Humans will eventually reach the limits of their waste-generating capacity, according to three World Bank researchers. But you won’t be around to celebrate:
By 2000, the 2.9 billion people living in cities (49 percent of the world’s population) were creating more than 3 million tonnes of solid waste per day. By 2025 it will be twice that – enough to fill a line of rubbish trucks 5,000 kilometers long every day. … Although OECD countries will peak by 2050 and Asia-Pacific countries by 2075, waste will continue to rise in the fast-growing cities of sub-Saharan Africa. The urbanization trajectory of Africa will be the main determinant of the date and intensity of global peak waste. Using ‘business-as-usual’ projections, we predict that, by 2100, solid-waste generation rates will exceed 11 million tonnes per day – more than three times today’s rate.
Joseph Stromberg searches for solutions:
[T]here are cultural and policy dimensions to waste production. The average person in Japan, for example, creates about one-third less trash than an American, even though the two countries have similar levels of GDP per person.
This is partly because of higher-density living arrangements and higher prices for imported goods, but also because of norms surrounding consumption. In many Japanese municipalities, trash must be disposed in clear bags (to publicly show who isn’t bothering to recycle) and recyclables are routinely sorted into dozens of categories, policies driven by the limited amount of space for landfills in the small country.
Creating policies that give incentive to people to produce less waste elsewhere, therefore, could be a way of tackling the problem. But, because our garbage is just the end result of a host of industrial activities, some reduction measures will be less important than others. Designing recyclable packaging would be a much less useful solution, for instance, than designing products that don’t need to be replaced as often. Even better, as [researcher Daniel] Hoornweg and his coauthors argue in the article, would be accelerating ongoing increases in education and economic development in the developing world, especially Africa, which would cause urban population growth – and also the amount of trash produced per capita – to level off sooner.
The Dish 