CONSUMPTION- The Real Cost of Plundering the Planets Resources. Our accelerating rates of extraction come with immense ecological and social consequences.Our accelerating rates of extraction come with immense ecological and social consequences. Elizabeth Kolbert October 23, 2023   The process generally begins with quartz’s cousin, quartzite, which [  {Quartz]consists of a large measure of silicon dioxide- under very high heat, and in the presence of carbon, the quartzite gives up most of its oxygen.Then acid and a great deal more heat are applied, until the silicon reaches a purity level of 99.9999999 per cent, or, as it’s known in the business, “nine nines.” . It is here that Spruce Pine’s quartz comes into play. To form a boule, pure silicon has to be heated in a special crucible to twenty-seven hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The crucible must be tough enough to withstand this temperature, and, at the same time, it must have the right chemical composition, so it won’t introduce contaminants. The only substance that meets both these criteria is high-purity quartz, and one of the only spots where the right sort of quartz can be found is Spruce Pine.Spruce Pine’s quartz is so valuable that, as the Vancouver-based journalist Vince Beiser observes in his book “The World in a Grain,” almost everything about it, outside of its purity, is a closely guarded secret. The company that owns the town’s largest mine—Sibelco, a Belgian conglomerate—doesn’t publish production figures. All this stealth, Ed Conway suggests in his new book, “Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization” (Knopf), is justified. “There are few such cases where we are so utterly reliant on a single place,” he writes. He quotes an unnamed industry veteran who notes that someone flying a crop duster over Spruce Pine and releasing “a very particular powder” could “end the world’s production of semiconductors” within six months. No production of semiconductors would mean no production of computers, cell phones, automobiles, microwaves, game consoles, fitness trackers, digital watches, digital cameras, televisions—the list goes on and on. “Even in devices that don’t have ‘smart’ in their name, mechanical linkages have long since given way to a network of semiconductors,” Conway, a London-based journalist, observes. “Nearly every economic activity, nearly every dollar of global GDP, relies in one way or another on the microscopic switches of semiconductors.” Prudently, he does not reveal what that very particular powder is.                                                                                                                                                                                          Conway reckons, humanity mines, drains, and blasts more stuff out of the ground each year than it did in total during the roughly three hundred millennia between the birth of the species and the start of the Korean War. This comes with immense consequences, both ecological and social, even if we don’t attend to them. Consider sand, the first of Conway’s not so dark materials. According to a 2022 report from the United Nations Environment Programme, global demand for “sand resources” has tripled in the past two decades, to something like a hundred trillion pounds a year; this amounts to almost thirty-five pounds a day for every person on the planet.“Where once there were riverbanks, today there are sheer drops into the water,” Conway writes. Such is the hunger for sand that, in many parts of the globe, an illicit trade has sprung up. A lot of sand also goes into building buildings, not to mention dams, bridges, overpasses, and roadways. Sand and gravel are the major ingredients in concrete, some seven hundred billion tons of which now slather the earth. Often, concrete is reinforced with rebar, which is made with iron, the third of Conway’s six materials. (The material I’ve skipped here is salt, which, Conway says, is essential to just about every chemical process that’s ever been invented.) Worldwide, nearly three billion tons of iron ore are extracted each year.  Like many books in its genre—about how x number of y items explain z—“Material World” has trouble sticking to its chosen integer. One of Conway’s six raw materials is oil, but into this category he also squishes natural gas. Both are obviously fossil fuels, but, as Conway himself notes, they have distinctive properties that make them essential in different ways. Oil powers the transportation sector—cars, trucks, airplanes, and supertankers—and its by-products go into plastics, which show up in just about every consumer product you can name, from air mattresses to zippers. Natural gas, meanwhile, is primarily used to generate heat and electricity. It’s also a key ingredient for synthesizing nitrogen fertilizer, without which, it is estimated, half the world’s eight billion people would starve. Meanwhile, a transportation sector that runs on electricity will require a whole lot more of his fourth material, copper..........read on- an ominous future for mankind lies ahead!         https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/30/the-real-cost-of-plundering-the-planets-resources?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Science_102823&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&bxid=5e2bb2c62a077c05ea0a9723&cndid=59734366&hasha=284acdf0ea1b080a3966b6c47b8c38c0&hashb=a4ccd8de508e6a2ad52eb405268d00c48cb0e5a6&hashc=7a51910293749398eff22b8bf795b4f5ed4d3ebff046adf7c9ebf33811a9eca8&esrc=subscribe-page&utm_term=TNY_Science_Tech

