Recycle & Reuse: There are more than seven billion of us on the planet

Published 10:00 pm Tuesday, July 14, 2015

The United Nations observed World Population Day on July 11 as a way to bring attention to the issues caused by an increase in world population. It’s estimated that the world population is currently more than seven billion, with 15 people being added every six seconds. According to the nonprofit Population Connection, the world is growing “at a near-record pace, with a population equal to New York City added every month, and equal to Germany added every year. In the year 2000, there were six billion of us, and the number of people is growing every second. This growth in human numbers has been called a population explosion.”

If these growth trends continue, the human population is expected to grow to 10 billion by the end of this century, yet the Earth’s size remains the same. The capacity of our planet to provide space, food, resources and energy to sustain everyone is limited. Today we are facing the challenge of carrying capacity, the point at which there are not enough natural resources, such as food and fuel, to continue to support any more members of a given species. Carrying capacity, however, is hard to estimate since people use resources at different rates. Predictions about future trends in technological advances, resource availability, demography and economic development all contribute to the estimates.

To see just how quickly the human population has grown during the last 2,000 years, I recommend you watch the video called World Population History at www.worldpopulationhistory.org. This video shows a map of the world overlaid with an animation of dots on the map to represent population changes over time. The site also provides an interactive map with the same information.

You will see that the human population began to increase dramatically during the Industrial Revolution when many advances in farming, nutrition, medicine and sanitation promoted longer lives. And while birth rates in industrialized countries began to fall, they increased in the developing world.

Carrying capacity is more complicated than simply counting the population. Population Connection wrote, “The entire world population could fit into Texas and each person could have an area equal to the space of a typical American family home.” While this gives us a visual representation of the current world population it doesn’t take into consideration the amount of land and water needed for each person to maintain their lifestyle.

The amount of space required to provide the resources needed to produce the food, water, shelter, clothing and energy to support the population and their lifestyle is called the ecological footprint. The more resources that each person uses, the fewer people the Earth can support.

World Population History estimates that it takes one and a half planet Earths to sustain the current population — we’ve already overshot the ecological footprint. If current trends remain the same by the year 2050 we would need three Earths.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration states that “each American uses more energy, more water and produces more garbage than a person living anywhere else in the world. While Americans are less than 5 percent of the world population, we consume 19 percent of the world’s energy and produce 18 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions.”

The 2011 study of energy use by the World Bank estimates “in one year, the average American uses almost two times as much energy as the average Japanese person, almost four times the average person in China and 15 times as much as the average Kenyan.” Imagine if all seven billion of us used the amount of resources a typical American does.

While the issue of resource distribution, quality, safety and even space on the planet is a serious one it’s not just the governments that can do things to help. Individuals can make thoughtful lifestyle choices that can significantly reduce the stress on our resources and the planet. Where we live, how we use energy in our home, how we travel, what we eat and how much garbage we produce are all areas of our life that can have a positive impact on the planet today with lots of benefits for the future.

Improvements in technology, slowing the population growth and changing the global culture so that more people make better decisions about consumptions can all contribute to lessening the impact of the human population on the planet. Simple choices like swapping one meat meal for a vegetarian meal each week, reusing and donating clothing, carpooling, walking more and even recycling packaging from common household items can have a positive impact in the long term.

For educators interested in incorporating population education into their curriculum for middle and high school students, Population Connection has two websites: www.worldof7billion.org and www.populationeducation.org. Each provides practical lessons with themes including history, health of the oceans, carbon emissions and more. While most of the lessons are for individual classrooms, some are for planning school-wide events.

Liz Swafford is the recycling and education program coordinator for the Dalton-Whitfield Solid Waste Authority. Contact her at (706) 278-5001 or lswafford@dwswa.org.