by Ziya Tong
But there is one more Matrix pin-drop before we move on. Because half of the nitrogen in our food chain is now synthetically made, half of the nitrogen in your DNA comes from a Haber-Bosch factory.
* * *
—
EVERY YEAR, EIGHTY-THREE MILLION PEOPLE are added to the population of the planet. More people means more waste. And since the development of the Haber-Bosch process, a scandalous proportion of that waste has been uneaten food. To put it in perspective, the United States produced more than thirty-one million metric tons of food waste in 2010. According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, by weight that is ten times more food waste than e-waste that year.
All of the energy used to grow, ship, and sell food that is ultimately tossed away is also wasted. In the United States in greenhouse emissions alone, it works out to all of the offshore oil and gas reserves being drilled for nothing.*10 On a global scale, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, approximately one-third of human food production does not get eaten. That is a jaw-dropping 1.3 billion metric tons of food that gets thrown out every year.
On top of that, there’s another aspect to food waste. And it takes the form of the synthetic fertilizer made by the Haber-Bosch process. We use an enormous amount of fertilizer: for every person on the planet, there’s approximately twenty kilograms of ammonia spread annually onto the fields. But a mere 15 percent of that manufactured nitrogen makes it into our mouths in the form of food*11; the vast majority of our chemical fertilizers dissolve into waste.
As rains fall over the land each spring, nitrogen and phosphorus compounds from fertilizers are carried off into streams, rivers, and lakes and eventually drain into the ocean.*12 Here, the mixture of nutrients from our fertilizer runoff and sewage sparks an algal feeding frenzy, causing algae to spread over tens or even hundreds of square kilometres. Inadvertently, we are fertilizing the ocean. The resultant “bloom,” however, is deadly. Marine plants and animals living beneath the thick, slimy mat of algae are deprived of sunlight. And when the algae overgrowth dies and sinks to the ocean floor, the massive decomposition process robs huge amounts of oxygen from the water, making it impossible for marine life to breathe. Those species that can’t move to another location will not survive, and the biological desert that’s left is known as a dead zone.
There are over five hundred of these dead zones in the oceans, and they are growing bigger. The fertilizer that was supposed to make life flourish is turning coastlines into graveyards. By disrupting the balance of nature with our human-made systems of survival, we have created a vicious cycle: now we need more fossil fuel energy (the equivalent of about 2.5 metric tons of TNT per acre) to create more food, in turn creating more mouths to feed. And every year the cycle escalates.
The Haber-Bosch process alone uses up almost 2 percent of the world’s energy supply. And for every metric ton of ammonia created, two metric tons of carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere. We are blind to this nitrogen waste in the ocean, just as we are blind to the carbon dioxide waste we can’t see. But there is one form of waste we can see when it gets out of hand: air pollution.
* * *
—
IN BEIJING, A NEW COLOUR was named by the general public in November 2014. They called it “APEC blue.” It was the result of a mission that began months earlier, when the Chinese central government tasked 434,000 staff in the regions of Beijing, Shandong, Tianjin, Shanxi, Hebei, Inner Mongolia, and Henan with orders to execute a grand plan. The teams had one ambitious goal: to change the colour of the sky.
In the days leading up to the arrival of international delegates for that year’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, 11.4 million vehicles were ordered off the roads and over ten thousand industrial plants suspended production. Under strict supervision, close to forty thousand other factories were put on a rolling schedule to limit their working hours and consequently the smoke and exhaust fumes they normally emitted.
The plan worked spectacularly. For two weeks in November, Beijing’s notoriously thick grey-brown fog cleared and the air pollution fell by a jaw-dropping 80 percent. In its place, ready to welcome foreign dignitaries, leaders, and the world press, were soft white clouds and a brilliant APEC blue sky. But soon after the summit ended, the blue was gone too.
Today, Chinese citizens dream wistfully of the APEC blue skies of 2014, or the “military parade blue” skies of 2015. Scientists, for their part, have worked out why the skies darken so quickly once the temporary constraints on polluting are removed. It turns out that after the quick fix for a special event is over, there’s an industrial backlash. Following the sharp drop in pollution for the duration of the event, there is a “retaliatory spike” of polluting as businesses ramp up to compensate for lost time and money.*13 Not surprisingly, perhaps, there is a direct relationship between economic activity and pollution.
In polluted cities, the term “AQI” is as familiar to anyone as “Celsius” or “Fahrenheit.” It stands for air quality index, a scale designed to go from 0 to 500. Just by looking at the degree of haze, experienced residents can calculate the air quality. If you see a bit of haze on the horizon, that’s 100. By 200, the grey horizon has closed in on you. At 300, the pollution haze is blocking the sun.
An AQI of 300 and above is considered hazardous to human health. Health effects include “serious aggravation of heart or lung disease and premature mortality in persons with cardio-pulmonary disease and the elderly; serious risk of respiratory effects in the general population.” Off the charts, at over 700, the air is described as industrial smoke. It’s so thick that it’s “chemical-tasting, eye watering.” Coupled with a sandstorm, on May 4, 2017, the air was literally breath-taking. With an AQI of 905, Beijing had gone three times past the hazardous limit.
