13/5/21

Holiday Waste

Emma Boucher (opinion) || 4 mins

So you bought the new iPhone 12. Maybe your old phone was broken. Maybe it wasn’t, and you just wanted a change. Maybe you just wanted to have both. No harm done, right? It’s just a phone. Just a small rectangular-ish metal prism. That’s it. Millions of them are produced every year. What’s so wrong with that?

Well that’s exactly the problem. You’re right, that one single tiny phone is not making that much of a difference. It’s the culture and habits behind you buying it that constitutes the problem.

According to the National Geographic, 1.7 billion people across the world now belong to the “consumer class”. People across the world are buying things - way more than we need - just because we can. This includes people who buy an excess of processed food (like that box of oreos instead of making your own homemade cookies), more, larger and spacier houses and plenty other items that we consider ‘necessities’, but don’t need, like, twenty of. It’s a chain of supply and demand, providing jobs and supplying the upper tier of society with basically whatever they want and can afford.

This modern-day, new culture, which is now expanding, growing and taking root in developing countries such as China and India, is called consumerism, and it’s killing our planet. But why, you ask? Why is it so bad to have a cottage to go to during the breaks and weekends? Why can’t I own fifty t-shirts? Why not get the new iPhone as soon as it comes out?

Before we can answer this question, let’s look a bit more at the history of consumerism and why it showed up in the first place.

First, I take you back to the late 17th century, right bang-dab in the middle of the ‘Age of Exploration’, when Europeans started ‘discovering’ all these new places that they could conquer, like the Americas and parts of Asia and Africa. So of course, this led to an increased amount of raw materials being shipped from all over the globe (globalization) right to the smallest-yet-somehow-ruled-everything continent, Europe. An example of this is the infamous shipping of beaver skins and dried cod from the shores of Canada all the way to France and England. These two countries, of course fell in love with the fashionable hats and large fish that they could get from across seas, and suddenly more and more ships were going back and forth between the two continents. This was pretty much how it started for consumerism: the raw materials coming from these new places were brought to industrial factories, made into refined items and sold to the people. Not only this, but as new colonies were established overseas, these refined items could then be shipped back to the colonies to be sold, creating an even bigger market.

Now we get to the mid-early 1700s, getting into the industrial revolution. In this period of time, there are many people who want one common thing: to make money. So everybody’s answer to this is simple: make jobs. The industrial revolution led to many new factories and mines being created. Before this, materials were often homemade, and people got together in each other’s houses to make stuff. Here, people started making assembly lines, each doing a small job in the grand scheme of whatever the final product was. At some point in the industrial revolution, there arose a ‘middle class’ of sorts: people who rose out of poverty and got an education, work, etc. The rise of this middle class meant that there were more people to buy goods, meaning more consumerism.

Now finally we get to the 20th century. During this time, the cost of many items dropped drastically, meaning that pretty much everybody could afford them. This meant that there was a sudden facility to go buy many things that you did or didn’t need, instead of working to make them yourself, sharing or borrowing items or just not owning them in the first place.

And then we get to now. So. Why is all this important? Consumerism has its purpose, providing millions of jobs for our growing population and being a backbone in our economies. It has permitted, funded and encouraged advancements in places like technology, fashion, construction, and many others. It has shaped our world. Good for us, right, making all this stuff and selling it for as cheap as possible?

Actually, not so good.

There’s a couple reasons why consumerism is contributing greatly to climate change. There’s the greenhouse gases that are produced as a result of manufacturing and distributing these products, there’s the materials being used to make them, and there’s what we do when we’re done with them.

First, let’s talk about factories. This is definitely not a surprise. We’ve all passed one of these before. The big buildings with the chimney and column of smoke coming out the top. I don’t need to tell you what a factory is. The more we consume as a population, the more products we need, the more factories are needed to make them. Of course, most factories burn carbon-rich fossil fuels such as crude oil or coal to power their machines. When these fossil fuels are burnt, they release that carbon into the atmosphere, contributing greatly to global warming. In fact, factories contribute to over 50% of global greenhouse gas emissions!

This, you might already know. But what you may not have thought about is what happens to the toxic waste of a factory. Many factories that produce products that need certain chemicals, for example, clothing dye, end up dumping their chemicals into waterways nearby. In 2011, the US Environmental Protection Agency estimated that US factories dumped about 2 million tons of toxic waste into the air, land and water. (And that's just one country!). This toxic waste, of course, poisons the creatures who come into contact with it, and can even kill entire ecosystems. This is a huge problem, especially because the amounts of toxic material that a single factory could end up dumping into the water is huge, and can therefore spread very far and affect many animals for a very long time. Even factories that don’t dispose of toxic materials directly into nature are at risk of having some leak out into the earth around the factory and end up in the waterways anyway.

