Not only has population expanded, in industrial societies physical consumption per person expanded too. One measure of excess consumption is solid waste to landfill. In the United States daily solid waste per person rose from 2.7 pounds in 1960 to 4.7 pounds in 2005. This began leveling off in 2000, but of because of population growth total municipal waste is still rising.
Landfill waste is only one sink for garbage. It accumulates in five oceanic pools called gyres. Largest is the Pacific gyre, now about the size of Africa, consisting mostly of tiny plastic particles floating on and near the surface, and not obvious from a ship. But since CO2-oxygen interchange occurs at the ocean surface, how this scum could affect it is unknown, but probably not in a positive way.
The world now has a population of about 1 billion registered vehicles on the road. Only a hundred years ago it was nearly zero, and we keep adding them at a faster clip. From a marketing viewpoint the auto industry remains over capacity, but it produces about 70 million new vehicles per year, and they hang around a long time. Two years ago an “optimistic” projection put the world vehicle population at 3 billion by 2025. Even at double the fuel economy, whether all vehicles could be fueled is doubtful.
Without any statistics, American over-consumption is easy to spot. Just look at housing sizes, vehicle sizes, driving distances, food portions in restaurants, and the check out lines at big-box stores. A great deal of the American economy consists of trading and consuming a lot of “stuff.”
The accelerated pace of global consumption in the last 50 years is shown by gold. All the world’s inventory of gold, mined since antiquity, would about fill two olympic swimming pools. One of those pools would consist of gold mined in the last 50 years. Globally, production and consumption of raw materials continues to accelerate. Free market capitalism is a marvelous motivator of expansion, but it does not know how to shut itself off. The system must quickly learn how function much smarter –serving up quality of life without the excess physical consumption.