Over-Consumption Unchanged Despite Recession

This month marks a year after the beginning of the financial crisis. You would think that in a year where purse strings are tighter than ever, we would be saving money any way we could. Apparently Not.

A report by the New Economics Foundation into global over-consumption shows that despite one of the biggest global recessions for a century, the trend toward ever growing over-consumption has hardly changed.

The Consumption Explosion: the Third UK Interdependence Day Report measures from the beginning of each year until the day that the world goes into ‘ecological debt’, consuming more resources and generating more waste than ecosystems can produce and absorb. If the Ecological Debt Day falls before the end of the year, consumption is at unsustainable levels.

The worlds Eco-Debt has been growing more and more for the past 20 years and we are currently over-consuming at a massive level. According to the report “In 2009, World Ecological Debt Day falls on 25 September, allowing for a leap year, it means that the impact of a massive world-wide recession has slowed its arrival by just a single day compared to 2008, with the date still having advanced almost two weeks from 2007 when it fell on 6 October.”

This means that despite a huge global recession, we have continued to consume at the same rate as last year, which was massively up on the year previous. The UK’s dependence on foreign power has increased 5 fold since 2004. Here is the article, have a read for yourself:

The Consumption Explosion also reveals some of the crazy and wasteful ways that the UK does business with the rest of the world through so-called ‘boomerang trade’. Because we do not pay the full environmental cost of transport, all around us there are ships, lorries and planes passing in the night, wastefully carrying often identical goods from city to city across the globe and back again to meet consumer demand. For example, the latest data shows that, in the UK:

• We export 5,000 tonnes of toilet paper from the UK to Germany, but then import over 4,000 tonnes back again
• 4,400 tonnes of ice cream gets exported from the UK to Italy, and 4,200 tonnes is then imported back
• We import 22,000 tonnes of potatoes from Egypt and export 27,000 tonnes back the other way
• 116 tonnes of ‘Sweet biscuits, waffles and wafers, gingerbread and the like’ (the official category for trade statistics) comes into the UK, rumbling passed 106 tonnes headed in the opposite direction.