Waste of the world

The Story of Stuff

The environmental effects we experience are cumulative with origins going back decades. Perhaps the hand-drawn graphs that show increases in wealth, car use, water and paper consumption and the proportionate loss in woodland, biodiversity and normal temperatures are the most significant feature of this work. The ‘tipping point’ after which all the graphs turn into a steep climb – or “hockey stick curve” – is after the 1950s, with an ongoing 70-degree climb in the decades ever since the ‘baby boomer’ generations started to arrive.

Climate change is now an incontrovertible fact but is only one of many side effects of relentless consumption of the environment’s resources.