Biodiversity, Climate Change, Development & Aid, Environment, Europe, Global, Global Geopolitics, Headlines, Poverty & SDGs

Q&A: “We Have a Take-Make-Waste Economy”

Liza Jansen interviews Dutch ecologist LOUISE VET

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 21 2010 (IPS) - To halt the planet’s declining biodiversity and loss of critical natural resources, both the economy we live in and communication about science needs to be changed profoundly, says a prominent Dutch ecologist.

Louise Vet Credit: Netherlands Institute of Ecology

Louise Vet Credit: Netherlands Institute of Ecology

We presently live in a linear “take, make and waste” economy in which natural resources are running out and ecosystems are being destroyed, says Louise Vet, extraordinary professor of evolutionary ecology in The Netherlands.

But this clash between economic and ecological interests could be reconciled by implementing a so-called “circular economy”, she argues.

Vet, director of the Netherlands Institute of Ecology, spoke with IPS correspondent Liza Jansen about how this circular economy offers concrete solutions to prevent further ecological losses and teaches how to commercially benefit from it. Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Apart from your professional interest in outstanding ecologic scientific research, you try to arrange a good marriage between ecology and economy. How do you achieve this? A: It’s primarily a business challenge to do it differently. Many people are currently thinking and working on innovation to benefit the planet, economy, ecology and the people at the same time, the so-called People Planet Profit-model.


Since politicians would rather listen to businessmen and people from the industry than to environmentalists, we do a lot through businesses.

As an example: when a couple of years ago a new government was formed in The Netherlands, about 80 Dutch businessmen from multinationals were involved to stress the importance of sustainability in composing a new cabinet. The news appeared on the front-page of the major Dutch newspaper the NRC, with 80 signatures of these businessmen.

At first sustainability was seen as a left-wing thing, but because we present it as an innovation challenge with beneficial possibilities rather than a problem, right-wing people have gained interest.

On a regular basis my collegues and I lunch with politicians in The Netherlands, to talk about topics such as deforestation and policies regarding the fisheries, trying to get our ideas across the political agenda.

Q: What’s the biggest obstacle to reaching an agreement? A: We have very limited focus on long-term goals, which is difficult for present day industry. One of the major obstacles is the way we value things in our present day economy. We tax labour rather than resources.

If we’d change our financial system, which I think we should, other things would be valued. A great lot of resources on our planet are limited and should therefore be priced higher.

We’re trying to get to a different kind of financial economic calculation with, for example, paying for every used piece of carbon molecule. The rarer they are, the more expensive they get and the higher they are taxed. This would change the financial system completely and would therefore make different profits.

Q: How much more time is needed? A: I hope Western countries can get all their money together to save the forests that are so important for our planet. Right now a tree is only valued by the amount of wood it produces when you harvest it. But when the tree is valued on an ecosystem services basis, it is tremendously important for everybody on this planet.

Taking it away has a long-term affect on the ecosytem services: it catches CO2 [carbon dioxide], it filters air, it has its micro, fauna, flora, diversity importance etc. A tree contains so much more value than a simple piece of wood for a table or a chair.

Q: You recently invited everyone to come and poo in your research centre. Why? A: One of our most limited resources is phosphorus. Phosphorus is in every cell, in our DNA, in every living organism, plant or bacteria. We use it in our artificial fertilisers, making agriculture possible to feed the people in the world.

Worldwide, we’re disturbing the phosphorus circle, though we only have 80 years left before it’s done and its availability is limited to a few places in the world. As soon as that happens, we can’t have any artificial fertilisers anymore, which will be disastrous for food production.

Phosphorus in the future will be like fresh water.

What we do in the Netherlands: all our pee and poo goes straight to a sewage system that covers the whole of The Netherlands. Our sewage slush contains great concentrations of phosphorus, but we don’t do anything with it.

Therefore we’re trying to build a new model to regain the phosphorus from our own poo and pee by closing the nutrient cycle. We have vacuum toilets that hardly use any water because they use groundwater in stead of drinking water.

The pee and poo go to fermentation tanks, and after making energy out of “the black water”, as we call it, the [remainder] goes in there with all its minerals. Then it goes to algae, which take out the precious nutrients like phosphorous. The algae are harvested and given back to the soil (as fertiliser).

We’ll be the first office laboratory building of this kind.

Q: You state that we “live in the wrong economy”. What do you mean? A: We have a take-make-waste economy, not thinking about the stuff we use and what to do with it afterwards. It’s this so-called linear economy that is so wrong. We don’t value our resources enough.

Energy is not the real problem, we can solve that, it’s the resources. We’re in a spaceship, we have only a limited amount of stuff available on the planet and if we destroy it, we eventually make our own lives impossible.

Therefore we need to get to a circular economy, to at least keep the limited resources in the amount we have them now, rather than diminishing them even further.

 
Republish | | Print |


best books about public speaking