fact, in this scenario, there is little between cities except mountain after mountain of garbage.

Lynch’s book is insightful in many ways, but this scenario illustrates a lack of plausibility I’d like to avoid. First, there isn’t enough cheap energy left to process the entire planet’s surface into garbage (at least, we hope not). Second, there probably aren’t enough raw materials in the world to cover so much of the planet’s surface in garbage. And third, if the world were indeed so polluted, the toxicity of the environment would kill most humans (and other living creatures), leaving very few humans to continue consuming.

I’m sure there are some people who would look at Lynch’s scenario as yet another example of “doom and gloom environmentalists” trying to frighten people into giving up their disposable coffee cups by conjuring some fantastically implausible hell-world. I suspect that Lynch’s goal was simply to make a point rather than outline a truly realistic future. At the same time, his worst-case forecast seems eerily familiar if we simply expand our scope beyond human cities in the industrialized nations.

The Tijuana city dump we discussed earlier truly is a ceaselessly growing mountain of garbage. There are hundreds or thousands of places like it in India and China and South Africa, where much of the garbage consists either of the by-products of sweatshop industries producing consumer products to be sold in the industrialized nations or of electronic waste exported from industrialized nations once consumers have had their way with it.

Or recall what’s happening to the oceans. A 1999 study showed that water in the Pacific Ocean contains six times as much plastic as phytoplankton. Researcher Charles Moore repeated the study in 2002 and found a whopping 10:1 ratio.²⁴¹

For comparison, imagine if this were the case in a terrestrial environment. The amount of biomass in an average temperate deciduous forest is about six pounds per square foot. Multiplying this by the ten to one ratio we just mentioned reveals there’d have to be sixty pounds of plastic per square foot for the forest to be comparably polluted. How much is this? Since, for example, styrofoam has a density of about two-thirds of a pound per cubic foot, for there to be ten times as much styrofoam as biomass on a forest floor, there’d have to be sixty pounds of styrofoam per square foot, which means the forest floor would be covered by styrofoam to a depth of ninety feet.

Truly prodigious amounts of garbage are produced and disposed of somewhere, but what well-heeled middle-class human would want to live in a city surrounded by garbage? Part of Lynch’s vision has come true—it’s just that the garbage is being exported, like many of this culture’s problems, so that the costs are paid by poor humans and nonhumans instead of by those who create the problems in the first place.

Throughout this book we’ve been describing those who are killing the planet and those who rationalize it or who attempt to maintain this culture at the expense of the world (and at the expense of fiscally poor humans) or who promote “solutions” to the problems of this culture that take this culture as a given and the natural world as secondary, as immature, narcissistic, insane (out of touch with physical reality), and/or sociopathological. But maybe those descriptions have been far too kind. Maybe the truth is much simpler, and the people we’ve been describing are just plain old garden-variety greedy abusive assholes who prefer their own wealth—those who come up with and/or implement “solutions” to, for example, global warming that promote industrial capitalism over the living planet are often extremely well paid for doing so—over the health of the planet. I mean, the problems are not cognitively challenging. Ask any reasonably intelligent six-year-old how to stop global warming caused in great measure by the burning of oil and gas, and the child should be able to give the obvious answer: stop burning oil and gas. Ask an adult who does consulting for high-tech venture capital firms how to stop global warming, and the answer you get will almost undoubtedly be far more protective of high-tech corporations than the planet. And the answer you get won’t work.

Bet your life on it.

Think about it. Your bathtub is overflowing. The water is running full-blast. What’s the first thing you do? Do you begin to carry water outside in a teaspoon? Do you use energy-intensive machines invented at great taxpayer expense by your buddies at huge high-tech corporations and fueled by oil refined at great taxpayer expense by your buddies at huge oil conglomerates to suck up the water, transport it elsewhere, and dump the now-polluted water into what were once salmon-bearing streams? Do you plant native grasses on the bathroom floor, and call it a “new model for sustaining industry”?

Or do you turn off the tap?

If you’re not insane, you turn off the tap.

But the problem is that the greedy abusive assholes—okay, so they’re sociopaths, too, and immature, and so on—at the top do their damnedest to make sure the bathtub always overflows on someone else’s floor. And because they don’t care about others, they have no real incentive to turn off the tap.

This means someone else has to turn off the tap.

This analogy of an overflowing bathtub is true for carbon dioxide, plastics, and other waste products of this culture.

