Living beyond our means

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 12 aims, by 2030, to achieve the sustainable management and efficient use of natural resources.

One of the best ways is through overhauling the way we produce food.

Nearly a third of the food produced every year is wasted, at staggering cost to the environment, biodiversity, economies and our health. In developing countries this is mostly because of lack of refrigeration in supply chains, and in developed countries it is food that is never consumed. In 2022 households were responsible for 60 percent of food waste—about 631 million tonnes.

Our food system alone illustrates this reckless spending. The food sector accounts for 22 percent of all greenhouse gases, mostly because forests are sacrificed for farmland. Agriculture uses about a third of the world’s arable land. Meanwhile, we waste over 1 billion tonnes of food annually. This waste alone generates 8 to 10 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions.

Indiscriminate ocean trawling is having a similar deadening effect—over one third of fish stocks are exhausted. Much of this is the result of bycatch—the accidental catching and needless loss of other species like sea turtles. Bycatch is pushing species such as sharks to the brink of extinction.

A scant 8.6 percent of the global economy is ‘circular’, which means the majority of what we produce ends up polluting seas and rivers or generating dangerous emissions in landfills. The textile industry is a major contributor, largely because of fast fashion–clothing only worn a few times before it is discarded. It also plays a significant role in fossil fuel consumption, deforestation and pollution, as well as child labour and trafficking.

The fashion industry is worth US$2.5 trillion. It’s the second largest polluter in the world, after the oil industry.

Thirty percent of all clothes made are never sold, and 57 percent end up in landfills—a truckload dumped or incinerated every second. Less than 1 percent of used clothing is recycled.

From the depths of the Mariana Trench to the heights of Mount Everest, plastics pollution is everywhere–even in our bodies. Plastics production has surged in the last 50 years and is expected to double by 2050.

Every day the equivalent of 2,000 garbage trucks of plastic is dumped into oceans, rivers and lakes. The ecological and economic effects are vastly damaging.

And recent research shows that of the 400 million tonnes of plastic produced in 2022 just 9.5 percent was made from recycled material.

E-waste, according to the UN, is rising at rates five times higher than it is recycled.

A record 62 million tonnes of e-waste was produced in 2022, up 82 percent from 2010. That’s enough to fill 1.55 million 40-tonne trucks—enough trucks to encircle the equator. And e-waste is expected to rise to 82 million tonnes in 2030.

Less than one quarter of e-waste mass was recycled in 2022, leaving $62 billion worth of recoverable natural resources unaccounted for. This represents billions of dollars of valuable resources dumped in landfills.