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De Wit pointed to a thin arrow that circled back, from right to left, along the bottom of the diagram, representing all the material we’d managed to capture through recycling, composting, and so on. But really, to get along on this Earth, we must do just one thing: Stop wasting so much of it. Sure, it said, the threats we face are multifarious and overwhelming. There was a unifying, exhilarating clarity to that wonky diagram, to the way it defined the task.
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This may sound ridiculous, but as de Wit walked me through the numbers that morning, it felt like an epiphany. Are biodegradables and recycling the cure? Staff writer Laura Parker considers what a circular economy for plastics might look like.) (Plastic isn’t the enemy, but plastic waste in the ocean and elsewhere is a global plague. That includes climate change: It happens because we burn fossil fuels and scatter the waste-carbon dioxide-into the atmosphere. Think of an environmental problem, and chances are it’s connected to waste. A third of all food rotted, even as the Amazon was deforested to produce more. Plastic trash drifted into rivers and oceans so did nitrates and phosphates leaching from fertilized fields. More than 67 billion tons of hard-won stuff was lost, most of it scattered irretrievably. In 2015, he explained, about two-thirds of the material we scratched from the planet slipped through our fingers. De Wit pointed to the gray fog on the right edge of the diagram. It’s what happens next, after our needs are met, that’s the problem-the mother of all environmental problems, in fact. Unauthorized use is prohibited.Īll good so far amazing even, if you’re the type to be amazed by human effort and ingenuity. The total flow into the economy in 2015 was 102.3 billion tons. Fossil fuels powered those vehicles, kept us warm, became plastic, became all kinds of things. Metal ore became ships, cars, and also combine harvesters-in a single year we harvested 22.2 billion tons of biomass, just to feed us all. Sand went into concrete apartment towers on six continents. On the diagram, fat, colored currents of the four types of raw material-minerals, ores, fossil fuels, and biomass-surged from left to right, splitting and braiding as they became products that met seven human needs. He opened a pamphlet and spread out a diagram he called “an x-ray of our global economy.” Unlike natural ecosystems, which operate in cycles-plants grow in soil, animals eat plants, dung replenishes soil-the industrial economy is largely linear. The one Marc de Wit works for is called Circle Economy, and it’s part of a buzzing international movement that aims to reform how we’ve done just about everything for the past two centuries-since the rise of the steam engine, “if you need to pinpoint a time,” de Wit said.ĭe Wit is 39, genial, bespectacled, a little disheveled, a chemist by training. Now it houses assorted do-gooder organizations.
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A century ago, when the Dutch were still extracting coffee, oil, and rubber from their colony in Indonesia, this building had been erected as a colonial research institute. It was a crisp fall morning, and I was sitting in a magnificent old brick pile on the Oosterpark, a palace of curved corridors and grand staircases and useless turrets. In Amsterdam I met a man who revealed to me the hidden currents of our lives-the massive flows of raw materials and products deployed, to such wonderful and damaging effect, by 7.7 billion humans. This story appears in the March 2020 issue of National Geographic magazine.