The sheer scale and complexity of the material economy makes it difficult to grasp how much of each different material we extract, what it is used to make and what happens when stuff gets thrown away.
There are some surprises in the data though. For all the focus on plastic and consumer goods like clothes, for instance, there really isn’t a lot of that in the grand scheme of things. The materials used to produce consumables are massively outweighed by those used in construction and to feed us all.
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WHAT IMPACTS DOES STUFF HAVE?
The extraction, processing and disposal of all materials have environmental and health impacts, from particulate pollution and the greenhouse gases that drive global warming to the depletion of water resources and land use change. These burdens are unevenly distributed across the world. Higher-income countries have greater impacts per capita. They also outsource them to lower-income countries that have more intensive industrial and manufacturing bases, creating a negative “trade flow” in impacts.
HOW MUCH STUFF ARE WE USING?
The stuff we use can be divided into four main categories: biomass (crops and animal products), fossil fuels, metal ores and non-metal minerals such as aggregates and sand used in construction. The amount we use has more than tripled in 50 years, with latest estimates suggesting it has probably now topped 100 gigatonnes (Gt). Rising population is one factor in this, as is increasing affluence and consumption, especially in some parts of Asia and South America. Those parts of the world are playing catch-up, however: North America remains by far and away the greatest per-capita consumer of material resources.
WHAT ARE WE USING STUFF FOR?
When thinking about waste, we often focus on issues such as fast fashion and disposable plastic. These consumables are big problems, but in terms of the material resources they soak up, they are relatively small fry.
In 2020, the non-profit organisation Circle Economy produced a report using data from the UN and trade databases to depict the flow of various materials through the global economy, from extraction to their final destination. It shows we are using a truly huge amount of stuff, estimated to be more than 100 gigatonnes in 2017, up from 92 Gt in 2013.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that we use most resources to meet two basic needs: food and shelter. Resource use is dominated by minerals, mostly used to build homes, and biomass, used to feed us. We also use 15.1 Gt of fossil fuels, which weave their way through the diagram as their energy is liberated by burning.
Only some 30 per cent of these materials contribute to the stock of goods in use, a lot of it materials used in constructing buildings. Roughly another third is emitted, for example as greenhouse gases, or “dispersed”, meaning they are lost but not formally registered as waste. The rest is formal waste. Only just over a quarter of that – amounting to 8.5 per cent of the total entering the economy – is recycled or recovered. Ours is an overwhelmingly linear economy.
WHAT VALUE DO MATERIALS GENERATE?
Calculating the value of material goods to society is a fraught task because value isn’t easy to measure, even in purely financial terms. Value also doesn’t come exclusively from newly produced goods. Circle Economy’s analysis suggests that in 2016, the total value added to the global economy through goods was €58 trillion. Dividing that into sectors and setting value against the amount of stuff used, and also the planet-warming carbon emissions generated, gives some measure of where materials are being used wisely.
This analysis shows that some sectors, including services and healthcare, are low emitters that use relatively small amounts of materials and still provide big benefits. Others, notably housing, suck up vast amounts of material and belch out carbon, but also provide a lot of value. All this suggests the sectors where we can do the most good by working towards a circular economy. Most stark, however, is the situation with nutrition. About 20 per cent of the resources humanity uses go to producing food. This is clearly crucial to our survival, but the processing of these plants and animals into food delivers relatively little added value in the framing of this analysis– partly because we waste or lose about a third of the food we produce.
