@MathieuP @stekopf @MarkHoltom @gerrymcgovern
"We are talking differences by one or two orders of magnitude"
Could you share a link to that research?
"In the Western world, resource consumption per capita is stable or decreasing in most countries."
That is surprising. Is this accounting for trade?
@jackofalltrades @stekopf @MarkHoltom @gerrymcgovern
For energy use, this chart (not trade adjusted) is a good place to start : https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab=chart
@jackofalltrades @stekopf @MarkHoltom @gerrymcgovern And this one is trade-adjusted, if I am not mistaken.
https://ourworldindata.org/energy-offshoring
@MathieuP @stekopf @MarkHoltom @gerrymcgovern
This is energy only, and the claim was about all inputs.
It may be hard to find good estimates from the production side, so we may as well look at the waste side:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/plastic-waste-accumulated-in-oceans
Europe went from 2.11m tonnes of plastic waste ending up in the ocean in 2000 to 5.05m tonnes in 2019.
Similarly, according to:
https://globalewaste.org/statistics/continent/europe/2015/
Europe went from 15.6kg of e-waste per capita in 2015 to 17.6kg in 2022.
@MathieuP @stekopf @MarkHoltom @gerrymcgovern
I live in Europe and wherever I look I see more *stuff*. There's no way we are using less resource inputs per capita than 20 or even 10 years ago.
@jackofalltrades @stekopf @MarkHoltom @gerrymcgovern I think we have little grasp of how inefficient cars were when we were young (I live in France).
A current BMW consumes half as much as a 1990's Ford Sierra.
There has also been bounds in energy efficiency of most home appliances and heating devices.
You'll also notice that there is more stuff, but most of it is so much lighter than it used to be.
@MathieuP @stekopf @MarkHoltom @gerrymcgovern
Yes, but there were less cars when I was young. The playground next to my parents' house has been converted into a parking lot. 🙁
The car sizes also changed drastically. Our family of five drove on vacation in Fiat 126p. Now my two parents drive alone in Toyota RAV4.
The lighter stuff may still have a bigger environmental impact / material input. Just ask yourself: how many kilograms of raw materials must be mined to produce a single cell phone?
@jackofalltrades @MathieuP @stekopf @MarkHoltom @gerrymcgovern But what I discovered is: people buy more and more stuff because of two main reasons:
1. Tik Tok was instrumentalized to create another „Status“ society so that so that you have to buy shit to compete with peer pressure
2. Industry sells not finished shit. So you buy it, you discover it’s crap, you buy another one, to try wether that works as expected, and so on.