Ending over mending: planned obsolescence is killing the planet. In his novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley writes of a society in which recorded voices subliminally prepare babies for their future role as consumers. “I do love flying, I do love having new clothes,” they whisper. “But old clothes are beastly. We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending. Ending is better than mending.” Huxley depicts a dystopia. But the slogans he describes might equally apply to common products today. “Before Apple, everything was interchangeable. Sure, every phone had its own special part, like different cars. But now, each year, Apple is changing its design on purpose to make it harder for us to fix them.” That’s Nicholas Muradian from the repair company Phone Spot, talking about the serialisation of components for the new iPhone 12. The latest iteration of Apple’s flagship product can’t be repaired – or, at least, not without using the company’s expensive proprietary service. That’s not uncommon. Some manufacturers now build with special screws or glue parts together, specifically to prevent home maintenance. Others simply don’t provide the basic components that would give their products a longer life. When the second world war ended, the tremendous productivity of the wartime American economy suddenly posed a problem, with manufacturers desperately requiring new markets to keep their assembly lines humming. Disposability was one of the solutions adopted, as the industrial designer Brooks Stevens explained. “Our whole economy is based on planned obsolescence,” he said, “and everybody who can read without moving his lips should know it by now. We make good products, we induce people to buy them, and next year we deliberately introduce something that will make those products old fashioned, out of date, obsolete. We do that for the soundest reason: to make money.” Consumers in America and throughout the world were encouraged to become dissatisfied with perfectly serviceable items, so that instead of making one-off purchases they updated seasonally. As the Australian Productivity Commission takes submissions into its Right to Repair inquiry, it’s worth thinking about how the items we use daily became so disposable. That psychological campaign was reinforced by mechanisms that made the continued use of household items difficult. As one designer exulted, the “planned existence spans of products” was “the greatest economic boost to the American economy since the origination of time payments.” Environmentalists now refer to the late 1940s as the “Great Acceleration” – the period in which humanity’s impact on the planet increased exponentially. If you’re 80 years old or more, something like 90% of carbon emissions ever generated by humans can be dated to your lifetime, a consequence of the deliberately wasteful economy unleashed during the post-war economic boom. The lack of repairability does not merely exemplify the problem with how we consume. It’s also symptomatic of the way we now produce. Until a few hundred years ago, people made or did things because those things were immediately useful to them or someone they knew. If we want to reverse the ecological catastrophe engulfing our planet, we must refocus attention on what is produced and how. In an increasingly fragile world, we need more — much more — control over production. We need conscious choices which resources we use and which we don’t, instead of letting giant corporations do whatever makes them the most money......https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/17/ending-over-mending-planned-obsolescence-is-killing-the-planet                                                                                                                                                                              Research: The Unintended Consequences of Right-to-Repair Laws by Luyi Yang, Chen Jin, and Cungen Zhu January 19, 2023 The growing “right-to-repair” legislative movement seeks to make it easier and cheaper for consumers to fix their products by requiring manufacturers to share repair information, provide diagnostic tools, and supply service parts. Various right-to-repair laws have been considered and passed around the world. Repair advocates argue that such legislation will break manufacturers’ monopoly on the repair market and benefit consumers. They further contend that easier repair allows consumers to hold on to their old products longer, so they do not throw away used products and buy new ones as quickly. This would reduce the environmental impact by reducing e-waste and new production. Our research, forthcoming in the journal Management Science, challenges this conventional wisdom and finds that the right-to-repair legislation may not benefit either consumers or the environment.  The key is that manufacturers might strategically adjust new product prices to mitigate their foreseeable profit loss from the right-to-repair legislation.  Will manufacturers follow a margin strategy and raise new product prices to capitalize on easier repair? Will manufacturers follow a volume strategy and cut new product prices to lure consumers into replacing instead of repairing a glitchy product? Such price responses can have nuanced implications for both consumers and the environment.  We built an economic model to analyze manufacturers’ reactive pricing strategies. Our model examined “durable goods” that are used repeatedly over time, such as cars, tractors, refrigerators, and cell phones.....read on       https://hbr.org/2023/01/research-the-unintended-consequences-of-right-to-repair-laws  

Fashion’s environmental impact. Fashion is responsible for 10 percent of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions and 20 percent of global wastewater, and uses more energy than the aviation and shipping sectors combined.

