At any given time, crude oil is pumped from deep within the earth. Some of that sludge is sent to refineries to be turned into plastic, which is turned into handheld phones, window shades and ornaments hung on Christmas trees.
Scientists know the amount of carbon dioxide, but is emitted to make these products. (The new iPhone is like driving a car over 200 miles), but little research has been done on how much is hidden inside. The findings were published Friday in the journal Cell Reports Sustainability. Researchers have discovered that over the last 25 years, billions of tons of carbon from fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas) have been stored in equipment, building materials, and other long-lived man-made objects. It is estimated that it was hidden in a place called “underground space”. “Technosphere”.
According to a study by researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, 400 million tonnes of carbon is added to the technosphere’s stockpile every year, growing at a slightly faster rate than fossil fuel emissions. But in many cases, the technosphere does not retain its carbon forever. When things are thrown away or incinerated, the atmosphere also warms. In 2011, 9 percent of all extracted fossil carbon was sunk into goods and infrastructure in the technosphere. This is roughly equivalent to that year’s emissions from the European Union, if burned.
“It’s like a ticking time bomb,” says Klaus Hubacek, an environmental economist at the University of Groningen and lead author of the paper. “We pull tons of fossil resources out of the ground, put them in the technosphere, and then leave them alone. But what happens after the object’s lifespan is over?”
The origin of the word “technosphere” is 1960When a science writer named Will Lepkowski wrote in an article for Science magazine, “Modern humans have become lonely, aimless prisoners of the technosphere.”. Since then, the term, a play on “biosphere”, has been used by ecologists and geologists to address the amount of material that humans have covered the Earth with.
“The problem is that we’ve been incredibly wasteful in creating and building things.” Paleontology at the University of Leicester, UK, who was not involved in the Groningen University study Professor Jan Zalasiewicz said.
In 2016, Zalasiewicz and his colleagues published a paper estimating that the technosphere has grown to approximately 30 trillion tonswhich is 100,000 times the mass of all humans combined. The paper also found that the number of “technofossils” (unique types of man-made objects) exceeds the number of unique species of life on Earth. In 2020, another group of researchers found that the technosphere doubles in volume approximately every 20 years And now it probably outranks all living things.
“The question is: how does the technosphere affect the biosphere?” Zalasiewicz said. For example, plastic bags and fishing nets can suffocate animals that encounter them. And unlike natural ecosystems such as forests and oceans, which can absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, humans are “not very good at recycling,” Zalasiewicz said.
Managing all this waste in a more climate-friendly way is precisely the issue that researchers at the University of Groningen want to focus on. Their study examined 8.4 billion tons of fossil carbon in artifacts that were used for at least one year from 1995 to 2019. Nearly 30 percent of this carbon was trapped in rubber and plastic, much of it in household appliances. The remaining quarter was hidden in asphalt, a byproduct of the crude oil used in construction.
“Once we dispose of these things, the question is, what do we do with that carbon?” said Khan Hidiroglu, one of the study authors and a doctoral student in energy and environmental studies at the University of Groningen. says. “If you put it in an incinerator and burn it, you’re immediately releasing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which is something we really don’t want to do.”
The paper estimates that approximately one-third of these fossil products in the technosphere are incinerated each year. The remaining third ends up in landfills, where it can act as a type of long-term carbon sink. Unfortunately, as the authors acknowledge, these sites leach chemicalsburp methaneor emit microplastics into the environment. Just under a third is recycled, but this is a problematic solution, and a small amount ends up in the litter.
“There are so many different aspects to this issue and how to properly address it,” Hubacek said. Still, he said, landfills can be a good starting point if managed properly. According to the study, most of the fossil carbon put into landfills decays slowly and remains there for more than 50 years. By designing products to be recycled and used for long periods of time, we can lock up carbon for longer.
Ultimately, Hubacek said, real solutions start with people questioning whether they really need so much. “Let’s consume less and not make it in the first place. But once we have it, we need to think about what to do next.”
