Think Zero Waste

Porridge is either breakfast or waste, depending on one's point of view. Mom used to say 'it sticks to the ribs', her metaphor for good food. It also sticks to the bowl, which is a problem as I load breakfast dishes into the dishwasher. The machine doesn't deal well with sticky porridge unless I help out. Porridge is either breakfast or waste, and what we do is either assimilate it or waste it. The difference is all in the head.

Get ready: March 30 is International Day of Zero Waste.

Nice? Well yes, but zero waste is less obvious than it seems. Anything, including your best friend, can be waste if it's in the wrong place. Consider these statistics (or skip to the end because numbers are confusing and I probably got it all wrong anyway).

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Current world human population is 8,099,640,493 plus about two more every second. 

The average weight of a human is 137 pounds (62 kg), which includes 130 pounds (60 kg) for Asians and Africans sweating in the fields and 180 pounds (82 kg) for North Americans munching chips on the couch. The number of deaths worldwide this year is estimated to be 60.95 million. Using these numbers, my calculator reports that there will be 3.76 million metric tons of human flesh and bone to dispose of in 2024. Lots of cremations and burials. We're running out of space. What are we going to do with all the dead people? We can't leave them on the couch in front of the TV where they expired. The house won't sell. They are waste.

Elon Musk might let us dump them in outer space for a nominal fee dependent on the price of rocket fuel. But wait. Are we going to waste the material in those bodies? How long will it take to run out of the stuff of which people are made? Water, for instance.

You saw what I did there? I began with waste as a noun, something unwanted to be discarded like broken appliances that Dad would leave at the curb for the garbage collector. I sneakily turned waste into a verb, to dispose of something of value, which Mom said was naughty, and you'd better eat what's in the bowl or there's no supper. Mom would bring in the broken appliances from the curb while Dad was at work. She knew that they would magically start working again someday if she waited patiently. So zero waste means either nothing gets discarded (nothing and nobody dies) or don't throw that good stuff away (we can use this: harvest the water in that body like the Fremen on Arrakis). We get so muddled by using a word in different ways without saying so.

We've been recycling bodies forever without saying so (because it's yucky). According to population geneticists, mitochondrial Eve lived in Africa 200,000 years ago. If she weighed 60 kg when she died, 60% of which was water, then 36 kg (36,000 g) of water returned to the biosphere from her body. The molecular weight of water is 18.  The number of water molecules in 18 grams (Avogadro's number) is 6.02 x 10^23. So Eve's body gave back (6.02 x 10^23 x 36,000 ÷ 18) = 1.2 x 10^27 water molecules to the world.

The volume of water on earth is 1.3 x 10^9 cubic kilometres  = 1.3 x 10^18 cubic metres. Since a cubic metre of water has a mass of 1000 kg, that comes to 1.3 x 10^21 kg, which means that a kg of water on earth contains, on average, (1.2 x 10^27) ÷ (1.3 x 10^21) = 1,000,000 molecules from Eve's body, assuming that the water on earth got well mixed in 200,000 years. 

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For an 80 kg North American whose body contains 48 kg of water, that includes 48,000,000 molecules that were in Eve's body when she expired. They passed through a few other bodies first, and will be passed along again for sure. That's recycling.

Of course, molecules are tiny, so 48,000,000 molecules doesn't amount to much. But it makes you think. Eve's body may have been waste for a short time until they put her in the ground. But Eve's water wasn't wasted for long because water is readily assimilated by other organisms and dispersed in air, ocean and fresh water, glaciers and ground water. What, then, is waste?

It's just a state of mind. According to the mindless planet, nothing is waste. Zero waste is the way things work here on earth. If you want to belong, think zero waste. 

Otherwise, the end won't be pretty, so you can sign up for the colony on Mars where you will learn to reuse things.

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788 words including the math. Too much. I was going to toss it in the basket like the note I wrote last week, but that isn't how we do zero waste. 

You could reuse this as your home screen, or forward it to the mayor. Or print it and shred it and use the confetti in your compost heap. I'm going to send it to the company who made my lawnmower because they ignored my email asking about repairs.

When Cemetery Space Runs Out: CBC Radio

Geologic History of Earth: PBS, Youtube

Fossil Fuels Put the World at Risk: David Suzuki Foundation

Plastic Waste and Pollution Reduction: Government of Canada

Plastic-Eating Bacteria: LiveScience