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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.