The Sustainable Lie

Unfortunately this lecture was a part two to a previous lecture i missed due to the BAF trip. From what I understood his previous lecture focused on the pollution of the world by gas emissions and waste packaging etc. This lecture however was about greenwashing, which is when companies spend more money on advertising how much they help the environment rather than directly helping the environment. For example an advert for energy saving light bulb is being broadcast on millions of television screens and wasting vast amounts of energy that will never be saved by switching to a different light bulb.

Apparently at the moment 20% of the planet's population are using 80% of the planet's resources and if 100% of the planet lived like the West does, the planet would be unable to sustain itself. It would be an ecological disaster as there wouldn't be enough crops to feed everyone or enough fuel to get things from one country to another. But we will surely reach a social disaster if things continue the way they are with only 20% of the planet living in luxury. However, as far as the possibility to sustain ourselves in concerned, we won't know until we try. One hundred years ago sociologists were warning us that the population couldn't withstand six billion people eating a basic amount of food let alone a percentage living in luxury and we have managed quite well so far. Fuel on the other hand may be a problem to sustain, with all energy saving fuels seemingly requiring a vast amount of fuel to produce.

Next we were given some statistics:

• There is a new product launched every three minutes which is usually over packaged and produces lots of waste
• $400 billion spent on advertising luxury products we don't actually need which use up fuel to produce them and lead to a lot of waste and over consumption, this ranges from pop tarts to DVD players
• Cement for new buildings creates 5% of all global carbon dioxide emissions but is very rarely pinpointed for this whereas airports are even though plane travel only creates 2%
• The technology we use everyday like Ipads and computers create massive amounts of waste, for example a laptop produces four thousand times its own wait in waste
• BP, an oil and gas company has received a lot of criticism and media attention largely due to oil spills but this company is actually twice as efficient when compared to rival company ExxonMobil who produce 146 million tonnes of CO2 per year - this is more than an average country!

 Lastly were told about how helpful recycling really is and it was quite eye opening. Although we all think that we are being helpful by putting out our recycling every week, a lot of fuel is wasted on actually recycling these items, usually outweighing the amount of energy that is being saved. Paper for example requires a costly bleaching process and only 50% of this new paper is deemed suitable enough to reuse resulting in 50% of all the UK's waste being paper. 50% of all our plastic sent for recycling is sold to China for £50 per tonne (Strangely everything seems to be 50) and is shipped over there, using up a lot of valuable fuel.

Our lecturer's statistics seemed very one sided and included no positive statistics at all. I hope this was just a shock tactic because if there really are such few positive results from recycling then what is the point? I'm guessing he was just using shock tactics as a few of his points seemed very weak and desperate such as glass and metal recycling wasting petrol to take it to the recycling centres - this was the only negative point for these two materials. I'm going to keep on recycling and hopefully that will have some small impact on the world, and if not, at least i tried.