In 2020, Human-Made Objects Tipped the Earth Out of Balance
By: Damon Beres
Tags: Society, Waste, Climate Change, Future, Environment

In 2020, Human-Made Objects Tipped the Earth Out of Balance

A new study redefines our impact on the natural world

Siak River, Pekanbaru, Indonesia. Photo: Barcroft Media/Getty Images

There is considerably more plastic on our planet than there is living animal mass. Buildings and roads account for more mass than trees and shrubs. As of 2020, the weight of humankind’s creations is on track to surpass that of all the living biomass on Earth, a remarkable development that gives us a new way of understanding our impact on the natural world.

Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel detailed this claim in a study published in Nature last week. The authors call 2020 the “crossover point.” After this, human-produced mass, or anthropogenic mass, will outweigh the planet’s natural biomass. There will be more people stuff than other stuff. This has happened quickly: The study explains that anthropogenic mass has doubled every 20 years since the turn of the 20th century.

(Note that the researchers’ calculations are complex and have enough give to swing a few years in either direction. Perhaps we have already passed the crossover point, or are just about to.)

There is a related website that explains the research through a series of infographics: The mass of the Eiffel Tower is roughly equal to the mass represented by all the white rhinos left in the world, and the human-made mass in New York City is roughly equivalent to that of all the fish. It’s like a bedtime story that fades into an unsettling dream.

“We hope that once we all have these somewhat shocking figures before our eyes, we can, as a species, take responsibility.”

You might awake feeling restless. Though you could imagine someone looking at this research and seeing a triumph of humanity — all the world harvested for our buildings and roads and technological progress — a realist will understand that it may portend disaster.

“We hope that once we all have these somewhat shocking figures before our eyes, we can, as a species, take responsibility,” Ron Milo, PhD, an author of the study, said in a press release.

This level of production, referred to as our “socioeconomic metabolism” in the paper, cannot continue forever. It has already changed our planet in dramatic ways, namely through climate change and all that it inflicts: the poisoning of our air, the transformation or outright destruction of natural ecosystems, the intensification of natural disasters, and so much else.

With the natural world ravaged, our socioeconomic metabolism may need to be oriented away from luxuries and the pursuit of unabated economic growth and toward imperfect solutions like geoengineering, or building refugee camps to replace the underwater cities.

The paper also discusses mass waste at length. “If current trends continue, anthropogenic mass, including waste, is expected to exceed 3 [teratonnes] by 2040 — almost triple the dry biomass on Earth,” it says. (“Dry biomass” means water is excluded.)

The term “waste” may seem to suggest that this mass is discarded, able to be forgotten. This is not the case. We currently produce around 55 million tons of electronic waste every year, for instance — “5 million elephants or 110 Burj Khalifas piled on top of each other,” as Josh Lepawsky put it in a story for OneZero. The creation of technology is destructive, and so is its aftermath. Silicon Valley is home to more toxic Superfund sites than any other county in the United States, where chemicals from electronics manufacturing seep into the earth and groundwater. Dead technology becomes junk, often omitting toxic chemicals itself in its journey around the planet. Objects do not necessarily become inert when they are no longer useful; while most anthropogenic mass may be material like concrete and gravel, the study nonetheless invites us to consider the impact of all our creations.

Future humans will have a lot to deal with. This study is a useful document for quantifying the magnitude of our challenge. It is not a call to despair because despair by its very definition can accomplish nothing. In fact, this research is a reminder that our problems can be measured and defined — with effort, they can begin to be solved.