We need to turn off the fucking tap.

And while we’re at it, we should pull the fucking plug.

There are three main future scenarios I’d like to explore, as follows.

First, I will extrapolate a future from the continuance of business as usual. What would happen if things pretty much continued the way they’re going, with no major social transformations? What kind of world would be left?

Second, I’ll explore a “technotopia.” What would happen if all the “ecological” high-tech fantasies came true? What if every product manufactured was built with recycling in mind, if every new technology was integrated into what the environmental intelligentsia would label an ecologically sane society, and if maximizing an indefinitely sustainable quality of life was the goal of industrial society?

And last, what if none of the above happened? What if industrial society simply gobbled up what’s left of the cheap energy and resources and then collapsed, as so many civilizations have in the past?

Let’s start with the “business as usual” scenario, since it’s the most straightforward. In this scenario, things keep going pretty much the way they have been, with most trends continuing more or less into the foreseeable future. People keep buying and throwing away massive amounts of disposable products because it’s easy, cheap, and convenient to do so. Corporations keep manufacturing and selling those products because it makes them piles of money, and those same corporations keep producing vast amounts of industrial waste and pollution as by-products of manufacturing processes. The environmental intelligentsia keep telling us that if we just tweak the processes (putting plants on truck factories, purchasing compact fluorescent light bulbs, and so on) we’ll be able to continue this exploitative lifestyle—in other words, the environmental intelligentsia continue to serve those in power by preemptively rationalizing away the necessity of the fundamental changes required to keep this culture from killing the planet, by lulling people into believing the superficial changes suggested by members of the environmental intelligentsia are “revolutionary” and sufficient. Indigenous and poor people keep being displaced by the extensive resource extraction industries necessary for all this manufacturing to take place, and many of them continue to be enlisted into the garbage process. And governments continue to use overwhelming force to facilitate all of the above activities. (What else are governments for?)

Since the global economy is predicated on and requires continual growth, the above activities happen more and more, on a larger and larger scale, year after year. The population continues to grow, and economically poorer nations continue to industrialize and consume more. It’s reasonable to expect increasing total industrial activity, increasing amounts of waste produced, and increasing toxification of the global environment.

The optimists among you might perhaps point out that even though those trends would continue, we would also see continuing trends of growing environmentalism in governments, corporations, and society at large. Recycling programs are growing, you might point out. There are campaigns afoot to reduce the use of disposable plastic bags and incandescent lightbulbs or even outlaw them completely. There are advertisements in completely mainstream magazines for people to recycle their old cell phone batteries! We’ve made recycling mainstream in only a few decades!

But people a few decades ago didn’t have to worry about pollution from cell phone batteries at all. So it’s hardly progress to move “forward” to a point where you’ve only partly solved a problem that didn’t even exist a few decades ago. Consider that in 2006 alone over 1 billion cellular phones were sold.²⁴² And those cell phones contained not only batteries, but displays, plastic cases, and microchips, all of which also caused by-product waste during manufacture. It’s estimated that manufacturing a two gram computer chip produces some fifty pounds of waste, including toxic waste.²⁴³ All of this hardly marks progress, especially considering that only a century ago almost every item and material was, as we discussed earlier, recycled.

This is really just a continuance of another business-as-usual trend. The number of items recycled, in absolute terms, will continue to increase. But the total number of disposable items produced, in absolute terms, will also continue to increase. So the percentage of items recycled will stagnate, and the total amount of waste will continue to grow even though recycling will be a great success in growth terms.

Let’s look at a tangible historical example of this. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, in 1960, the United States produced a total of 88.1 million tons of municipal solid waste. That is, garbage of the sort collected by the curbside, but not industrial, construction, or hazardous wastes. In that same year, 5.6 million tons of waste was recycled. Flash forward to 2005, when 245.7 million tons of garbage was produced. In 2005, 58.4 million tons of the waste was recycled.

We can look at these numbers a few different ways. If we want to be optimistic, we can look at recycling by mass and say “Wow, they recycled ten times as much waste in 2005 as in 1960!” Or we can run the percentages. In 1960, only about 6 percent was recycled, compared to almost 24 percent in 2005. So, great, right? Except that the total amount of nonrecycled waste produced increased dramatically, from 82.5 million to 187.3 million tons. Not so great.