On bad days, let alone severe days, spending even twenty minutes outside can leave people feeling sick. Sore throats and coughs without cold or flu symptoms have become common. And for residents, especially those who live and work near factories, the coughs do not seem to go away.
The face masks worn by the Chinese public are now iconic. But in Beijing, only one section of society has it relatively easy when the pollution gets out of control. The rich can afford to protect their well-being by insulating themselves from the choking skies.
In the capital, the wealthy can send their kids to private schools, many of which have giant “playground bubbles” for children to play in. These pressurized air domes are equipped with hospital-grade air filters to purify the air and provide perfect “weather” year-round. On days when the AQI requires the children to stay inside, they are kept safe behind air-locked doors.
This pollution-proofing doesn’t come cheap. Air domes cost millions of dollars, and even at home it costs tens of thousands of dollars to maintain fresh pockets of air for families to breathe in. Apartments in luxury high-rises are equipped with the latest high-tech air and water purifiers to provide a semblance of normalcy.
The poor have no option but to breathe the bad air around them. And it’s not just China: India is home to 11 out of the 12 worst polluted cities. Likewise, Saudi Arabia and Iran have cities with pollution levels that make them hazardous to live in. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), which monitors a database of 3,000 cities in 103 countries, over 98 percent of cities in low- and middle-income countries failed to meet WHO air quality guidelines, whereas in high-income countries the failure rate nearly halved to 56 percent.
Of course, our bodies have inbuilt biological air filters—our lungs—and examining them can reveal the particulate matter we absorb from the outdoors. Pathologist Paulo Saldiva, who serves as a member of the scientific committee of Harvard University’s School of Public Health and as a member of the air quality committee of the WHO, has done autopsies on the lungs of people exposed to outdoor air pollution. Blackened and pockmarked with carbon, they could easily be mistaken for the charred lungs of a cigarette smoker.
Every day, we inhale about twenty-three thousand breaths, taking in, on average, twelve thousand litres of air. The tiny hairs in our noses and the cilia that protect our lungs filter out the larger particles, but the most dangerous particles are the small ones, called PM2.5, because the particulate matter is less than 2.5 micrometres in size. Collectively, they are the invisible sandstorm of sulphate, nitrates, black carbon, mineral dust, sodium chloride, and ammonia that we call “pollution.”
Originating from the exhaust of car engines, mines, power plants, and industrial boilers, these incinerated particles have been strongly linked to lung cancer, kidney and cardiovascular disease, as well as asthma. In China, already the country with the highest rate of lung cancer, medical experts expect the number of lung cancer patients to rise to over eight hundred thousand a year by 2020. This is a silent epidemic. Worldwide, the WHO estimates that three million people die prematurely from outdoor air pollution every single year. By comparison, the number of people who die from AIDS is about a third that number, or 940,000.
When you sit back to consider it, the pollution we produce on an annual basis is staggering. It includes:
MANUFACTURED CHEMICALS: 30 million metric tons a year
PLASTIC POLLUTION OF OCEANS: 8 million metric tons a year
HAZARDOUS WASTE: 400 million metric tons a year
COAL, OIL, GAS: 15 gigatonnes (billion metric tons) a year
METALS AND MATERIALS: 75 gigatonnes a year
MINING AND MINERAL WASTES: roughly 200 gigatonnes a year
POLLUTED WATER (MOSTLY CONTAMINATED WITH ABOVE WASTES): 9 trillion metric tons a year.
These are the ingredients for a massive toxic bomb, according to veteran science journalist Julian Cribb. Globally, we build one of these bombs every single year. The difference is there’s no deafening boom. Instead, it’s a quiet fallout: the invisible particles seep into the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe. As Cribb writes, “Industrial toxins are now routinely found in newborn babies, in mother’s milk, in the food chain, in domestic drinking water worldwide. They have been detected from the peak of Mt Everest (where the snow is so polluted it doesn’t meet drinking water standards) to the depths of the oceans, from the hearts of our cities to the remotest islands….The mercury found in the fish we eat, and in polar bears in the Arctic, is fallout from the burning of coal and increases every year.”
The idea that there is some sort of “outside” world we can exist independently from is an illusion. Science shows us what our own eyes can’t see: that everything in existence is part of a network, part of a flow. What we put out into the environment will eventually find its way back into our bodies.
* * *
—
OVER THE LAST THREE DECADES, hundreds of new cities have popped up in China. Today, the country has over six hundred cities, most of which were villages or small towns until very recently.
China’s rise to economic dominance is a result of its manufacturing sector. The Chinese made the world’s stuff, and they made it cheap. The colossal energy used to fuel and feed its population, manufacture goods for export, and build its new cities unsurprisingly now means that China is responsible for the highest amount of carbon pollution. By the end of 2017, China was responsible for 28 percent of global emissions, a significant portion of the estimated forty-one billion metric tons of carbon dioxide the world emits every year.
