Tag: pollution

Life on the planet in 2040

Vision-for-2040
Melbourne school strike, photo by Takver https://flic.kr/p/2dfY9tt

On days when the woes of the world are too much with us, do you ever think what life on the planet in 2040 will be like? That’s the year the Doomsayers say will be the End Times or the Apocalypse. The theory is that by 2040, planet earth will no longer be able to sustain its estimated population of nine billion.

There are serious arguments for that proposition – extreme weather events caused by climate change, lack of sufficient food and water and ever-worsening pollution. There is the ever-present threat to life on the planet of nuclear war and a rolling series of civil wars which have driven millions of refugees into other countries, with consequent social and political disruption.

Imagine 2040, then. I’ll be 91, Nibbler will be 29 (which is old for a dog); Donald Trump will be 94, ex-wife Ivana 91 and current wife Melanie a spritely 70. Sir Paul McCartney will be 97 (should his long and winding road last that long), and Justin Bieber just 46!

More importantly, children being born now will be 21 in 2040 and quite angry about the state of the world they have inherited from their parents. Those who currently are angry teenagers will already be in their mid-to late 30s and maybe producing children of their own.

The key concern for life on the planet in 2040, just 21 years away, is the ever narrowing prediction about the effect of climate change on weather patterns and sea levels.

Most scientists and some futurologists will say the No 1 problem (I call it the giraffe in the wood shed), is over-population. Bluntly, the world just will not have the resources to feed nine billion people. Already futurists are saying that in the not-too-distant future, we’ll be getting our daily protein from faux meat and insects.

It’s tempting to lean towards flippancy in a 1,200-world commentary on what the world could be like in 2040. Let’s imagine two affluent Poms meeting for breakfast at a café in downtown London 2039 (having got there in minutes by Vactrain from their bucolic suburbs 60 kms away). Smashed avocado on toast will cost something like 29 Europounds, a flat white about 8 Europounds. The waiter already has the order as Paul texted (by thought) while Vactraining. Henry will want to talk about the EU and how long can it last – surely one more year? Paul, feeling guilty about a story he read on the Vactrain newsfeed about six million Brits living in poverty, mutters about Brexit and what a disaster it was.

“That’s ancient history, Paul,” says Henry, adjusting his virtual-specs so he can scan headlines while having a conversation, as you do. Meanwhile the waiter returns (on his hover board) to say there are no avocadoes, despite reports of a glut, but they can do smashed grasshoppers.

Someone with a flair for satire could easily take a similar lead from the occasional quirky statistical forecast in futuretimeline, a community database/blog maintained by futurologist William James Fox.

For example, the autopsy report for Elvis Presley will be made public in 2027, thus scuppering the obsessions of the Elvis-lives club. By 2035, Millennials will be enjoying an inheritance boom, just ahead of a 2039 forecast that scientists will have found a cure for ageing!

By 2039, Alzheimer’s will be fully curable. This will be too late for some people already affected, but should I start to become forgetful at 87, whoever is in charge can take me along to the clinic. Hopefully, it will be bulk-billed.

Flippancy aside, most serious science-based forecasts focus on climate change, because of its potential to ruin everything.

Forecaster quantumrun.com cites an optimistic number for 2040 – the rise in global temperatures above pre-industrial levels will be 1.62 degrees. That’s just above the 1.5 degrees limit recently set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

That won’t impress Sweden’s Greta Thunberg or her generational cohort. Born in 2001, she is part of what Forbes Magazine calls Generation Z, people born between the mid-1990s and early 2000s. In 2015, Gen Z represented 25% of the US population, a larger group than both Baby Boomers and Millennials.

Then aged 15, Greta sparked an international movement when she started a 20-day strike outside Sweden’s parliament in August 2018.  News travelled fast on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. By November 30, the movement had gone viral. In Australia, 15,000 schoolchildren went on strike to call for action (despite much blustering in Parliament). In January this year, 35,000 European teens invaded the European Parliament in Brussels. Over the next fortnight more than 50,000 Belgian teens walked out of their classrooms.

