Cows wandered in the distance as Rukayya Ibrahim Muazu and her colleagues set up a stand with information about plastic milk jugs. It was a sunny spring day in 2019 at Our Cow Molly farm in Sheffield, England.
Milk jugs and all the things we use daily have secret stories, Muazu knew. These are the stories of where the items came from before we got them and where they will go when we are done with them. She was learning these stories as part of her PhD program in chemical and environmental engineering at the University of Sheffield.
Take a plastic milk jug. To get it, drills must first pull crude oil from the Earth. Factories turn the oil into petroleum and then plastic. Other factories form the plastic into jugs. Trucks deliver those jugs to farms, where they get filled with milk.
Later, a truck will carry the full jugs to nearby stores and cafés, including one at Muazu’s school. After students like her stir all the milk into their tea or coffee, the café gets rid of the jugs. About half will get recycled. The rest head to landfills.
This process is quite typical today. Things get used up or break or we simply don’t want them anymore. So, we throw most of these into the trash. “There is so much waste,” says Muazu. Having completed her degree, she now works at the University of Surrey. It’s in Guildford, England.
Amelie Côté agrees. People “take, make, consume and throw away,” she says. She’s an analyst in Canada at Équiterre. It’s an organization in Montreal, Quebec, that seeks solutions to environmental problems. One of those problems is that too many people — especially those in the industrialized world — use and discard far more stuff than they should. This is called overconsumption.
Consuming too much stuff drains resources. It can harm ecosystems — even people, especially those in low-income countries. It also worsens climate change. According to the Global Footprint Network, last year people…
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