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World’s consumption of materials hits record 100bn

tonnes a year

Damian Carrington Environment editor

@dpcarrington
Wed 22 Jan 2020 12.08 GMT

The amount of material consumed by humanity has passed 100bn tonnes every
year, a report has revealed, but the proportion being recycled is falling.

The climate and wildlife emergencies are driven by the unsustainable extraction of
fossil fuels, metals, building materials and trees. The report’s authors warn that
treating the world’s resources as limitless is leading towards global disaster.

The materials used by the global economy have quadrupled since 1970, far faster
than the population, which has doubled. In the last two years, consumption has
jumped by more than 8% but the reuse of resources has fallen from 9.1% to 8.6%.

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6/30/2021 World’s consumption of materials hits record 100bn tonnes a year | Waste | The Guardian

The world consumes 100.6bn tonnes

of materials per year ...

50.8bn tonnes 10.1 15.1 24.6

minerals ores fossil fuels crops and
trees

... which makes these things ...

5.6 6.9
communication consumer goods

38.8 10 21.3
housing services food

8.7 9.3
transport healthcare

... most of which

is wasted ...

31 14.6 22.4 32.6

buildings/infrastructure emissions lost to environment refuse

... and overall just

8.6% is recycled

7.4 11.2 8.6

mining landfill recycled
waste

4.4
Source: Circle Economy unregistered waste

The report, by the Circle Economy thinktank, was launched at the World Economic
Forum in Davos. It shows that, on average, every person on Earth uses more than 13
tonnes of materials per year. But the report also found that some nations are making
steps towards circular economies in which renewable energy underpins systems
where waste and pollution are reduced to zero.

“We risk global disaster if we continue to treat the world’s resources as if they are
limitless,” said Harald Friedl, the chief executive of Circle Economy. “Governments
must urgently adopt circular economy solutions if we want to achieve a high quality
of life for close to 10bn people by mid-century without destabilising critical
planetary processes.”
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6/30/2021 World’s consumption of materials hits record 100bn tonnes a year | Waste | The Guardian

Marc de Wit, the report’s lead author, said: “We are still fuelling our growth in
population and affluence by the extraction of virgin materials. We can’t do this
indefinitely – our hunger for virgin material needs to be halted.”

The report found that 100.6bn tonnes of materials were

consumed in 2017, the latest year for which data is available. Half of the total is
sand, clay, gravel and cement used for building, along with the other minerals
quarried to produce fertiliser. Coal, oil and gas make up 15% and metal ores 10%.
The final quarter are the plants and trees used for food and fuel.

The lion’s share of the materials – 40% – is turned into housing. Other major
categories include food, transport, healthcare, communications, and consumer
goods such as clothes and furniture.

Almost a third of the annual materials remain in use after a year, such as buildings
and vehicles. But 15% is emitted into the atmosphere as climate-heating gases and
nearly a quarter is discarded into the environment, such as plastic in waterways and
oceans. A third of the materials is treated as waste, mostly going to landfill and
mining spoil heaps. Just 8.6% is recycled.

“This report sparks an alarm for all governments,” said Carolina Schmidt, Chile’s
environment minister. “We need to deploy all the policies to really catalyse this
transformation [to a circular economy].”

Cristianne Close of the conservation group WWF said: “The circular economy
provides a framework for reducing our impacts, protecting ecosystems and living
within the means of one planet.”

The report said increasing recycling can make economies more competitive,
improve living conditions and help to meet emissions targets and avoid
deforestation. It reported that 13 European countries have adopted circular
economy roadmaps, including France, Germany and Spain, and that Colombia
became the first Latin American country to launch a similar policy in 2019.

China’s ban on waste imports aims to encourage domestic recycling, the report said,
but has also stimulated the development of circular economy strategies in Australia
and other countries which previously exported their waste to China.

Janez Potočnik, a former European environment commissioner and the co-chair of

the UN Environment Programme international resource panel, said the world
needed to learn to do more with less and replace ownership with sharing, as is
increasingly being seen with cars.

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6/30/2021 World’s consumption of materials hits record 100bn tonnes a year | Waste | The Guardian

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