On the edge of Jakarta stands a pile of garbage more than 15 storeys high and spanning 200 football fields. Each day it grows by another 6500 tonnes.
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While Bantar Gebang 2 is one of the largest landfill sites in the world, it is emblematic of the linear, one-way economy in which resources are extracted, used, then dumped.
In extreme cases, the useful life of the resources can be measured in minutes - an item is purchased in a plastic bag that is almost immediately discarded, is blown into a drain from where it enters a river and ends up in the ocean and perhaps is ingested by a fish and then a human, or adds to one of the great ocean garbage patches.
In the "best" case, it ends up in landfill.
These results are largely a product of the present economic system.
For many products, it is far cheaper to extract resources such as timber or minerals, feed them into a manufacturing process and, when they have lost value, throw them away.
The word "waste" neatly encapsulates this situation: the verb means "to use, consume, spend, or expend thoughtlessly or carelessly". Yet landfill represents a vast reserve of resources that could be reused instead of buried.
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Indeed, this is what the people of Bantar Gebang are doing when they pick through the piles looking for any items of value.
While for them it's a way of dealing with poverty, a far better solution would be that the economic system did not leave them behind and where "waste" is reduced, reused, remanufactured and recycled rather than tipped into ever-growing piles.
Instead of "cradle to grave", we must think about the life cycle of resources in terms of "cradle to cradle".
A simple analysis of the materials that end up in landfill suggests they contain vast untapped potential.
In theory, materials can be recycled as long as there is sufficient energy to drive the process.
But in practice, a completely circular economy is impossible because there are losses of materials from manufacturing, through distribution, sales to the end consumer and beyond.
In many cases, the recovery of waste products would require exorbitant quantities of energy.
A production system cannot use all the material it receives, although this varies greatly depending on the situation.
The net result is that the "circular" economy leaks at every stage.
- This is an edited extract from The Path to a Sustainable Civilisation, by Mark Diesendorf and Rod Taylor, published by Palgrave Macmillan.
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