The new materialism: a matter of policy.

• Author: Young, John

Chemistry teachers sometimes like to tell their first-year students that the total value of the substances in a human body amounts to less than $1. Of course, there's a certain humor in any assessment of human worth that considers only physical materials. But even allowing for such a frivolously narrow view, it turns out that this assessment is dead wrong.

The material cost of a human life is astronomically more than that of the substances the body contains, or even those it takes in as food. The residents of industrial societies are voracious consumers, using dozens of times their weight in chemicals, metals, paper, and other materials each year. Those materials, in turn, may take thousands of times their weight in raw materials t produce.

Added up, the quantities are staggering: in the United States, the average person accounts for the use of some 540 tons of construction materials, 18 tons of paper, 23 tons of wood, 16 tons of metals, and 32 tons of organic chemicals in the course of a lifetime. By the standards of the developing world, that's a extravagant level of consumption. On average, residents of industrial countries use 19 times as much aluminum, 18 times as much in chemicals, 14 times as much paper and 13 times as much iron and steel as do their Third World counterparts.

These extraordinary consumption rates have enormous environmental consequences, but the materials themselves usually slip unnoticed through our lives. Those of us who live in Tokyo, Rome, or Washington, D.C. rarely seem to wonder where the substances in our carpets, cars or computers come from, or how they were wrough into useful form. We don't often consider how far-flung is the infrastructure that supports our daily routine--how many factories, roads and dams we have built our lives upon. The only time we're likely to notice the large quantities of materials in our lives is when they become waste and we're compelled to get rid of them.

Unfortunately, the environmental costs of materials are not just a matter of waste. Groundwater pollution from landfills or toxic incinerator emissions are actually a relatively small part of the problem, since most of the damage is done well before waste management even becomes an issue. Most of the environmental dangers lie in the immense complex of mines, smelters, petroleum refineries, chemical plants, logging operations, pulp mills, and other facilities that churn out our raw materials and bulk commodities. In the United States, for example, 71 percent of all toxic emissions from manufacturing are produced by just four bulk commodity industries: chemicals, plastics, paper, an primary (non-recycled) metals.

Raw materials production, though invisible to most people, is a central cause o ecological decline. Whole mountains, valleys, and rivers have been ruined by mining in Papua New Guinea, Chile and the United States. Forest ecosystems have been decimated by logging in Canada, Malaysia, and Nigeria. Farmland in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan has been contaminated with pesticides and salt from decades of irrigated cotton growing--and diversion of the region's rivers for irrigation has shrunk the Aral Sea by a third and destroyed its fisheries.

Raw materials industries are also among the world's biggest consumers of energy For instance, just five primary materials industries--paper, steel, aluminum, plastics, and container glass--account for 31 percent of U.S. manufacturing energy use. This thirst for energy plays an important role in such pervasive problems as global warming, acid rain and the flooding of valleys for hydroelectric dams.

Current rates of materials production are unsustainable, not so much because we're running out of the materials themselves, but because processes used to produce them court human and ecological catastrophe. Underlying today's seemingly boundless demand for raw materials in industrial countries is a radical increase in per capita consumption: materials use has grown far faster than population. In the United States, for instance, the Bureau of Mines estimates that total consumption of virgin raw materials was 17 times greater i 1989 than it was in 1900--a span during which the country's population grew jus a little over threefold. Ironically, our nests are now being fouled by the very means we have relied on to feather them.

THE NEED FOR HUGE REDUCTIONS

It is imperative, then, that the developed countries find ways to cut their materials consumption sharply. Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek, an economist with the Wuppertal Institute, a German environmental research center, argues that to arrest global environmental degradation, a 50 percent reduction in worldWide materials consumption will be needed--and that to achieve it, industrial countries need to aim for a 90 percent reduction.

The political reality, of course, is that policy makers aren't likely to pursue radical reductions unless they're convinced that living standards won't suffer. For this reason, reductions might at first glance seem impossible.

But to put the issue in perspective, it is useful to recall the skepticism that greeted the concept of dramatically improved energy efficiency two decades ago. Since then, new lighting, heating, cooling, insulation and manufacturing technologies have made it possible to cut energy use by three-fourths or more i many applications. The improved technologies are now often cheap enough to make energy conservation a better investment than energy production (see "Power Brokers: Managing Demand for Electricity," November/December...