The Reality Bubble

by Ziya Tong

  We, of course, are a part of the food chain, and plastics have been finding their way not just into our dinner plates but onto them as well. In 2015, scientists looking at fish markets off the coasts of California and Indonesia found that one in four fish had plastic in its gut. The number was even higher in a study that looked at the English Channel, where a third of the fish caught by trawler—including cod, haddock, and mackerel—were found to contain synthetic polymers. In Scotland, a whopping 83 percent of Dublin Bay prawns, or scampi, contained plastic fibres. And in Canada, researchers found microplastics in the majority of farmed and wild clams and oysters.

  But plastic is not only in the food we eat. It is also in the water we drink. In an investigation that covered over a dozen nations on five continents, 83 percent of tap water samples overall were polluted with plastic. The particles are small enough to be undetectable by the naked eye, but that does not change the fundamental truth: every day billions of people are eating and drinking plastic.

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  THE AIR, SOIL, AND WATER eventually become us. Ultimately, as paleoclimatologist Curt Stager writes, we are made of waste: “Look at one of your fingernails. Carbon makes up half of its mass, and roughly one in eight of those carbon atoms recently emerged from a chimney or a tailpipe….[You are] built, in part, from emissions.”

  It’s not only our bodies. Whole empires are built on waste. China’s sudden rise to the status of global superpower is in large part due to its strategy of efficiently consuming North America’s garbage and rebuilding itself with it. As shipping containers full of manufactured goods crossed the oceans from China and unloaded their wares on US shores, it did not make economic sense to send them back empty. Entrepreneurs took advantage of the cheap return transport to send ships back loaded with garbage and recyclable waste. America’s garbage literally became China’s gold…and silver, and copper, and aluminum, and zinc.

  It is a perfect example of the old adage “One person’s trash is another person’s treasure.” The steady supply of recycled materials was certainly cheaper than mining it at home; recycling steel, for instance, requires 60 percent less energy than mining it from iron ore. In 2010, China’s primary shipments to the United States were computer and electronic equipment, valued at $50 billion. In contrast, the United States’ primary exports to China, by volume, were scrap metal and paper waste—essentially, “a little more than $8 billion worth of bundled old newspaper, crushed cardboard, rusty steel and mashed beverage cans sold at rock-bottom prices,” as Edward Humes writes. By 2016, China had become the world’s largest net importer of garbage, taking in forty-five million metric tons of scrap metal, waste paper, and plastic from around the world each year, valued at $18 billion.

  Whole towns and cities sprang up in China to recycle and profit from this waste. The town of Shijiao became the “Christmas tree light” capital, with at least nine recycling factories stripping out the copper from an estimated nine million kilograms of Christmas tree lights thrown out every year. In East China, the city of Qingdao became the primary hub for processing the world’s plastic, taking in the bulk of the nine million metric tons of plastic the country imported annually. In the southeast, in the town of Guiyu, more than 5,500 businesses have been set up to dismantle over 680,000 kilograms of discarded computer equipment, cell phones, and other e-waste to harvest the precious gold, lead, and copper inside.

  It was a great deal for China financially, but toxic for the country environmentally. In many towns, workers subjected to hazardous waste were found to have higher rates of birth defects, tuberculosis, respiratory problems, and blood diseases. At the same time, after four decades of being the planet’s dumping ground, China had become the second largest economy in the world. As Adam Minter, author of Junkyard Planet, expressed in an interview on the CBC, “China’s getting rich, and as you get rich, you throw away more stuff. As you throw away more stuff, you generate more for your own recycling.”

  China literally doesn’t need to take the world’s crap anymore. On January 1, 2018, it finally put a stop to toxic imports, erecting a “green fence” by banning the import of twenty-four types of yang laji, or foreign garbage. Almost instantly, mountains of trash that would have otherwise “disappeared” from North America began to grow in depots across the United States and Canada. The stockpiles have nowhere else to go.

