The Hidden Carbon Vault Inside Your Gadgets

At any given moment, crude oil is being pumped from deep within the planet. Some of that sludge is sent to a refinery and processed into plastic, which then becomes your cell phone, your window shade, the ornament hanging from your Christmas tree.

Although scientists know the amount of carbon dioxide These products are released to make (A new iPhone is like driving a car Over 200 miles), there is little research on how much is secreted in them. A study published Friday in the journal Cell Reports Sustainability Estimating that fossil fuels — billions of tons of carbon from coal, oil and gas — were stored in gadgets, building materials and other long-lasting human-made items over a recent 25-year period, researchers say. “Technosphere.”

According to a study by researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, 400 million tons of carbon are added to the technosphere’s reserves each year, which is growing at a slightly faster rate than fossil fuel emissions. But in many cases, the technosphere does not store that carbon permanently; If the objects are thrown away and burned, they also warm the atmosphere. In 2011, 9 percent of all extracted fossil carbon was sunk into items and infrastructure in the technosphere, an amount that would roughly equal the emissions from the European Union that year if it were burned.

“It’s like a ticking time bomb,” said Klaus Hubasek, an environmental economist at the University of Groningen and senior author of the paper. “We pull a lot of fossil resources out of the ground and put them in the technosphere and then sit around them. But what about the lifetime of the object?

The term “technosphere” was coined 1960When a science writer named Will Lepkowski wrote that “modern man has become an aimless, lonely prisoner of his technosphere,” in an article for the journal Science. Since then, the term, a play on “biosphere”, has been used by ecologists and geologists to grapple with the extent to which mankind has smothered the planet.

“The problem is that we’ve been incredibly wasteful because we’ve been building and building things,” says Jan Zalasiewicz, a professor of paleobiology at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom.

In 2016, Zalasiewicz and his colleagues published a paper that estimated that the technosphere grew by approx. 30 trillion tons100,000 times the mass of all humans piled on top of each other. The paper also found that “technofossils” — unique types of man-made objects — outnumber unique species on the planet. In 2020, a separate group of researchers discovered that the technosphere The volume doubles approximately every 20 years And now perhaps more than all living things.

“The question is, how does the technosphere impinge on the biosphere?” Zalasiewicz said. Plastic bags and fishing nets, for example, can suffocate animals that encounter them. And unlike natural ecosystems, like forests and oceans that can absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, humans are “not very good at recycling,” Zalasiewicz said.

Disposing of all these things in a more climate-friendly way is exactly the problem that researchers from the University of Groningen want to focus on. Their study looked at 8.4 billion tons of fossil carbon in man-made objects used for at least one year between 1995 and 2019. About 30 percent of this carbon was trapped in rubber and plastic, much of it in household appliances, and another quarter was hidden in bitumen, a byproduct of crude oil used in construction.

“Once you discard these things, the question is, how do you treat that carbon?” said Kan Hidiroglu, one of the study’s authors and a PhD student in energy and environment at the University of Groningen. “If you put it in an incinerator and burn it, you immediately release more carbon emissions into the atmosphere, which we really don’t want to do.”

Each year, the paper estimates, technology burns about a third of these fossil-products. Another third ends up in landfills, which can act as a kind of long-term carbon sink. But unfortunately, the author admits, these sites often Leach chemicalsBurp out methaneor Said microplastics A little less than a third is recycled into the environment – a solution that comes with its own the problem — and a small amount of litter falls.

“There are many different aspects of the problem and treating it properly,” Hubacek said. Still, he said, landfills are a good starting point if managed well. According to the study, most of the fossil carbon stored in landfills decays slowly and lasts for more than 50 years. Designing products in such a way that they can be recycled and helps to sequester carbon over a long period of time

Ultimately, Hubasek says, the real solution starts with people asking if they really need so much stuff. “Reduce consumption and avoid creating it in the first place. But once you have that, we have to think about what to do next.”

This article originally appeared on grist A https://grist.org/science/gadgets-carbon-sinks-technosphere-study/. GRIST is a non-profit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories about climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org.