Mind Over Matter: Recasting the Role of Materials in Our Lives

Worldwatch Paper 144, by Gary Gardner and Payal Sampat, December 1998. Worldwatch Institute, 1776 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20036; 202/452-1992;

www.worldwatch.org (Web site). Paperback, 60 pages, single copy $5 plus $4 shipping in North America.

The Worldwatch Institute is well known for its pithy, factual, and well-referenced reports on a wide range of resource and environmental topics. Paper #144 on materials doesn’t disappoint. This short booklet provides an excellent synopsis of materials use in our society, the environmental impacts associated with materials (extraction, processing, use, and disposal), and how we might reduce these impacts. Eye-opening facts presented include:

•The average materials use by an American—including all industrial raw materials, fertilizers for our food, and so forth—is 223 pounds (101 kg) per day.

•There was a 2.4-fold increase in world materials production between the early 1960s and 1995.

•Even though materials intensity—material use per dollar of output—dropped 18% worldwide between 1970 and 1995, total consumption of materials jumped 67%.

All is not grim, though. Gardner and Sampat present positive developments and trends relating to our material use and efforts to curtail it. We learn about Austria’s National Environment Plan to increase materials efficiency 10-fold over the next decade; Xerox’s shift from selling photocopiers to selling the service of those machines; Germany’s 1991 packaging waste ordinance holding manufacturers responsible for nearly all the packaging waste they generate; eco-industrial parks in Denmark and Fiji that link industries using waste products with those that generate them; and landfill taxes in Denmark that have boosted construction debris recycling from 12% to 82% in just eight years.

The authors describe how we can come to grips with the profligate resource use associated with our industrial economy and turn it around. This can be done by closing the “subsidy spigot” for extractive activities (such as the 1872 Mining Law in the U.S. that gives mining companies access to public land for just $5/acre ($12/ha) without making those companies pay royalties or even clean-up of the mining sites), by taxing pollution and waste, and by encouraging the shift to a service economy in which companies maintain responsibility for products and materials throughout their life cycles.

This little booklet is well worth the hour or two it will take to digest, and it provides powerful statistics to use in convincing others of the merits of more responsible materials use.