The Growing Burden of Waste and the Need to Rethink Infrastructure Informed by Science

Since 1950 the U.S. population has more than doubled. It has grown from an estimated 152 million people to perhaps as many as 329 million inhabitants today. Real per capita income increased four-fold in that same period, growing from about $10,600 per person in 1950 to nearly $44,000 today (measured in real 2012 dollars).

For understandable reasons we might imagine a largely upbeat economic story that follows from a population growth that also experiences a significant increase in per capita income. Yet, there is a further narrative that should also be conveyed. To support all of that snowballing growth over the past 68 years, the U.S. has consumed an aggregate mountain of matter—whether materials, soil, water or energy—that is 266 times the volume of the resources that were necessary to maintain the economy in 1950 [1].

While, yes, we can report clearly positive economic returns from all of that consumption over the past seven decades, there have also been huge social, economic, and environmental costs driven by the generation and dumping of wasted resources. For example, building on the work of Laitner (2015), and Ayres and Warr (2009), it appears that perhaps 88 percent of the energy consumed in the years 1950-2018 has been dumped in the form of heat, greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution and particulate matter [2]. All of that waste has contributed to an array of climate and health effects over time, with lingering effects into the future [3]. A detailed review might find a similar magnitude of other large-scale wastes generated in the use of materials, water, and soil – with concomitant impacts on health and environmental quality.

Laitner and Weiland (2018), for example, found that adding up the municipal solid wastes generated every day, and then accounting for soil erosion, greenhouse gases, other air pollution, and fecal matter (from both human and agricultural production), the average American may generate as much 280 pounds of waste in its various forms each and every day. If not more. That means for every dollar of personal income earned in the United States, we also produce more than two pounds of wasted matter. Hence, they ask the question, “Are we living more by waste than ingenuity?” [4]

But let’s step back a moment and think not only about the implications of this scale of waste, but also how better information and new critical insights might drive a more positive outcome. In effect, we might first explore the economic well-being that might be supported by greater energy and resource productivity. Then we might envision how insights from the world of science might advance a more beneficial and sustainable outcome.

With respect to economic well-being? First, there is the lost social and economic opportunity—for example, weaker levels of household incomes—driven by a very large scale of wastefulness over time. In effect, more resources are being turned into waste than generating positive economic opportunity. Figure 1 below provides a link between the more productive use of resources as it both drives and enables greater per capita incomes within the United States. With data available from both the U.S. Energy Information Administration and the Bureau of Economic Analysis, we use an X-Y graph to highlight the connection between energy productivity and income. Energy productivity is defined as the magnitude of real dollars of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) supported by the use of one million Btus of primary energy over the years 1950 to 2018. (For reference, one million Btus of energy is roughly equal to 293 kilowatt-hours of electricity or 8 gallons of gasoline.) We can then compare it with real per capita incomes for the same set of years.