A vast “circularity gap” is driving resource depletion and risk, but closing it could unlock trillions in value and reduce pressure on the planet.

Every year the world tips US$30 trillion’s worth of valuable materials into its garbage tips, waterways, the atmosphere and other dumping grounds. Put another way, every person on Earth would be about $4000 a year better off if we reused stuff and reduced losses – instead of chucking it all away.

That’s the finding of the 2026  Circularity Gap report, a regular study of humanity’s colossal use and waste of materials. The gap it refers to is the difference between the avoidable losses incurred by our sloppy, lazy, throwaway society, and the huge benefits we can reap by eliminating losses and reusing materials.

More importantly, it is one of the few readily attainable goals that can help save our society from collapse and our grandchildren from obliteration.

As discussed in the  recent piece on population, the Earth is currently carrying three to four times more people than it can support in the long run. We have 8.3 billion people, heading for 11-12 billion by the latter part of the 21st century. And according to scientific experts, the  Earth can carry only 2.5 billion at today’s levels of material consumption.

The selfish and the thoughtless frequently object that society (meaning they) will never agree to the 70 per cent cut in its material demands which is necessary for the preservation of civilisation.

Maybe not – but closing the ‘circularity gap’ would almost eliminate the need for new materials to be extracted, by simply using as close to 100 per cent of the old ones as we can get. Lowering our population will do the rest.

The bottom line is this: humanity currently  consumes 105 billion tonnes of materials it has extracted from the Earth system every year, in the form of food, fibre, energy, minerals, timber and building materials. This has grown from 28 billion tonnes in 1972, meaning that our material demand has increased by 275 per cent in the same time it took the population to grow by 115 per cent. In resource terms, today’s humans are three times greedier than their grandparents.

However, the maximum the Earth can sustain renewably, according to the Global Footprint Network and scientific analysts, is the extraction of 60 billion tonnes of materials annually.

However, at present rates human material consumption is forecast to hit  160 billion tonnes by the 2060s – 100 billion tonnes more than the Earth can support. And we will waste around 150 billion tonnes of it.

Reduced to the individual, the average person now consumes 12 tonnes of materials a year (far more in rich countries), rising to 18 tonnes in the 2060s. Yet the Earth can sustain only seven tonnes per person.

The global resource crisis is most evident in the growing water shortages, which now afflict half of Earth’s citizens and most of our megacities. But global shortages of food, timber, clean air and key strategic minerals are not far away.

The latest Circularity Gap report, however, accentuates not so much the crisis – as the opportunity: a $30 trillion (€25tn) opportunity, from eliminating unnecessary losses in all productive areas of the economy, especially in food, energy, processing, manufacturing, transport and construction.

The report states “This means that for every €3 of economic value created globally, around €1 is lost due to linear material use. These losses are avoidable and represent a significant opportunity for circularity to enhance value recovery and long-term value retention across economies.”

Unfortunately, current economic metrics – like GDP – do not take account of these losses, it warns. In other words, we need a more ecologically-literate form of economics to base our decisions on.

The report cautions that realising our lost $30 trillion isn’t just about adopting recycling – it’s also very much about reducing resource extraction, improving efficiency, harvesting production waste and maximising resource value all along the chain.

It is time to recognise our throwaway society, not just as obscenely wasteful – but as a bleak and selfish chapter in the human story that casually threw away the lives of its children and grandchildren in the civilisational collapse which it precipitated.

People are starting to recognise the havoc which global heating, nuclear war and even environmental collapse can cause to humanity’s future chances of survival. But they remain largely ignorant or indifferent to the lasting damage that resource failure can inflict.

Besides freshwater, major life-sustaining resources now slipping into critical scarcity include topsoil (for growing crops), forest products, fish and clean air. Global heating and continued population growth will amplify all these shortages.

Resource failure is, with strong reason, one of  the ten catastrophic threats that are currently combining to menace the future of civilisation and the human species. Also, it is getting worse: the volume of materials recycled has actually fallen from 8.6 to 6.9% in the past ten years. Meaning we waste 93% of everything we now extract from the Earth.

Yet the solution – closing the ‘circularity gap’ – is both affordable and readily achievable. There is nothing that prevents us from ending waste – and thirty trillion darn good reasons to do so.

The  human jawbone is the most destructive implement on the planet. Every day, yours alone chews through 12 kilos of topsoil, 950 litres of water, 1.6 litres of fuel and 1g of increasingly toxic pesticides while producing 4.9 kilos of carbon emissions. Yet all of this colossal waste could be reversed simply  by adopting ‘renewable food’. And nobody in the world ever need go hungry again.

The rewards for ending losses and recycling our waste are far, far greater than the discovery of any major new technology. It is equivalent to one quarter of the total value of the world economy ($126 trillion).

Retrieving those vast losses does not require any new alchemy. The technologies to do it already exist - and many have done for decades. The glass and aluminium industries have shown the way. Plastics and rare metals are catching up.  Smart companies are already scenting huge profits.

So let’s start turning all that waste into real wealth.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.

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