You’ll see more of this next Friday (March 15), when the Youth Strikes for Climate movement stages a global walk-out.

Thunberg, who has since been the target of social media abuse accusing her of being a Green plant (har har), resolutely dug in. In an editorial published in the Guardian Weekly recently she told readers “Adults need to act like their house is on fire – because it is.”

She has pledged to continue her protest until global leaders act to meet the IPCC call to reduce carbons emissions by at least 50% within 12 (now 11) years.

Greta’s lone vigil outside Sweden’s Parliament led to her being invited to give a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos in Switzerland.

“Some say we should not engage in activism,” she told delegates. “Instead we should leave everything to our politicians and just vote for a change instead. But what do we do when there is no political will?”

Meanwhile I’ve started watching Season Two of a Netflix political thriller, ‘Occupied’. The plot (set in the near future). envisages a ‘silk glove’ occupation of Norway by Russia (in cahoots with the EU), to ensure Norway’s oil and gas pipelines continue to service Europe.

In the first episode of Season One, Norwegian PM Jesper Berg announces that Norway will no longer produce or export fossil fuels, instead favouring thorium* energy plants. The series (based on an idea by Norwegian thriller writer Jo Nesbo), shows how conflicts might arise should a brave, futurist politician defy the status quo.

*thorium is a weak radioactive element that can be used in a new generation of nuclear reactors.

Climate change aside, one of the great challenges for life on the planet in 2040 is what to do with old farts like me! In 2017 the United Nations estimated the number of people in the world aged over 60 will double to 2.1 billion by 2050. The UN also expects the cohort of people aged 80 years or over to increase threefold to 425 million by 2050.

Susan Muldowney, writing for CPA Australia’s newsletter, said that by 2040, one in five Australians will be aged over 65 and 1.2 million of them will be older than 85.

“Australia’s aged-care sector has been largely government-funded and dominated by not-for-profit providers,” Muldowney wrote in the accounting association’s newsletter, In The Black.

“However, this may change over the next decade. The number of private, for-profit start-ups is expected to grow in line with the new regulatory push toward consumer-directed aged care and the generational shift from the frugal post-Depression generation.

“The culture-changing baby boomers are used to having choice – even if they have to pay for it,” she added.

Right, then, I’m off up town to order smashed avo on toast. Enjoy it while you can, I say.

 

The dangers of plastic waste

plastic-recycling-dangers
Photo of plastic recycling plant fire in Birmingham (2013) courtesy of West Midlands Fire Service Photographic 2017

I wish someone had told me about Plastic Free July before August arrived. But hell, it’s never too late to start learning new tricks, eh!

In case you missed it too, this is a global initiative started in Western Australia. From its humble beginnings in 2011 with 40 people in Perth, Plastic Free July has now spread across the country and around the world. In 2016, 100,000+ Western Australians and more than 1 million people worldwide took part.

“Every bit of plastic ever made still exists and in the first 10 years of this century the world economy produced more plastic than the entire 1900’s.”

The initiative aims to educate people to cut down on their consumption of single-use plastic. The main thrust is to get people to stop using disposable shopping bags. Australians already have an incentive, in that there is already a ban in Tasmania, South Australia, the Northern Territory and the ACT.

About a third of the plastic consumed in Australia ends up at recycling plants to be ‘down-cycled’ into other products. Plastic, as we know, lasts forever, unless of course it catches fire, in which case it burns as fiercely as oil or natural gas. Fire is an ever-present risk at waste and recycling plants because of the highly combustible nature of the stored materials.

In mid-July, a major fire broke out amid stockpiles of paper and plastic at the Coolaroo Recycling plant north of Melbourne. The political fall-out from this fire spread further than the smoke plume, sparking a class action threat and a move by the Victorian government to audit all recycling plants in the state.

Victoria (and other States) would probably want to avoid something like the UK’s record of fires at waste and recycling plants (300 per year), including the one depicted (above) at a recycling plant in Birmingham. 