Here’s another way we can look at it. Even though the total amount of waste did increase by quite a bit, so did the population. So maybe—even though this isn’t the sort of thing that would really matter to phytoplankton, albatrosses, or indigenous people whose land is being turned into garbage dumps—that increase is because of population growth. According to the US Census Bureau, the population of the US increased from 180 million in 1960 to 296 million in 2005. That’s an increase of 64 percent. But the amount of waste produced increased by 179 percent, far more than population change can account for.

One important fact we should remember is that these numbers are only for municipal solid waste. They don’t include industrial wastes; they don’t include wastes which are burned, buried, or otherwise disposed of on site; and they don’t include wastes which are released as gases, like carbon dioxide. In fact, the EPA estimates that industrial waste far outweighs municipal waste. They estimate that annual industrial waste production in the US is a whopping 7.6 billion tons.²⁴⁴ All municipal waste—everything you and your neighbor and the business down the street put out on the curb—weighs less than 3 percent of this industrial waste.

If we divide municipal waste by population, we get an average of 1660 pounds per person per year. But if we include industrial waste, per capita waste production jumps to 26.4 tons per person, or 52,700 pounds.

Let’s pause to consider this for a moment. Imagine you live in some average house in some average neighborhood. Let’s say you’re a die-hard simple living environmental activist. You decide to try to produce zero waste for a year. You recycle everything. You bring cloth bags when you go shopping. You shop for groceries at the farmers market, or in the bulk food store. You get small items and appliances second hand, because they don’t come in wasteful packaging. If an item or appliance breaks, you either fix it or give it to someone who can fix it. If you go to a store and any given product is disposable, or if it comes in disposable packaging, you either don’t buy it or figure out a way to make use of the disposable parts.

Now, you know that municipal waste accounts for 1660 pounds per person per year. You also know that this number includes not just waste from your residence, but also waste from government offices and businesses, anything that might be collected alongside residential waste. So you march down the street to visit those offices, a sheaf of waste reduction pamphlets in hand, and manage to convince them to cut down on their waste enough to eliminate your share of it. Great job! The local corporate newspaper even features you on the front page!

But there’s a problem. Even though you’ve eliminated all of your household waste; even though your neighbors give you funny looks because you’re still wearing those ragged five-year-old tennis shoes you refuse to throw out; even though you have personally done everything you could think of to reduce your waste, short of moving out into the woods and living off the land, there’s still a problem. Although you’ve managed to stop the better part of one ton of garbage from going into the landfill this year, your per capita share of the industrial waste produced in the US is still almost 26 tons. That’s 37 times as much waste as you were able to save by eliminating a full 100 percent of your personal waste.

Okay, now you’re pissed. You’ve washed out a lot of plastic sandwich bags this year. You’ve darned a laundry hamper full of torn socks and fixed your broken toaster three times, but that industrial waste just keeps on flowing like no one even noticed. Maybe you’re even starting to feel depressed about it, and who could blame you? The amount of waste produced by industry far outstrips your own personal waste. What can you possibly do about a problem that big, something so out of your control? Hold that thought, because we’ll be coming back to it, and we’ll have some answers for you.

In the meantime, back to our scenario. Back to those 7.6 billion tons of industrial waste created each year, being churned out as you read this. All these numbers, the millions and billions of tons, are mind-boggling. What the heck does it mean to be producing this kind of garbage? It’s hard to get a grip on, especially since municipal waste collection systems are designed to move garbage quickly and efficiently out of cities. A few size comparisons may help us get a better perspective on this situation.

A Boeing 747 can carry a load of about 377,000 pounds. If we wanted to ship every ounce of municipal waste produced in the US over to some “underpolluted” foreign nation, we would have to send 1.3 million Boeing 747s per year (using the 2005 numbers for garbage production). If you went and put your lawn chair down at the end of the runway at our imaginary garbage-shipping airport, you would watch a 747 filled to the brim with garbage roar over your head every 24 seconds, day and night, every single day of the year. But as always, we have to remember that most of the waste an industrial culture produces is made at a factory, not a household. So let’s throw those 7.6 billion tons of industrial waste into the mix. If we decide to ship that waste on the 747s as well, then we might have to hire some more air traffic controllers at our imaginary airport. We now have to arrange to launch 31.5 million 747s per year. If you’re sitting at the end of the runway with your lawn chair and your stopwatch you’d better have a good pair of earplugs. A 747 will be screaming past every 1.3 seconds, twenty-four seven. Picture a nose-to-tail string of 747s launching perpetually.

