Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  To observe life with clutter, two American anthropologists visited the garages of middle-class families in Los Angeles between 2002 and 2004. Most had twoor three-car garages. Yet only six of the twenty-four families they studied still parked their cars in them. One had converted the garage into a bedroom; others had carved out an office or a leisure space. But most gave it over to storing old appliances and possessions. ‘From construction materials to excess furniture and toys, we find items blocking driveways . . . or spilling out of garages [into back yards].’ Most garages were ‘usually quite jumbled and chaotic’. Only five families actively used their garage – all for recreational purposes. Half the sample did not visit theirs once.99

  The loft and the garage were probably as crucial as recycling in rescuing the United States from its landfill crisis in the late twentieth century. The impulse to hoard was far greater than to throw away. Anthropologists in Tucson in the 1980s found that when old objects were replaced, only 6 per cent were actually thrown away. Half were given away or sold to family and friends, just under a third to strangers or shops. One third was hoarded at home.100

  In its major surveys, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) gives an indication of the mountain of stuff that is stored. American homes have turned into veritable mines of untapped materials. In 2009, some 70 million computers and 104 million TV sets lay idle in storage, most of them at home. For every three or four computers and TVs in use, there is one old one packed up in a box in a loft. An old electronic product is almost as likely to be hoarded as to be recycled.

  The impulse to hoard complicates the conventional picture of wasteful consumers, but not in an entirely cheerful way. It certainly qualifies simple moralistic verdicts of a heedless disregard for things. On the contrary, people do care, perhaps too much. From a material and environmental point of view, this creates its own problems. They want replacement items but without letting go of old ones. This simultaneously sucks in more materials and blocks the release of existing ones. Lofts and garages have thus turned into a contemporary version of the pre-modern vastus, an uncultivated electronic wasteland strewn with computers, TVs and cameras. Hoarding works like a dam, stopping the flow of these materials back into circulation and use elsewhere. This places a serious limit on the potential of recycling. The World Re-use, Repair and Recycling Association estimates that two thirds of TV sets that are recycled are either refurbished or remanufactured into new TVs or monitors abroad. But in the United States, for example, only 17 per cent of TVs that are ready for end-of-life management are collected for recycling – a larger number sit in storage. In 2011, the EPA reckoned that it took thirteen years before even half of the old black-and-white TV sets and cathode-ray tube monitors (CRT) were thrown out – for desktop computers it was ten years.101 By the time they are all released, people in developing countries will themselves have switched to flat screens. Who will free the machines?

  Recycling of used electronics has made progress in the last two decades; in the USA, according to the latest figures (2009), a quarter of electronics were collected for recycling. The slice has been getting bigger, but so has the cake. Between 1987 and 2007, the sale of electronic products shot up seven-fold, to 426 million units in America. A third of old computers are recycled, but other technologies, such as mobile phones, never find their way to a recycling firm. The presence of electronic products and kitchen appliances in the waste stream has steadily risen across the rich world. In Britain, over 2 million fridges and freezers entered the waste stream in 2006. The average French person throws out 25kg of electronic waste a year.102

  MATERIAL FLOWS

  In biochemistry, metabolism describes all the chemical reactions within a cell that enable it, with the help of enzymes, to extract energy from the environment to live, grow and reproduce itself. The idea of applying the concept to human society had occurred to Marx, who referred in Das Kapital to the metabolism (Stoffwechsel) between man and nature. Since the 1980s, ‘social metabolism’ has emerged as a key concept to capture the flow of materials and resources that societies take from the earth in order to transform them into the products, buildings and infrastructures that make up the material fabric of everyday life, and the waste and emissions generated in the process.103

