It’s quite an achievement to live waste free for a year and Matt and Waveney are to be congratulated. They had a small bin that was the sum total of their waste for the year.

The Green Party’s Waste Minimisation Act passed through parliament last year which put a very small cost on waste to landfill ($10/tonne), the revenue from which is split between local and central government to fund waste reduction initiatives. The Act also creates the possiblity to establish product stewardship schemes that would give central government the power to insist that different waste streams are managed in a way to reduce reuse and recycle, if there is a Minister for the Environment who wanted to use such powers.

The Act is a very small step towards a society in which resources are reused within closed systems, and energy to run the closed system comes from renewable sources.

The Story of Stuff is a good start as to why we need to reduce waste.

any alternative to growth remains unthinkable, even 40 years after the American ecologists Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren made some blindingly obvious points about the arithmetic of relentless consumption.

The Ehrlich equation, I = PAT, says simply that the impact (I) of human activity on the planet is the product of three factors: the size of the population (P), its level of affluence (A) expressed as income per person, and a technology factor (T), which is a measure of the impact on the planet associated with each dollar we spend.

Take climate change, for example. The global population is just under 7 billion and the average level of affluence is around $8000 per person. The T factor is just over 0.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide per thousand dollars of GDP – in other words, every $1000 worth of goods and services produced using today’s technology releases 0.5 tonnes of CO₂ into the atmosphere. So today’s global CO₂ emissions work out at 7 billion × 8 × 0.5 = 28 billion tonnes per year.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has stated that to stabilise greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere at a reasonably safe 450 parts per million, we need to reduce annual global CO₂ emissions to less than 5 billion tonnes by 2050. With a global population of 9 billion thought inevitable by the middle of this century, that works out at an average carbon footprint of less than 0.6 tonnes per person – considerably lower than in India today. The conventional view is that we will achieve this by increasing energy efficiency and developing green technology without economic growth taking a serious hit. Can this really work?

With today’s global income, achieving the necessary carbon footprint would mean getting the T factor for CO₂ down to 0.1 tonnes of CO₂ per thousand US dollars – a fivefold improvement. While that is no walk in the park, it is probably doable with state-of-the-art technology and a robust policy commitment. There is one big thing missing from this picture, however: economic growth. Factor it in, and the idea that technological ingenuity can save us from climate disaster looks an awful lot more challenging.

¨Growth¨ 1750 to 2000 Click to enlarge

Hat tip: Celsias

Next time you reach for a typical 450 gram box of cereal, you might pause to consider that it may have required over 7,000 kilocalories of energy for processing, while the cereal itself provides on 1,100 kilocalories of food energy

One influence on the high fuel consumption associated with food is the ‘switch from frequent food shopping on foot at small local shops, to shopping by car at large out-of-town supermarkets’. This has led to the closure of small shops, markets and wholesalers.

Parallel to this trend is the concentration of the supply base into the hands of fewer, larger suppliers, partly to meet supermarket preferences for bulk year-round supply of uniform produce. [There have been] major changes in delivery patterns, with most goods now routed through supermarket regional distribution centres, a trend towards use of larger Heavy Goods Vehicles (HGVs) and just-in-time delivery, sometimes referred to as ‘warehouses on wheels’.

Supermarket shelves still have plenty of cheap food on them, mostly because prices fail to reflect the true energy costs of food production.

But that can’t last.

The externality costs associated with food are increasing with the price of oil. Soon we will no longer be able to subsidise food production with cheap oil. In fact this week the Economist editorialised and detailed in a cover story that after more than 30 years of declining world food prices this year had seen an extraordinary change. Rising incomes in Asia and ethanol subsidies in America have put an end to a long era of falling food prices

Since the spring, wheat prices have doubled and almost every crop under the sun-maize, milk, oilseeds, you name it-is at or near a peak in nominal terms. The Economist‘s food-price index is higher today than at any time since it was created in 1845… Even in real terms, prices have jumped by 75% since 2005.

It’s 20 minutes long so if you’re at the office you may want to save this one for after work – or ask your boss to watch it with you.