And all of this is just from one country. We haven’t even talked about the rest of the industrialized nations.

I don’t know about you, but my head is spinning a little now that we’re talking about tens of millions of airplanes. So let’s pick something a bit larger for comparison. Let’s pick something big and famous and recognizable. A skyscraper. Let’s look at something the size of a World Trade Center tower.

Each of the big World Trade Center towers had 110 stories, with a total of 3.8 million square feet of office space. Imagine every office and every corridor and cubicle and elevator filled with garbage, nine feet deep. We can assume garbage has a density of about 1500 pounds per cubic yard. This means we should be able to fit about 32.4 million cubic feet, or 1.9 billion pounds of garbage, into our skyscraper. That’s just shy of a million tons per skyscraper.

So let’s take annual waste production, both industrial and municipal, and add them together, which gives us about 7.8 billion tons. That would fill 8211 of these skyscrapers per year. That’s 22.5 skyscrapers per day. So imagine that we have a construction crew building a new skyscraper every hour of every day—minus a one hour lunch and two fifteen minute breaks, to make the math work out to 22.5 buildings per day (and to meet labor laws). And the first thing they do, each hour, once they’ve finished the construction, is to fill the skyscraper from the lobby to the observation deck with the previous hour’s garbage production.

If you wanted to stick to building these skyscrapers only in American cities with a population of more than half a million, you could put a new skyscraper in every city on just about every working day, Monday to Friday, of the entire year.

Imagine we were building a garbage metropolis filled with garbage skyscrapers. Our WTC-sized tower is 208 by 208 feet. A standard Manhattan block is 264 feet by 900 feet, so we should be able to cram in four per block if we don’t care about parking or parks, which is a reasonable assumption since a neighborhood with four million tons of rotting garbage on every block probably won’t a be very popular tourist destination. If we put four of these skyscrapers on every block, we’d be building nearly forty new blocks every week. The total land area of all of Manhattan is just shy of twenty-three square miles. Within less than four months, our tireless construction crew would cover every single acre of Manhattan—Central Park included—with garbage-filled skyscrapers. They’ll fill three Manhattans per year, with a few hundred million tons leftover.

Now, dramatic as these illustrations may be, we have a caveat. So far we’ve been looking at total garbage output. But the fact is, of course, not all waste goes into the landfill. We would never actually see all of this waste in one place. According to the EPA, more than a third of municipal waste is recycled or incinerated, and most industrial waste goes into water. Though this would decrease our net waste quantities, it’s not as much of a consolation as it could be. It essentially means that while the great majority of the waste is still being wasted, it’s just being disposed of in the larger world. Hence, dioxin in every stream. Hence, plastic in the middle of the Pacific Ocean outweighing phytoplankton ten to one.

Back to our scenario. What if business as usual continued? What if current trends were extrapolated into the future? Since we’ve been talking about a forty-five-year interval, let’s use that same time interval for our extrapolation, and we’ll look at the a time between 2005 and 2050. It’s difficult to predict exactly how things will change, so let’s keep things simple and use the same percentage changes over this interval.

Between 1965 and 2005, municipal waste production increased 179 percent. So let’s apply that to our combined municipal and industrial waste production, which gives us 21.8 billion tons per year for 2050. What I want to answer is: how much garbage would be produced in the US in forty-five years of business as usual? If we assume we have a constant increase each year between 2005 and 2050, it all adds up to (in a rather devilish coincidence) 666 billion tons over forty-five years.

To go back to our earlier comparison, that’s 3.5 billion 747s. That’s over seven hundred thousand skyscrapers full.

That’s 263 Manhattans.

That’s seventy-three Grand Canyons full of garbage.²⁴⁵

That’s a hell of a lot of garbage.

And that’s just for the United States.

The nonindustrialized nations—often called the “third world”—are rapidly industrializing. China now exceeds the United States in industrial activity. India is a spinning machine of outsourced technology. The nonindustrialized nations in general are seeing major growth of industry, and often of personal consumption as well.

There are no clear estimates of how much garbage is produced in the entire world each year. Although cities with well-developed municipal waste collection systems keep track of how much garbage they move, it’s nearly impossible to keep track of garbage not moved through such systems. That means we have very little information about waste disposed of in areas without well-developed waste collection systems, that is, waste burned or buried onsite, or trucked to an untracked dumping ground. All of this means that if we want to try to figure out how much garbage the global economy is producing we’re going to have to make a lot of assumptions. But even a fairly approximate idea of global economic garbage generation will help us get a better grip on our waste problems.