  Previously, we have followed goods from the moment they are desired and acquired to the point where they end up in the bin, the garage or a landfill. These are important stages in the journey of stuff. What might appear like a linear biography of things – from birth to death – is in fact circular from the perspective of ecology. Matter is transformed and moved: it does not die or disappear. Whether recycled, buried or burnt, material particles flow back into eco-systems, be it as sludge or CO2 emissions. Cars, shoes and games consoles do not grow on trees. Iron and copper had to be mined and smelted, grasslands had to be created for cows to graze so as to produce the hide, and chemical factories had to be fired to create the components for toys and appliances. What we take home in our shopping bag carries with it a material past and future. And these are considerable. In a groundbreaking analysis in 1997, the World Resources Institute reckoned that, in rich industrial societies, the typical consumer would have had to carry an additional three hundred shopping bags every week, filled to the brim with all the materials that had been needed to give them the products and lifestyle they were accustomed to. Imagine carrying a large car on your back. The problem of household waste shrinks into a tiny matter when placed next to the 45,000–85,000kg of all the material used by an individual in such advanced societies every year.104

  The analysis of material flows, made possible by new efforts of national accounting in the last fifteen years, enables us to follow this gargantuan transformation of matter over time and ask not only how much but also how well societies have made use of material resources. Direct Material Input (DMI) captures all the materials that go into processing and manufacture – the logs used to make the kitchen table, the petroleum that goes to the refinery, the iron that had to be mined to make cars, and so forth. A lot of material, however, is dug up or pulverized in the process and never makes it into the final article – to get at the iron ore, a lot of other matter has to be removed in the first place. It all adds up to the Total Material Requirement. To visualize this, Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek of the Wuppertal Institute came up with the image of the ‘ecological rucksack’.105 This is not about the weight of a product itself, nor about the materials used directly, but about the hidden material burden it carries on its shoulder, from the petrol used to ship it to the resources needed to get rid of it. We also want to know how wasteful or efficient societies have been when squeezing value out of matter, that is, the ‘material intensity’, or productivity, of stuff.

  Material-flow analysis is not perfect. The flow has mainly been measured using national accounts. These include how much material a society imports and exports, but, since they are national, they do not count the hidden resources that are embedded in foreign products before they cross the border. A car made in Britain in a factory fired by British gas adds many more tons to the British account than a car imported from Korea which appears as if by immaculate conception, with the weight of its body only. The ecological burden of our lifestyle on distant others through the soil degradation and pollution involved in production tends to disappear from sight. National borders and statistics are rather meaningless when it comes to environmental cost. Unlike a cell, a society does not strictly speaking have one metabolism. It has lots of them. Through some households and regions, material rushes like a wild torrent; in others, it is a trickle. A lot depends on how (and how intensely) things are used, not just the total material and its value as such. Moreover, the analysis tells us about overall flow, without telling us about the effects of different materials on the environment, which vary greatly. A 24-carat diamond will have done vastly more damage than a renewable wood pellet. Water, too, is generally excluded from material-flow analyses. This is understandable – water weighs a lot and woul
d distort the picture – but means that all the water needed to produce food and other products (so-called ‘virtual’ water) evaporates from sight.106

  A final problem is that material flows are measured in relation to the value of all products made in a country (GDP). Of course, it is useful to know whether a society needs two lumps of coal to produce a product worth $9.99 or finds ways to do so with just one. But using money as a shorthand for material productivity has the unfortunate downside of obscuring the different environmental consequences between high-end and low-end versions of the same product. A person who spends $100 on a T-shirt in a designer boutique walks out of the shop with a lighter ecological rucksack than someone who buys twenty T-shirts for that price at a bargain outlet. A study of Swiss households suggests that richer families tend to consume better as well as more, preferring higher-quality goods with relatively lower environmental impact, although, in total, of course, they have more stuff than their poorer neighbours.107 Still, however rough and limited, material-flow analysis does give us at least a sense of the general picture of how much material is needed to prop up our way of life.