Speaking of water, another way that consumerism is destroying our planet is the overconsumption of materials needed to make the products. And this, of course, includes an immense amount of water needed to feed and grow the animals and plants we eat in enormous quantity. This is not to say we shouldn't eat, but industrial meat consumption and food waste are among some of the largest contributors to climate change. We are at a global all-time high for food waste, 40% of food produced, packaged, and shipped is wasted! And this is all due to the consumerist lifestyle.

Another way that consumerism hurts our planet is deforestation. Because as consumerism - and therefore the need for more products (including wooden products) - rises, the more trees are cut down to meet the demand. This is such a big problem that in fact, 3.5 to 7 billion trees are cut down every year. That’s nine zeros, people! And all of those trees end up going not only into wooden things like tables and chairs, but also into the paper industry.

Paper is a huge deal. We don’t realize how much we actually use, even though it is cause for 14% of deforestation in the world. And since it’s recyclable, we don’t actually think twice about it.

Now, a single tree, let’s say, the average pine tree (45 feet), can make about ten thousand pieces of paper. ‘That’s quite a lot!’ you say. And you’re right. It is. But if you compare those measly ten thousand sheets to the astounding 409 million metric tons of paper that we produce yearly, it tallies up to a lot of trees. That’s so much paper that it isn’t even counted by sheets anymore, it’s counted by weight. A single page of paper weighs nearly nothing. Less than five grams. Imagine 409 million tons of it!

But enough about trees. Let’s talk about plastic.

Yearly, we produce over 380 million tons of plastic, half of it being single use. But plastic, as you may or may not know, is actually made of fossil fuels, which, as we talked about, produce an incredible amount of pollution. So the plastic industry is in fact a very polluting one, even for the plastics that are recyclable.

And speaking of plastic, its production is not the only polluting thing about it. The problem with plastic is that people don’t seem to really know what to do about it. Do you recycle it? Do you throw it out? Can you compost it? What’s with the numbers? And most people don’t have the patience to find the answers to those questions. So they just throw the plastic in the trash. So much so that in Canada, we have an estimate of 2.5 out of the 3.3 million tonnes of plastic waste ending up in landfills. And another fact to put out there: over a third of the plastics used in Canada are created for single-use.

So why is this important? Well first off, it means that landfills get bigger and bigger each year from our crazy amount of plastic waste. But the real problem comes from when the plastic waste makes its way away from the landfill and into various ecosystems. Animals can get stuck and choke in some plastic such as bags (and mask straps), and some animals will even eat the plastic, which can sometimes contain toxic material that will poison them, and other times, will block up their digestive system as it doesn’t dissolve and give off nutrients, causing the animal to starve to death.

The thing with our planet, though, is that 71% of it is water. So, naturally, most things end up circling back to our vast oceans. And plastic is no exception.

Between 1.1 and 8.8 million tons of plastic waste ends up in our oceans coming from various coastal communities every year. In fact, this is such a problem that as of last year, 2020, the weight of all plastic produced over the world is greater than the weight of all animals, land and marine, combined. In fact, in 2050, it is predicted that there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish!

This is a huge problem. Over a million marine animals die every year from plastic poisoning, and hundreds more are deformed or struggle because of our trash. This has serious consequences, as 3 billion people, more than ⅓ of the world population, rely on seafood as a main source of protein.

Not only this, but plastic can break down into tiny filaments, called microplastics. These microplastics, roughly two thirds of the diameter of the average human hair, can be absorbed into various mollusks and other filter-feeders in the ocean, who mistake them for nutrients that float around in the water. And frankly, not to be discouraging, we’re kind of too late. Nearly 100% of mussels around the world already contain microplastics in their flesh. This means that whoever eats the mussels carries around the microplastics, and they slowly make their way up the food chain and up in… well… us. Did you know that the average human eats more than 40 pounds of plastic in their lifetime? This is a depressing fact, not only for us but for what it means our planet has become.

It’s time to stop this.

So next time you think of buying that new iPhone when your old one is still functional, next time you decide to go on a shopping spree ‘just for the heck of it’, next time you want to get yourself a giant fancy car, just think about what you’re really doing. Use whatever you have for as long as possible, and if it is still functional, give it away instead of throwing it out. Try to recycle and compost as much as possible. Take that step. Even if it is hard. Because you’re right, that one item won’t contribute to our planetary problems so much. But it is a step. It is a step away from consumerism, away from this new, fancy, horrible trend that causes animals to die and pollutes our planet. It is a step closer to a new, green, beautiful planet that we must build together.