About 20 percent of the world’s human population receives about 80 percent of global economic income.²⁴⁶ Let’s assume consumption mirrors income, and waste mirrors consumption.

Now, we calculated that if you included industrial waste, the US economy produces about 26.4 tons per capita. The US is somewhat more wasteful, on average, than the rest of the industrialized nations. So let’s assume that the average per capita waste production of the wealthiest twenty percent of humans is a nice round twenty tons per person. The poorest 80 percent have a per capita income of about 0.7 percent of the wealthiest 20 percent. Let’s assume their waste production mirrors that, and that they each account for 0.13 tons of waste per year (about 267 pounds).²⁴⁷

The human population of the whole planet in 2005 was 6.5 billion. For the poorest 80 percent, population times waste per capita yields just shy of 700 million tons. The richest 20 percent account for 26 billion tons. That’s a total of 26.7 billion tons globally.

Again, all this is a bit messy, partly because a lot of industrial waste produced in nonindustrialized nations—like China—is produced in export factories, so it’s hard to say in that case who’s responsible for what garbage.

Keeping all that in mind, however, let’s do another scale comparison: 26.7 billion tons is the equivalent of 142 million 747s per year, or four and a half per second. That’s more than 28,000 skyscrapers full. That’s just shy of one Manhattan per month.

Let’s try to guess what the increase would be by 2050. If we assume the same growth for global garbage production as we did for US garbage production—179 percent—then we get 74.5 billion tons. If we try to add up all of the garbage produced in our forty-five-year period, assuming constant growth, here is what we get: 2,277,000,000,000 tons. That’s nearly 2.3 trillion tons, or a bit more than 4.5 quadrillion pounds. This is 900 Manhattans. This is fifty-eight Grand Canyons full. If you were to take all of the garbage and smear it across the state of, say, Kentucky, it would form a solid unbroken layer more than four feet deep. If you wanted to make it just deep enough to block the light and smother all plant life—say, about four inches deep—you could cover an area twice the size of Texas.

If we wanted, we could run some more numbers: how many more megatons of plastic dumped per year, how much dioxin in the water until cancer rates double, how long until the plastic in the Pacific Ocean outweighs the plankton by fifty or one hundred or one thousand times. But beyond a certain point the precise numbers don’t matter. The trends are clear enough, and their effects sufficiently devastating, that if you’re still reading this book you probably don’t need more numbers extrapolated to understand the situation. And if you’re a politician, CEO, or member of the environmental intelligentsia, the numbers probably won’t cause you to act to defend the planet anyway.

Fortunately for us and those who come after, the “business as usual” scenario has some deeply problematic assumptions. The largest underlying flaw is the assumption that there are enough raw materials in the world to continue business as usual for more than a few decades. We’ve already passed peak oil, which means the days are numbered for the cheap energy used to extract, process, and yes, also to recycle synthetic materials. A 2006 study examined the minerals required to bringing the industrial infrastructure in the “developing world” to the scale of the industrialized nations. The authors determined that this would require essentially all of the copper and zinc in the earth’s crust (and possibly all the platinum) as well as near-perfect metal recycling.²⁴⁸ We could go through the industrial demand of other resources as well, but again, that would be an unnecessary diversion. We know that this culture cannot continue with business as usual, because that is what it means to be unsustainable.

Since we’re making assumptions, we could also go ahead and assume that future energy shortages would be overcome by cold fusion, massively increased coal mining, the discovery of immense quantities of pixie dust far below the surface of Kansas, or by any number of other improbable or dangerous or magical means.²⁴⁹ But as far as waste is concerned, this only makes the problem worse. Cheap energy makes it easier to extract resources, and to manufacture and ship products. If you knew that one week from now you would be magically transported to the year 3000, what would you do? You could pray for oil to run out as soon as possible, so that the world you appeared in would not be full of the garbage of more decades or centuries of civilization. Hopefully you would do much more, but, once again, we’ll come back to that thought later.

This “business as usual” scenario is of interest to us not because we think “business as usual” will last for millennia, but because of the impact every year of it will have on those who do live in the millennia afterwards. How it changes, or what it changes to, is something we deal with in our other scenarios.

Since we were just talking optimism a moment ago, let’s move forward to the next scenario and discuss a hypothetical technotopia.