  Humans have interfered with the environment, clearing land and extracting resources for 12,000 years, ever since settlers first started farming in southern China and the Near East; the Chinese mined coal and used it for cooking 3,000 years ago. Methane levels started to increase 5,000 years ago and continued to do so through the industrial era. The killer gas was released by the switch to irrigation and the cultivation of rice fields, in particular. Forest clearances set free carbon. The anthropogenic impact on climate thus goes back a long way. What changed in modern times, from around 1800, was the speed and intensity of human interference. Between 1000 and 1700, the proportion of the earth’s surface that was turned into cropland rose from 1 per cent to 2 per cent. By 2000, it had reached 11 per cent; the area used for pasture grew from 2 per cent to 24 per cent. Coal and industry peppered the landscape with smoke stacks. Humans started to be a bigger influence on climate than nature itself. The acceleration of global warming in the last 150 years is the result.108

  Thanks to a team of Austrian social ecologists, we can follow material flows at a global level for the last hundred years.109 Between 1900 and 2009, the total amount of materials extracted from the earth rose ten-fold. Population growth was one factor – and in China was the main one until the 1980s – but what was decisive was the quickening metabolism of industrial societies. In the early 2000s, a person went through twice as much matter as in 1900. Worse – from the perspective of nature – development and the rising standard of living brought a shift in the kind of matter extracted. Renewable biomass (crops, wood) and energy, which are literally used up and, in part, find their way back into the soil (throughput materials) have increasingly given way to materials that stick around, such as cement and metals (accumulation materials). Making cement is a major source of CO2, responsible for 8 per cent of CO2 emissions in 1980 but a stunning 16 per cent in 2005.110 Here, at last, is evidence of the material burden created by the global pursuit of a better life, as manifest in apartment blocks, migration to the city and the proliferation of single households that rarely feature in more optimistic pictures of consumer waste for these years.

  From the point of view of a merchant or engineer, the twentieth century is an impressive success story of unprecedented efficiency gains. In 2005, it needed only a third of the materials and half the energy to produce stuff of the same value as in 1900. For nature, it nonetheless meant a bigger material burden. GDP grew faster than matter, but the world was still loosening its belt to accommodate its bulging mass. Human societies were wasting less stuff, but they were still devouring ever more. Material productivity was outpaced by a faster metabolism.

  There have been only three short periods when the world enjoyed actual dematerialization: the deep recession of 1929–32, the end of the Second World War, and 1991–2, when the Soviet Union collapsed. None of these are particularly attractive models to emulate. Even in the aftermath of the two oil crises in the 1970s the world did not manage to reverse its metabolic hunger.

  This is the global picture, but we must also ask about the changing position of countries relative to each other. Here, charting the total passage of materials through national statistics gets murkier, as illustrated by the case of the United Kingdom. From the point of view of national accounts, the UK emerges as a posterboy of dematerialization. The country successfully ‘decoupled’ growth from material input, to use the fashionable phrase. The material base of the economy is the Total Material Requirement (TMR), which includes everything that is extracted in the UK and everything that is imported, from finished products to raw materials and semi-manufactured items. Since 1970, Britain has managed to more than double its GDP with only an additional 18 per cent of TMR; for comparison, Austria, similarly, needed only half the material to produce goods of the same value as in 1960.111 Since 2001, Britain’s TMR has even fallen, by 4 per cent. In addition to the recession since 2008 – recessions slow down the metabolism – the major factor has been the decline of mining and home construction.112 Fewer new homes meant less sand, gravel and cement, notwithstanding kitchen and basement extensions. Some accounts also suggest that Britons eat less today than a decade ago, though not necessarily more healthily.