  The Chinese ban will force many developed nations to face their own waste or find other near-term solutions. That could mean more landfill, more incineration, or finding another country to export to. Alternatively, it could mean that we finally learn to deal with the waste appropriately ourselves.

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  IN THE 1985 SCIENCE FICTION COMEDY Back to the Future, the DeLorean time machine was truly ahead of its time: it used garbage as fuel. Today, we live in that future. Cars, bus fleets, even garbage trucks themselves, can run on biogas made from garbage. In cities like New York that generate two million metric tons of organic waste (including food waste) annually, the captured decomposing-landfill gas is being ingeniously transformed into energy.

  The champions of this waste alchemy, however, are the Swedes. In Sweden, the buses run on a rather unusual mix of human waste, slaughterhouse waste, and liquor. Booze plays a part in reducing the country’s emissions because it’s expensive in Sweden, leading citizens to bring it back with them from journeys outside the country. Many go over the customs limit, meaning that every year hundreds of thousands of litres of beer, wine, and spirits are seized at the border. And rather than dumping the contraband down the drain, the Swedes convert it into fuel, with one litre of booze making half a litre of biogas. This “giant cocktail,” as it’s fondly called by the locals, powers over a thousand of Sweden’s trucks and buses, along with a biogas train.

  The Swedes are so good at converting their garbage that only 1 percent of its citizens’ household waste ends up in landfill. Instead of burning fossil fuels for their heating, almost a million homes in the country rely on heat from incinerated garbage. As a rule, recycling stations must be found within three hundred metres of every residential area. Inside each station, high-tech vacuum systems suck up the garbage, diverting it to one of the country’s thirty-two incineration plants, where it is transformed into heat or electricity. The system is so effective that Sweden now imports garbage, for a price, from Norway, the United Kingdom, and Ireland.*17 The country’s facilities charge approximately $43 per metric ton of trash, working out to over $100 million in annual revenue.

  Value can be mined from sewage as well. Every day, billions of people around the world dump tiny particles of gold down the drain, and it adds up. According to Kathleen Smith of the U.S. Geological Survey, the traces of gold, silver, and platinum that can be found in sewage sludge amount to the equivalent of a commercial mine. The precious metals, albeit in microscopic form, come from industrial waste *18 and everyday products like shampoo, detergents, and even nanoparticles that are woven into socks to reduce body odour.

  The extraction method works the same way the mining industry pulls metals out of rock, by using leachates. Large-scale sewage mining in a controlled environment could act to clean up waste biosolids, making sewage a better fertilizer. There is, of course, money in it too. A study at Arizona State University on precious metal recovery from sewage found that a population of one million people produces $13 million worth of metals in the wastewater annually. In Tokyo, the Suwa treatment facility has already begun extracting gold from its sewage. Rather astonishingly, the yield is even higher than it would be from mining the precious metal from ore. At Japan’s Hishikari mine, which has one of the greatest gold deposits in the world, twenty to forty grams of gold on average are found for every metric ton of ore. In comparison, at the Suwa facility, 1,890 grams—almost two kilograms—of gold can be recovered from every metric ton of ash from incinerated sludge.

  It would seem that our civilization is at last remembering that waste can be valuable. In
Europe, engineers are using the waste heat coming from sewers and incinerators to keep buildings warm, while massive server farms like those at Google and the NSA are using cool water from flushed toilets and wastewater systems to lower the temperature at the mega-data facilities. Taboos have led to an “ick factor” that prevents most people from appreciating the vital nature of waste in the nutrient cycle. But properly treated so that it’s free of heavy metals, disease, and organisms, our feces can become fertilizer or, placed in anaerobic digesters, turned into a biogas. A recent UN report suggests that human waste collected for energy has the potential value of $9.5 billion a year.

