How long will our natural resources last?

University Degree Business and Administrative studies

Putting economics before ecology has a devastating effect on the planet. But while solutions for sustainable development already exist, political will is sadly missing.

How many planet earth’s will we need by 2050 to keep humankind in the style to which we have become accustomed? It's an absurd question and there's an absurd answer: two Planet Earths would apparently suffice. But it's nothing like as absurd as the fact that there's not a single world leader prepared to give a genuine consideration to our imminent collision with ecological reality. Our planet is running out of room and resources. Western society’s high consumption levels have plundered so much that outer space will have to be colonised within 50 years if natural resources continue to be exploited at the current rate.

A study by the World Wildlife Federation warns that the human race is plundering the planet at a pace that outstrips its capacity to support life. The study reveals that humans have destroyed more than a third of the natural world over the past three decades.

Using the image of the need for mankind to colonise space as a stark illustration of the problems facing Earth, the report warns that either consumption rates are dramatically and rapidly lowered or the planet will no longer be able to sustain its growing population.

The Earth is rich in natural resources. Some of these we depend on for our very survival, whilst others are consumed to enhance our quality of life. Some of the resources we use, such as oil and gas, take so long to form through natural processes that we can consider them non-renewable; eventually they will run out.

A Sustainable Solution is a product that should be capable of being made, used, and recycled continuously for a thousand years without negative environmental consequences.

We need to find new ways of doing things-using renewable resources and giving more consideration to the long-term effects of the things we do today. This generation is borrowing our world from the generations to come. The least we could do is leave it better than we found it.

The fact is that science is telling politicians something they are desperate not to hear.

The real price of extraction for many minerals had declined between 1870 and 1956. More recently the price for the period 1900 to 1986 showed that until the there was a negligible upward trend in the real prices of coal and natural gas, and virtually no increase in the price of crude oil. The longer-term prospects for these prices are uncertain, but new energy-producing techniques such as nuclear fusion may be able to keep energy prices at their long-term real levels, or even lower.

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The fact is that science is telling politicians something they are desperate not to hear.

The effective stocks of a natural resource can be increased in at least three ways:

1.) A technological innovation that reduces the amount of iron ore lost during mining or smelting clearly increases the effective stock of that resource. Likewise, a new technique may make it economical to force more oil out of previously abandoned wells. This decrease in waste translates directly into a rise in the effective supplies of oil. For example, say that in 1960, with known drilling techniques, only 40 percent of the oil at a site in Borger, Texas, could have been extracted at a cost ever likely to be acceptable, but by 1990 improved technology had raised this figure to 80 percent. In other words, there has occurred not a rise in the physical quantity of oil, but an increase in the productivity of the remaining supply.

2.) The energy crises of the seventies provided some dramatic illustrations of the substitutability of resources. Homeowners increased their expenditures on insulation to save on fuel costs, thus substituting fiberglass for heating oil. Newspapers reported that the cattle drives of earlier eras were being revived, with cowhand labour substituting for petrol. Technological innovation can reduce the cost of extracting or processing a resource. Because of technological breakthroughs, a new oil rig, for example, may require fewer labor hours to operate and use less electricity and less steel in its manufacture. Those savings of other resources can translate into savings of oil, because those other resources are thus freed up to be used elsewhere in the economy, and some of the alternative uses will entail substitution for oil.

3.) The third way we can increase our effective stocks of a natural resource is, of course, by technological changes that facilitate recycling. Say, for example, that a new recycling technique allows copper to be reused before it is scrapped and that no such reuse was economical before. Then this technique has doubled the effective reserves of copper. It is important to note, however, that recycling adopted without regard for economic considerations can actually waste resources rather than save them.

These three means can all increase the effective supplies of exhaustible resources. Some people believe that the burst of productivity and increase in living standards that has occurred since the industrial revolution can be attributed to our willingness to deplete our natural heritage at the expense of future generations. But as we have seen here, rising productivity may, in a real sense, actually increase humanity's stock of natural resources.

Can we expect such technological innovation to continue indefinitely? The evidence of trends in the prices of natural resources suggests that technological innovation has indeed provided continuing increases in the effective stocks of finite resources. But is there a limit to this process—can we expect the wonders of technology to continue to wring ever more out of the earth's resources? Unfortunately, no one knows the answer.

Recycling involves recovering materials that would otherwise have been thrown away and reprocessing them into useful products. In the past, because of the energy and cost involved in transport and reprocessing, recycling has sometimes been of dubious environmental benefits as it was energy intensive and led to pollution. Now, however, thanks to improved separation and processing techniques, it has become a more practical treatment option for waste items such as metals.

All aluminium soft drink and beer cans can be recycled apart from those with steel ends. Aluminium cooking foil can also be recycled. Aluminium cans that have been collected for recycling are first sorted and then baled into bricks. The bricks are transported to processing plants where they are fed into rotary furnaces and the aluminium heated to about 70`C. The molten aluminium is then cast into ingots which are sent to rolling mills where they are remade into new cans. In some cases, the recycled cans are reprocessed into other aluminium products.
Aluminium recycling is extremely efficient as the energy needed to make one new aluminium can is the same as the energy needed to recycle 20 aluminium cans. However, it must be realised that the most important environmental effects of aluminium occur during extraction and conversion of the raw material, bauxite, into a semi-manufactured product. This is done electrically, demanding a large quantity of energy.
At construction sites, materials can be separated at source and placed in covered skips and bins-this will save on site clean-up costs. It is important to encourage 'waste awareness' among employees and subcontractors.

The UK recycle 42% of their aluminium cans. But in Switzerland 91% of aluminium cans are recycled.

No resource has inspired so great a fear of running out as oil has. This fear is not new. The BP Statistical Review 2000 has calculated that world reserves of oil are 140.4 billion tonnes. Every time in the last hundred years that an expert predicted we would run out, that prediction has been wrong—and not just wrong, but wrong by a huge margin. For example, in one of the most astoundingly wrong predictions, the Interior Department stated in 1939 that U.S. oil supplies would run out in thirteen years. Of course, over sixty years later, the United States is still producing oil.

If one assumes that total production of copper will remain stable, the identified resources would last 27 years (Minerals Handbook 2001). If we assume that production will increase at the rate it has in recent years it would reduce the duration of known reserves by nearly half. However, all these forecasts are quite unreliable.

One tendency, that makes forecasts variable, is what is regarded "exploitable". Around 1900 ores contained 5% Cu by 1980 a minimum of 0.5% Cu appeared profitable. By improvement of flotation techniques even lower contents will be accepted.

With worldwide heightening environmental concerns over non-renewable resources, issues around the type of generation used by power companies are becoming more and more prominent. Most New Zealand power companies use natural, renewable resources such as water, wind and geothermal steam to generate power. These are much more beneficial as they do not deplete our natural environment and are sustainable long-term.
Hydro generation is a good example of a renewable resource because the water is used again and again as it flows from the lake to the sea and the lakes are replenished by natural rainfall. The only disadvantage of this system is that it is reliant on having regular, sufficient rainfall. However rainfall can vary a lot, both seasonally, and from year to year as global weather patterns change.

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