If we could see all those forty-one billion tons of CO2, it would be like looking at the equivalent in tonnage of forty-one Mount Everests.*14 The fact that we can’t has become the greatest challenge in any discussion of climate change. But there is another, more visible, way to see the effects of fossil fuel waste. In this form, it is everywhere around us: I’m talking about plastic.
As the American Chemistry Council notes, “Most plastics are based on the carbon atom….The carbon atom can link to other atoms with up to four chemical bonds. When all of the bonds are to other carbon atoms, diamonds or graphite or carbon black soot may result. For plastics the carbon atoms are also connected to…hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, chlorine, or sulfur.” It’s shocking when you think about it, but just one hundred years ago plastic didn’t even exist. As Edward Humes writes in Garbology, “Plastic has gone so fast from zero to omnipresent that it’s slipped beneath conscious perception. Take a moment to scan the room you’re sitting in. Everything from pill bottles…to the knobs on kitchen cupboards to the buttons on your pants to the elastic in your socks to the foam inside your seat cushion to the bowl you put your dog’s dinner in to the composite fillings in your teeth…it’s everywhere.”
Today, the average person in North America uses one hundred kilograms of plastic every year, most of which is in the form of packaging that gets thrown out. When it was first invented however, plastic was durable and created to last. In 1907, the chemist Leo Baekeland developed it as a chemical replacement for an East Asian insect called the lac beetle. The arboreal insects secreted a hard substance called shellac that was harvested by manually scrapping it off the bark of trees. In the beginning, it was the material that the nascent electrical industry was using to insulate their wires.
Baekeland thought there had to be a better way, so he set his mind to developing a synthetic substitute. In his lab, using a mixture of formaldehyde and phenol (an acid derived from coal tar), he produced a thick and sticky resin. On its own, it wasn’t particularly useful, but when he added filler like wood dust or asbestos to the mixture, it gave the substance a surprising strength. Better yet, when he injected it into moulds, he found that he could shape it. He had created the world’s first thermo-setting plastic. Baekeland had created synthetic shellac.
Shiny new objects made from the novel material, called Bakelite, were first introduced to America in 1927. It was seen as a miracle substance. Now, instead of relying on elephant ivory for cutlery handles or tortoiseshell for glasses frames, there was an alternative, a plastic that could be shaped into anything. By 1944, Bakelite was being used in fifteen thousand products.
Around this time, mass production of the everyday plastics we use today began to take off. PVC, superglue, Velcro, Lycra, polyethylene bags, and polystyrene foam all came onto the market in the 1940s and 1950s. But still, global plastic production was less than a million metric tons per year.
Since that time, we have made over eight billion metric tons of plastic. Six billion metric tons of which we trashed.
In the United States, only a small amount of petroleum, approximately 5 percent, goes into plastic production. This brings a stark realization: all the plastic around us represents only a tiny proportion of the hydrocarbons in the environment.
We see our everyday objects but we are blind to the processes behind them. Looking at a plastic shampoo bottle for example, we don’t see the oil spills, the landfills, or the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. As billions of people do everyday, we use a plastic item once—an object that will last ten thousand years—then throw it in the bin. The absurdity, as a popular internet meme has described it, is that “our society has reached a point where the effort necessary to extract oil from the ground, ship it to a refinery, turn it into plastic, shape it appropriately, truck it to a store, buy it, and bring it home is considered to be less effort than what it takes to just wash the spoon when you’re done with it.”
This was not always the case. Until the 1950s, household objects were valued. People cherished quality. Over generations, they passed on silverware or perfume bottles or chairs or dining tables or bed frames. They became our antiques. But in 1955, a new kind of lifestyle began to emerge. An August 1955 issue of Life magazine contained a vision of the new American family. The article title was “Throwaway Living” and the accompanying photo featured a man, woman, and child joyfully tossing disposable household objects in the air like confetti. Material prosperity meant that products were now being designed and promoted to be short-lived. As Life magazine proclaimed, “disposable items cut down household chores.”
But you may have wondered why—if plastic is made from fossil fuels, and fossil fuels were once living organisms—most plastics are not biodegradable. The reason, it turns out, is similar to why nitrogen in the air is so difficult to break apart. In plastic manufacturing, carbon molecules are heated up over a catalyst, but the purpose is not to tear them apart but to lock them together to create an extremely tight bond. Once the bond is formed, the plastic becomes chemically inert. Micro-organisms that have evolved to decompose organic matter have not come across this kind of carbon bond in nature before. So, despite their billions of years of evolution, they simply do not have the metabolic pathways to digest it.*16
While plastics can’t be digested, they can be ingested. It is no longer news that scientists have found plastic in the guts of everything from tiny zooplankton at the base of the marine food chain to larger animals like fish, seabirds, and even whales. Every year, between five and thirteen million metric tons of plastic end up in the oceans, and every year over one hundred thousand marine mammals and over a million seabirds that swallow that plastic are killed. There is now so much plastic waste, it’s been estimated that by 2050 there will be more plastic in the ocean by weight than there will be fish.