  Our urine on the other hand, is already sterile. Instead of flushing it into the toxic stream of commercial, hospital, and industrial waste that pollutes fresh water, it could be diverted. The nitrogen each adult produces per year in their urine alone is enough to grow 100 to 250 kilograms of grain. Rather than relying so heavily on synthetic fertilizer, which later gets drained and dumped in the sea, we could close the loop on waste. According to the WHO, a single person, in their urine and feces combined, produces 4.5 kilograms of nitrogen every year. Scale that up with modern technology, and we can begin to return to the ancient practice followed by the Chinese, which kept the soil rich for millennia.

  The mathematician Alfred North Whitehead once argued that “civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” Our food comes to us from places we do not see; our energy is produced in ways we don’t understand; and our waste disappears without us having to give it a thought. When we have such giant blind spots concerning our food, energy, and waste, it is no indication that we have “advanced” as a society.

  Humans are no longer in touch with the basics of their own system of survival. Instead, we have systematically broken nature’s grand cycles of life, death, and rebirth. By hijacking the cycle of birth and producing animals through factory farming, domesticated livestock now outnumber wild mammals 15:1. This is our food system.

  By exhuming prehistoric graveyards, we have disrupted the cycle of death. Instead of leaving fossil fuels buried, we have unleashed 45 percent more carbon dioxide than would naturally be in the atmosphere. This is our energy system.

  And by no longer using our waste to regrow food in our soils, we have cheated the cycle of rebirth and turned to machines to artificially suck the element of nitrogen out of the atmosphere. This is our waste system.

  In turn, the human population has boomed—demanding more food and more energy and producing more waste—and soon we will be upwards of ten billion. When you hear people say that the “system” is broken, this is not usually the system they are referring to. But this is the system that sustains us on Earth: it is our life support system. And the ruinous feedbacks caused by it are growing rapidly: overpopulation, climate change, and dead zones. Each on its own is deadly. Together, they are catastrophic.

  One might say, We are ultimately in control of this system, are we not? This is our system, human-made. But if we can see that things are going wrong, given the time limits on our survival, why are we not dramatically changing course? In the next section, I will argue it is because there is another system keeping us in our place, one that insists on maintaining order and the status quo. In order to see it, however, we have to open our eyes to the invisible dimensions we inhabit. We need to look deep into the blind spots of time and space.

  *1 Contrary to conventional wisdom, the moon does have an atmosphere, though it is insignificant compared to the density of Earth’s atmosphere. The technical term for this type of collision-free atmosphere is a “surface boundary exosphere.”

  *2 In 1832, 20,000 people died of cholera in Paris alone.

  *3 “Human night soil is essentially the residue of what people eat after they have absorbed necessary nutrients. The night soil of a population that ate a lot of fish and meat generally contained more nitrogen and phosphate. People whose diet was mostly vegetarian (cereals and vegetables) had night soil that was generally poor in nitrogen and phosphates, but rich in potassium and salt.”

  —Tajima, Kayo. ‘The Marketing of Urban Human Waste in the Early Modern Edo/Tokyo Metropolitan Area’. Environnement urbain : cartographie d’un concept. Vol 1. (2007).

  *4 The Guano War is also known as the Chincha Islands War.

  *5 Bird poop brings 3.8 million metric tons of nitrogen out of the sea each year. The nitrogen comes from dissolved gases in the air that mix with the water, and are broken into fixed nitrogen. During the 1800s this process was largely done by cyanobacteria.

  *6 Nitrates had a dual purpose, they could be turned into fertilizer or explosives. For Europeans, it took three whole months for a shipment to arrive. The Germans, in particular, were keen to create their own source of nitrates since they knew that during war time, they could be blockaded, which would cripple their ability to grow food and keep them from replenishing supplies of gunpowder.

  *7 Today, approximately 90 million to 120 million metric tons of nitrogen in our food system comes from natural processes, such as nitrogen-fixing bacteria and lightning strikes.