Impacts on water. Global fashion also consumes 93 billion metric tons of clean water each year, about half of what Americans drink annually. Cotton is an especially thirsty crop. For example, one kilogram of cotton used to produce a pair of jeans can consume 7,500 to 10,000 liters of water—the amount a person would drink over 10 years. Cotton production also requires pesticides and insecticides, which pollute the soil; runoff from fertilized cotton fields carry the excess nutrients to water bodies, causing eutrophication and algal blooms.The dyeing process for fabrics, which uses toxic chemicals, is responsible for 17 to 20 percent of global industrial water pollution. Seventy-two toxic chemicals have been found in the water used in textile dyeing.                                                                                                                Contributions to Climate Change To feed the fashion industry’s need for wood pulp to make fabrics like rayon, viscose and other fabrics, 70 million tons of trees are cut down each year. That number is expected to double by 2034, speeding deforestation in some of the world’s endangered forests. The fashion industry produces 1.2 million metric tons of CO2 each year, according to a MacArthur Foundation study. In 2018, it resulted in more greenhouse gas emissions than the carbon produced by France, Germany and the UK all together. Polyester, which is actually plastic made from fossil fuels, is used for about 65 percent of all clothing, and consumes 70 million barrels of oil each year. In addition, the fashion industry uses large amounts of fossil fuel-based plastic for packaging and hangers.                                                                            Waste Less than one percent of clothing is recycled to make new clothes. The fibers in clothing are polymers, long chains of chemically linked molecules. Washing and wearing clothing shorten and weaken these polymers, so by the time a garment is discarded, the polymers are too short to turn into a strong new fabric. In addition, most of today’s textile-to-textile recycling technologies cannot separate out dyes, contaminants, or even a combination of fabrics such as polyester and cotton. As a result, 53 million metric tons of discarded clothing are incinerated or go to landfills each year.                    Microplastic pollution Many people have lived solely in athleisure wear during the pandemic, but the problem with this is that the stretch and breathability in most athleisure comes from the use of synthetic plastic fibers like polyester, nylon, acrylic, spandex and others, which are made of plastic.Because it must be cheap, fast fashion is dependent on the exploited labor force in developing countries where regulations are lax. Workers are underpaid, overworked, and exposed to dangerous conditions or health hazards; many are underage.                                                                                            Fashion’s social impacts......Of the 75 million factory workers around the world, it’s estimated that only two percent earn a living wage. To keep brands from moving to another country or region with lower costs, factories limit wages and are disinclined to spend money to improve working conditions. Moreover, workers often live in areas with waterways polluted by the chemicals from textile dyeing.                                    How can fashion be more sustainable? As opposed to our current linear model of fashion production with environmental impacts at every stage, where resources are consumed, turned into a product, then discarded, sustainable fashion minimizes its environmental impact, and even aims to benefit the environment. The goal is a circular fashion industry where waste and pollution are eliminated, and materials are used for as long as possible, then reused for new products to avoid the need to exploit virgin resources. Many designers, brands, and scientists — including students in Columbia University’s Environmental Science and Policy program— are exploring ways to make fashion more sustainable and circular.........and there's more       https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/06/10/why-fashion-needs-to-be-more-sustainable/

 From curbing consumerism to caring for others, Ramadan has lessons for us all  Nadeine Asbali  Ramadan is here, and Muslims all around the world are starting a month-long spiritual bootcamp: days spent abstaining from food and drink, and nights passed in prayer and contemplation. Mosques brim with life as they open their doors to the young and the old, familiar faces and new ones standing side by side, reciting the same words as more than a billion others around the globe. As Ramadan is celebrated in a nation [United Kingdom]more fractured than ever, it’s not just Muslims who could do with a little of its spirit. It is a common misconception that Ramadan is all about food. In truth, it is about starving the body to feed the soul. By temporarily depriving our bodies of what they need, we forge room for spirituality and introspection, generosity and discipline, to blossom in its place. Maybe we could all do with more of that in our era, where the self is supreme. Self-care and selfies, self-made and self-sufficient – we live in an individualistic age where the I comes before the we. The pandemic gave us a brief respite from that, as we clapped on our doorsteps and made small talk with the people we had previously ignored. But it didn’t last long. We were soon back to avoiding eye contact on the street, and passing homeless people by as if they were invisible. Ramadan forces Muslims to uphold the importance of community. We share food with neighbours, and give charity within our means: whether a smile to a stranger or cash to those in need. With the cost-of-living crisis so extreme that people are having todecline produce at food banksbecause they cannot afford the energy to cook them, imagine if it was the social norm to embody the Ramadan spirit and give so freely that, as the prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said, even your left hand doesn’t know what your right has given. Imagine if a family forced to choose between heating and eating opened their door to find a tray of home-cooked food on the doorstep, delivered by an anonymous neighbour. When poverty is inflicted by the state, manufactured through budget cuts and shifting policy, it falls on us to enact change. A famous Hadith reminds us that nobody can call themselves a Muslim if their own stomach is full while their neighbour is hungry. What if we all lived by this sentiment? Wealth distribution is fundamental to the Muslim understanding of social justice. We are obliged todonate 2.5% of our wealthabove a certain threshold to charity. Can you imagine the potential for change if the world’s billionaires donated even 1% of their wealth each year?                https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/apr/03/consumerism-caring-ramadan-muslims-holy-month