Cranfield Research Insights #3: A Quick Reflection on Pollution
The first year of my PhD research will be spent studying and reading, pulling together what is already known before I venture into new territory. I’m going to capture my insights in a series of short pieces shared on LinkedIn. I admit mainly this is to help my own writing and comprehension, but maybe they are helpful to others interested in the Circular Economy? I hope so and would welcome your comments, feedback, further contacts and references. This time it's just a quick non-academic piece, basically how I felt about an intensive four-week exposure to the (not) wonderful world of pollution!
Life on Sponge
Imagine a planet quite similar to ours. Like our own planet “Earth”, it’s named to describe it’s surface – so it’s called “Sponge.” It’s surface absorbs whatever lands on it, penetrating metres down, moved by gravity, rainwater and through underground aquifers. Once anything has passed into this subterranean world, it’s very difficult to retrieve – anything contaminating gets spread in unpredictable ways, often reaching water supplies, and anything valuable gets diluted and mixed up so that it is hard to recover cost-effectively. Gas leaks out, flammable, smelly, even toxic. At one time Spongeans deposited their waste in holes in the ground, but that simply led to numerous areas of contaminated land, unusable without expensive remediation. So they learned their lesson. Industrial and public infrastructure is designed not to leak contamination, products are designed not to generate waste. Waste is never buried. Perhaps most importantly, Spongeans have developed a culture where waste is just unthinkable – they would no more willingly pour oil on the ground than pour it on their sitting room carpet, and in the end they worked out how not to use oil at all.
OK you probably guessed by now. There is no separate planet Sponge – planet earth is that sponge, exactly as described here. Except we haven’t yet learned our lesson.
This little rant is because I just spent a month at Cranfield University learning about waste and pollution, from experts in land remediation, landfill mining, thermal treatment, hydrology, and much more. This represents an amazing body of experts, deeply committed, armed with science, technology, engineering, exhaustive safety procedures, reams of regulation… but expert in solving a problem we have created in the first place and would now be better to avoid. That’s the role of the Circular Economy – to create a world where ultimately waste literally does not exist.
I feel like an overweight person who has just visited a diabetic ward – I can see so much more clearly that I don’t want to live like this, on a contaminated planet. Let’s think of earth as a sponge, and keep our stuff on the surface – re-using the good stuff and taking much better care of the bad stuff, preferably by eliminating it in the first place!