  *8 It was twice the size of the first pilot plant, at Oppau, which exploded, killing six hundred people and injuring two thousand after the fertilizer in a storage silo caked together. Mixed in with sodium nitrate that was being manufactured for gunpowder, the combination had proved unstable, triggering a blast that is still recognized as one of the worst industrial accidents in history. Today, the Leuna works covers thirteen square kilometres.

  *9 After much testing the team settled on iron with aluminum oxide and calcium as the catalyst.

  *10 All of that excess carbon dioxide may be invisible to us, but it’s still getting pumped out there. Food waste alone accounts for 3.3 billion metric tons of CO2 annually. That’s more than two and half times the CO2 emissions of every vehicle in the United States combined.

  *11 “Worldwide about 80 percent of nitrogen harvested in crops and grass goes to feed livestock instead of feeding people directly. Much of that nitrogen winds up in their manure and then gases off as it sits in giant open lagoons near intensive animal production centers or when it is spread onto fields without being properly mixed into the soil.” Mingle, Jonathan. ‘A Dangerous Fixation’. Slate. (2013, March 12).

  *12 You can have too much of a good thing. The process is a like overfeeding fish. We’ve artificially added twice as much nitrogen and three times as much phosphorous as would occur in a natural system.

  *13 Political blue sky days are 4.8 per cent lower than average levels, but readings in the 4 days afterwards are 8.2 per cent higher.

  *14 The weight of Mount Everest is approximately 1 billion tons.

  *15 The most famous example of planned obsolesce is the light bulb. Today the average incandescent lightbulb lasts 1200 hours. LED lightbulbs last fifty times longer. But when they were first invented, lightbulbs could last much longer than that. In fact, at Fire Station Number 6 in Livermore, California, there’s a lightbulb that has been burning continuously since 1901.

  *16 There are some species that are able to biodegrade plastic. The recently discovered bacterial species Ideonella sakainesis for instance, secretes an enzyme that under the right heat conditions can break down plastic bottles.

  *17 As a bonus, the net CO2 emissions from burning the waste is also negative.

  *18 “Precious metals such as gold could find their way into the sewers courtesy of mining, electroplating, electronics and jewelry manufacturing, or industrial and automotive catalysts.”

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  TIME LORDS

  They deem me mad because I will not sell my days for gold; and I deem them mad because they think my days have a price.

  —KAHLIL GIBRAN

  ON JANUARY 1, 2018, at 12:05 A.M., several hundred passengers in Auckland, New Zealand, stepped on board a metal time machine and travelled back to 2017. It made big news around the world, though the time machine was not a new i
nvention. It was Hawaiian Airlines Flight 446, performing its regular scheduled duty. The only difference was that on this occasion it departed shortly after midnight. It flew northeast over the international dateline back to Hawaii, which is twenty-three hours behind New Zealand, allowing the plane to land in the previous year at 10:15 A.M.

  The imaginary line that separates the world into two days is known as the international date line. First drawn in 1884, the north-south line runs halfway around the world from the heart of our global time system: the prime meridian in Greenwich, England. It doesn’t follow the same straight path as a line of longitude; instead, as the date line holds no legal international status, it zig-zags around countries, which are free to decide on which side they wish to belong.

  Because of this, certain countries are in fact two days apart instead of just one. How is this possible? Over a hundred years ago, Samoa decided to stay “a day behind” so that it could be in the same time zone as the United States to facilitate trade. Kiribati, which is located slightly farther to the east and an hour behind, chose to remain on the opposite side of the date line, a day in the future. Then in 2011, Western Samoa exercised its sovereign right to change its mind. As Australia and New Zealand had become more important trading partners, it hopped back into the future, fast forwarding from December 29 to December 31 (skipping December 30 entirely) to join the nations on the other side of the date line. American Samoa, a territory of the United States, elected to stay behind, however. This means that for two hours each day there are three calendar days on Earth. If it’s Tuesday at 11:30 P.M. in American Samoa, it’s 6:30 A.M. on a Wednesday in Toronto, and 12:30 A.M. on Thursday in Kiribati.*1