Overview

While industrialization has brought with it prosperity and improvement in quality of life, it has failed to take into consideration the interconnected nature of our world. Our consumption patterns have contributed greatly to this exhaustion of natural resources, through systematic generation of ‘waste’. Over the past five decades, the global population has doubled, and extraction of natural resources has tripled.

Almost all our existing processes are linear in nature. They take in resources and change their form by concentrating, altering and synthesizing them into products, which at the end of their intended use cannot be reused or recycled. If present trends continue, by 2060 global resource use will more than double again, and greenhouse gas emissions will rise by 43%. Currently, humanity − all 7.8 billion of us − produces around two billion tons of waste every year, representing around 256 kilograms per person.