Meanwhile back home…

No-one knows for sure how many recycling plants there are in Australia because many are private companies licensed by their respective Councils. However, Deakin University environmental science lecturer Trevor Thornton, writing in The Conversation, quoted 2013 figures from the Department of Environment and Energy which estimate there are 114 waste recycling plants in Australia.

Thornton says the industry needs a national registry, updated annually. Governments need to provide tax breaks so plant operators can upgrade their equipment and also provide manufacturers with an incentive to use recyclable material in their products.

“At the same time, we should consider penalising businesses which use non-recyclable packaging when alternatives exist,” Thornton said. He cited retailers who sell goods in multi-material packaging like polystyrene and plastic without providing an alternative.

I was musing about all of this and more after realising I need to break a habit of asking for bags at the supermarket. I’ve been kidding myself that they are being re-used at home as rubbish bags. Just because a plastic bag gets used twice or even three times doesn’t make it any better for the environment.

Major supermarket chains Coles and Woolworths have already made a commitment to phase out single-use bags within a year. Woolies has revealed it uses three billion bags a year. Coles has not released data but it is probably of a similar scale.

Plasticfreejuly.org says six out of 10 Australians are already refusing single-use bags and using a variety of alternatives, all of which involve bringing your own container when you go shopping. But it’s not just a shopping problem – cling wrap, plastic water bottles, drinking straws, plastic takeaway containers and plastic cutlery are all potential sources of pollution. But as we’ll read later, it’s not as simple as chucking everything into the yellow bin.

​The Waste Authority of WA says Australians use one million tonnes of plastic a year (most of it packaging) and 320,000 tonnes of it goes to landfill. But even the refuse, reuse, recycle mantra won’t be enough to hold back the tide of plastic garbage which is engulfing oceans.

Some plastic ends up in waterways and the ocean – where scientists predict there will be more tonnes of plastic than tonnes of fish by 2050.

​The Plastic Oceans Foundation says the world is producing nearly 300 million tons every year, half of which is for single use. More than eight million tons is dumped into our oceans.

As for the oceans becoming a massive plastic rubbish dump, how in hell does plastic end up there? Some of it is microbeads from the manufacturing and recycling process which finds its way to the ocean via drains and runoff. Containers carrying plastic product to foreign ports fall off ships. The best-known example is the container full of thousands of yellow toy ducks lost at sea in 1992. You can read more about this phenomenon and how ocean currents play their part by browsing this educational website created by clever people at the University of NSW.

Data from plasticoceans.org underlines the impact of this pollution on the planet (plastic manufacturing uses 6% of the world’s fossil fuels). Every year 500 million bottles and one trillion bags are discarded as waste (not to mention 24.7 billion disposable nappies). On the scale of things, it’s good that a third of this waste is recycled.

While Australia seems on track to phase out single-use  bags, we need to do something about our addiction to bottled water. A Choice Magazine story in 2014 highlighted the fiscal folly of choosing bottled water over tap water. If you drink two litres a day from the tap, you’ll pay about $1.50 a year, Choice said. Drink the same amount from single-serve bottles you could be looking at more than $2,800 a year.

The Australasian Bottle Water Institute says ours is a $500 million a year industry selling the equivalent of 600 megalitres (600,000,000 litres) of water a year, 60% of which is sold in single-serve bottles.

If we do use plastic, then we should at least know how to sort the different types of waste for recycling. The ABC’s Amanda Hoh, following up on the ABC’s popular War on Waste TV show, interviewed Brad Gray of Planet Ark for some tips.

Gray says the most common mistake is that people throw soft plastics such as bags, food packaging or “scrunchable” plastic in with containers. These soft plastics get caught in the conveyer belt and the whole recycling system has to be stopped so they can be removed.

“All “scrunchable” plastic including shopping bags, plastic food packaging, fruit netting and dry cleaning bags can be recycled, although most often not via your home recycle bin,” says Gray.

“The best method is to bundle all your plastic bags into one bag and take it to a REDcycle bin located in most metro and large regional supermarkets. These plastics are then recycled into plastic school furniture.”

So now I have finished this week’s FOMM, it’s hi-ho to the supermarket and co-op, sturdy hemp shopping bags in hand. Well, that’s the goal.