  We should be cautious, however, before jumping to the conclusion that a country such as Britain has managed to reduce its pressure on the planet.113 While the recent decline might be heartening, from a historical perspective it is so far little more than a blip. Material intensity has failed to reverse the major increase in Britain’s material bulk in the 1970s–’90s. Most worryingly, the picture of dematerialization might be a statistical illusion. At home, the balance has shifted from industry to services. Here is a major cause for the rise in material productivity. Less stuff is needed to create a £ or a $ from consulting than from extracting a lump of coal or making steel for the frame of a car. But, of course, Britons have not stopped buying stuff. They simply import more goods and resources. Material-flow figures include the weight of imported steel, cars and tinned tomatoes, but they tend to be silent about all the material and fossil fuels that have to be extracted to create and deliver these imports. Petrol imported is counted, but aviation fuel used by foreign airlines is not. For the environment, it is of little comfort that fewer Britons drive to Blackpool if more fly off to Marbella. The picture would be far less rosy if these embedded material flows were included. Britain has pushed the damage caused by its material appetite offshore; by one count, some 13 per cent of carbon emissions are embodied in manufactured imports.114 In the British Isles, greenhouse-gas emissions have fallen by 1 per cent a year in the last twenty years. At the same time, British consumers have more than made up for this with their rising appetite for imported stuff.115 Perhaps not surprisingly, rich countries have been loath to switch from territorial accounts to consumption-based emission accounts. The only region in the world that can claim to have accomplished all-round dematerialization is Central Asia, which went into freefall when the Soviet Union broke up.

  In the 1970s, campaigners for environmental justice in the United States added ‘Nimby’ to the political vocabulary, drawing attention to how white middle-class neighbourhoods had mobilized around a ‘Not in My Back Yard’ sentiment and then dumped their waste and pollution on to poor and black communities. Material-flow analysis reveals an even more dramatic global version of Nimby-ism. In the 1950s, Europe and the United States, by and large, still lived mainly off their own resources. In the last fifty years, and especially since the 1970s, they have increasingly offloaded the burden of resource extraction to other regions. A study of the physical trade balances in the world found that developed countries shifted some 185 billion tonnes of material to developing and transition countries between 1962 and 2006.116 The ecological rucksack of traded goods grew faster than the volume of traded goods themselves. Unlike with domestic Nimby-ism, the global imbalance runs from north to s
outh as well as from rich to poor. The biggest environmental burden has ended up on Australian and Latin American shoulders. From here come copper, iron, meat, wool, and much more. Australia’s physical trade deficit rose almost eight-fold between 1970 and 2005. Since 1980, even the United States – hugely rich in resources – has outsourced its environmental burden. Significantly, it is not only Japan, Germany and Britain that have shifted their ecological rucksack offshore but also Pakistan, Vietnam and China; naturally, small islands and tourist havens like the Bahamas and the Seychelles are also shifting theirs. In the last half-century, the world has thus come to resemble an organized mountaineering party, with some well-fed tourists striving to the top, followed by a large group of sherpas who carry their food and kit.

  Ultimately, of course, we want to know what materials do as well as where they come from. The universe of consumer goods does not exist in a vacuum. It needs a supporting infrastructure. A car is no use without a road. A fridge, a hot bath and TV need electricity, gas pipes, four walls and a roof. In addition to the energy embodied in goods, therefore, we need also to consider the energy needed to make use of them. In other words, we want to know about flow as well as stock. Thanks to Patrick Troy and colleagues, we have some idea what this looked like for six districts in Adelaide in Australia in the 1990s. Troy’s team reconstructed what historic data they could find on the built environment, from the thickness of the walls in houses and whether floors were made of wood or concrete to the size and age of vehicles and water pipes. This was their embodied energy. They then compared it to the operational energy needed to run the show, that is, the gas that fired the boiler, the electricity that ran the appliances and the fuel to drive from A to B. As they acknowledged, their method was not perfect – they were able to estimate how much energy was buried in the transport network but found it impossible to do the same for the gas and electric networks, other than that which went through the pipes themselves. Non-residential developments, too, escaped them. Still, it does give us a helpful rule of thumb about the energy stuck in things in relation to that needed to run them. In all six districts, people used three to four times as much operational energy as embodied energy on an annual basis. In other words, in an average year in the 1990s, it took three times as much energy to heat space and water and to drive about than the annual share it had taken to make the pipes, radiators and cars. Almost half of all operational energy was used in transport.