Oral Summary Environment

Top 10 Countries Killing the Planet

10. Perú
Its environmental impact - Marine capture: overfishing
Threatened species: illegal trade of endangered species Examples The short-tailed Chinchilla

09. Australia
Percent of protected area
Main problems: - Habitat conversion - Fertilizer use - Natural forest loss

08. Russia
Access to safe drinking water
Problems with municipal wastes and nuclear contamination
Main environmental problems - Water pollution - CO2 emissions - Marine capture

07. India
Agriculture - Food production – urea fertilizer
Environmental impact due to fertilizer use
Water pollution - Marine capture
Threatened species- wildlife in waterways
CO2 emissions

06. México
Species of plants and animals
Main problems: - Trade of threatened species - Natural forest loss

05. Japan
Five big species of tuna - “whaling for research purposes”
Main environmental problems
- Marine capture - Natural habitat conversion - Water pollution - CO2 emissions

04. Indonesia
Natural forest loss - Threatened species
CO2 emissions - Fertilizer use
Marine capture - Water pollution

03. China
Water pollution - 20 million people lack access to clean drinking water
100,000 deaths annually related to water pollution illnesses - Marine capture
CO2 emissions - Threatened species

02. USA
Fertilizer use: nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium
- CO2 emissions - Water pollution - Marine capture - Threatened species

01. Brazil
Natural forest loss
Natural habitat conversion: soy and cocoa crops, cattle ranching, fast growing plantations for paper pulp
Fertilizer use - Threatened species
CO2 emissions - Water pollution
The Story of the Stuff
Extraction
Is a fancy word for natural resource exploitation
- 75% of global fisheries now are fished at or beyond capacity.
- 80% of the planet’s original forests are gone.
- In the Amazon alone, we’re losing 2000 trees a minute. That is seven football fields a minute.

Production
The materials move to “production“ and what happens there is we use energy to mix toxic chemicals in
with the natural resources to make toxic contaminated products.
- Toxics in, Toxics Out.
- BFRs, brominated flame retardants. They are a chemical that make things more fireproof but they are
super toxic

Distribution
Distribution means “selling all this toxic contaminated junk as quickly as possible.” The goal here is to
keep the prices down, keep the people buying and keep the inventory moving

Consumption
This is the heart of the system, the engine that drives it.
- The primary way that our value is measured and demonstrated is by how much we contribute to this
arrow, how much we consume. And do we! We shop and shop and shop. Keep the materials flowing.
- Obsolescence

Disposal
It all goes out in the garbage. And that brings us to disposal.
- All of this garbage [stuff we bought] either gets dumped in a landfill, which is just a big hole in the
ground, or if you’re really unlucky, first it’s burned in an incinerator and then dumped in a landfill.
- Incineration is really bad. Remember those toxics back in the production stage? Burning the garbage
releases the toxics up into the air. Even worse, it actually makes new super toxics. Like dioxin.

Recycling
Recycling reduces the garbage at this end and it reduces the pressure to mine and harvest new stuff at this
end, but it will never be enough.
- The waste coming out of our houses is just the tip of the iceberg. For every one garbage can of waste
you put out on the curb, 70 garbage cans of waste were made upstream just to make the junk in that one
garbage can you put out on the curb.
- designed NOT to be recyclable in the first place

Another Way
There’s a new school of thinking on this stuff and it’s based on sustainability and equity:
- Green Chemistry
- Zero Waste: means designing and managing products and processes to reduce the volume and toxicity of
waste and materials, conserve and recover all resources, and not burn or bury them.
- Closed Loop Production: aims to transform the current linear system into a closed loop through tools
such as Extended Producer Responsibility, Industrial Ecology and Zero Waste.
- Renewable Energy
- Local living Economies: Living economies are made up of human-scale enterprises locally owned by
people who have a direct stake in the many impacts associated with the enterprise.
Plastic Disaster

- Pollution from plastic products has created a major problem for the ocean and its wildlife washed up on
our coast. Plastic is versatile, inexpensive and convenient and is a degrading material that is lethal to
marine life animals.

- They think it's food plastic will imitate their natural food sources, for example albatross.

- For a sea turtle, if there was let's say a plastic grocery bag floating in the ocean a sea turtle may mistake
that for food, for example a jellyfish which they love to eat.

- Sea lions trapped in six pack rings.

- It's not just the sea turtles, it can be a seagull, it can be anything as big as a whale.

- Sea Lion lion gets entangled in plastic. What happens is if they're young their neck gets stuck in there
and as the neck increases in girth and with that nylon that doesn't stretch cuts in to the flesh if the animal
is older and it picks up a heavier net then it's dead.

- Dirty water that's coming from our city streets our urban slaughter and so that will go you know through
our storm drains as little gutters on our streets those will meet up with pipes and channels sometimes with
creeks and rivers and eventually all that water and all the pollution that went with it ends up in the ocean.

- Plastic bags, diapers, old things that are used to carry two six-packs together.

- To clean up the Garbage Patch the ocean is so big that it would take tens hundreds of years to be able to
clean it all.

- 2016 California banned single-use plastic bags which eliminated more than 13 billion single-use plastic
bags generated in California annually.

- The plastic bag ban in California is a huge step in the right direction.

- Don't buy plastic.

- Don't let them use plastic bags in the supermarket.

- Try to get water that has non plastic containers that are made of cardboard.

- Environmental integrity is becoming degraded on an awesome scale compared to fifty years ago.

- We recycle and dispose of plastic wastes will have a huge impact on the future of our beaches and
oceans.