💾 Archived View for gmi.noulin.net › mobileNews › 3582.gmi captured on 2021-12-03 at 14:04:38. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

View Raw

More Information

➡️ Next capture (2023-01-29)

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Go Figure: Why does every person need 200kg of steel a year?

By Michael Blastland GO FIGURE - Seeing stats in a different way

Imagine that every year, every one of us gave birth to an eight-year-old made

from steel. Disturbing image.

Now go further. Imagine that you also gave birth - everyone, male and female,

young and old, every year - to 10 cement, one plastic and three paper

eight-year-olds and one new-born aluminium baby.

Well, in a sense, you do. This is the global average production per head of

stuff: about 200kg of steel each, for example, enough to sculpt a child.

But we aren't all at the global average. In the UK, our annual consumption of

materials is about three times higher.

Graphic showing UK consumption of materials per head

For us, the aluminium baby is now a year or two old and the others have grown

up and multiplied, as you can see. Welcome to the stuff family you might never

have known you had, reborn every year.

Don't be confused by steel producing fewer people than paper despite weighing

more. It's because steel is more dense so you can sculpt less from it.

The top line of the graphic features some extra stuff people in black. That's

because creating all the other material people requires energy equivalent to

burning about 12 parents.

The idea for the image - a variation on the idea of the resource footprint -

comes from Dr Julian Allwood and colleagues at Cambridge University, including

his PhD students.

The calculation is rough and ready, and I come to slightly lower numbers than

Allwood and co, but the point is that this measurement uses a unit we're

familiar with - us.

They have just finished several years of research on primary materials - what

we'll call stuff - and put it in a book, Sustainable Materials With Both Eyes

Open, free to download and fascinating for umpteen reasons.

Here are just two. First, the style of the argument. Instead of the usual

ya-boo about sustainability, this is a pragmatic guide to getting more value

from less stuff. Researched with long-term co-operation from industry, it

emphasises facts and evidence but is aimed at a popular readership.

"My PhD students were nervous and surprised at the first draft, says Allwood.

"They were imagining something much like a journal paper. But there's not much

point. It wouldn't have any effect. We're all learning to engage."

Go Figure would award Nobel prizes for rigorous popularisation. The brilliant

trend-setter was Dave MacKay's free book Sustainable Energy Without the Hot

Air.

That said, the second point is the sustainability argument itself. For all the

ingenuity of the image, are you surprised by the size of your stuff family? Is

it a fair way of showing the data? We count population in millions and

billions, but human flesh and blood is still a small part of the world. And so

by comparing material-size to people-size, are we measuring primary material

consumption on the right scale? Either way, it sure makes you think.

Start Quote

Your stuff family grew from not much above zero in a little over 100 years

Not least because, as the authors point out, your stuff family grew from not

much above zero in a little over 100 years. The materials age began in earnest

only at about the turn of the 20th Century.

Is that growth sustainable? As it happens, some think we've just passed the

point of peak stuff, as it's been called, and that the annually-reborn stuff

family has begun to shrink.

Chris Goodall, an environmental writer, recently argued that economic growth

has run alongside a reduction in our consumption of stuff. Might growth even

have driven that decline, he asks?

He has a strong case that resource use has not kept pace with GDP growth. But

has it actually done better still and fallen? That's harder to say.

Taking any particular material, it's hard to know if the UK has reduced its

consumption of that stuff, changed from one kind of stuff to a new kind of

stuff, or simply moved the manufacture of it elsewhere in the world while still

buying it in. Just because selected numbers have gone down doesn't prove the

thesis.

Probably the best available figures are for flows of total materials. Here's

Goodall's own data for this measure of total stuff, measured in millions of

tonnes, derived from the UK environmental accounts.

Goodall looks at this graph and says that it more or less levels off throughout

the UK's boom years of the 1990s and 2000s - despite soaring GDP - and that it

was already on a downward path before the latest recession kicked in.

graphic

What do you think?

If we put a linear trendline on the data, the claim that we're flat or on the

way down looks debateable, though you could also draw different kinds of

trendline.

But this trendline does expose the peaks and troughs caused by economic boom

and bust. It's easier now to appreciate that what looks like a period of

flatness might be the effect of using a starting point at the peak of the

late-80s economic boom - just as we might say that the flatness from the 70s to

the mid 80s was the result of the early 80s recession.

We have to strip out these ups and downs to understand the underlying trend.

When we do, well, you decide - has it really levelled off or fallen?

Either way, I would applaud serious questions of this kind, even as I would

wonder about the conclusions.

If the stuff problem is improving, all well and good, but I don't think the

case is proven. Somehow, I suspect there'll be a big demand for all the

thinking we can muster about how to make the most of the materials we have,

whether for profit or sustainability.