A Hidden Carbon Vault Inside Your Gadgets

At any moment, crude oil is pumped from the depths of the planet. Some of that sludge is sent to a refinery and turned into plastic, then it becomes the phone in your hand, the shade on your window, the ornaments hanging from your Christmas tree.

Although scientists know how much carbon dioxide issued to make these products (A new iPhone is similar to the guide more than 200 kilometers), there is little research as to what is stashed away in them. A study published Friday in the journal Cell Reports Sustainability estimates that billions of tons of carbon from fossil fuels – coal, oil and gas – have been stored in gadgets, building materials and other long-lasting man-made objects over a recent 25-year period, removed in what researchers call it the “technosphere.”

According to the study by researchers from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, 400 million tons of carbon are added to the reserve of the technosphere every year, growing at a rate slightly faster than fossil fuel emissions. But in many cases, the technosphere does not hold that carbon permanently; if the objects are thrown away and incinerated, they also heat up the atmosphere. In 2011, 9 percent of all fossil carbon extracted was sunk into elements and infrastructure in the technosphere, an amount that would be almost equal to that year’s emissions from the European Union if it were burned.

“It’s like a ticking time bomb,” said Klaus Hubacek, an ecological economist at the University of Groningen and senior author of the paper. “We take a lot of fossil resources from the earth and put them in the technosphere and then let them sit. But what happens after the object’s life?

The word “technosphere” began 1960when a science writer named Wil Lepkowski wrote that “modern man has become an aimless and lonely prisoner of his technosphere,” in an article for Science magazine.. Since then, the term, a play on the “biosphere”, has been used by ecologists and geologists to address the amount of things that humanity has destroyed the planet.

“The problem is that we’ve been incredibly lazy in how we’ve made and built things,” said Jan Zalasiewicz, a professor of paleobiology at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, who was not involved in the University of Groningen.

In 2016, Zalasiewicz and his colleagues published a paper that estimated that the technosphere had grown to approx. 30 trillion tonsan amount 100,000 times greater than the mass of all humans piled on top of each other. The paper also found that the number of “technofossils” – unique types of man-made objects – exceeded the number of unique species of life on the planet. In 2020, a separate group of researchers found that the technosphere it doubles in volume approximately every 20 years and now probably surpasses all living things.

“The question is, how does the technosphere affect the biosphere?” Zalasiewicz said. Plastic bags and fishing nets, for example, can drown animals that encounter them. And unlike natural ecosystems, such as forests and oceans that can absorb carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, humans are “not good at recycling,” Zalasiewicz said.

Managing the disposal of all these things in a more climate-friendly way is precisely the problem that researchers from the University of Groningen want to draw attention to. Their research looked at 8.4 billion tons of fossil carbon in man-made objects that were in use at least once a year between 1995 and 2019. Almost 30 percent of this carbon was trapped in rubber. and plastic, much in household appliances, and another quarter was stashed in bitumen, a byproduct of crude oil used in construction.

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

Every year, the document estimates, about a third of these fossil products in the technosphere are incinerated. Another third end up in landfills, which can act as a kind of carbon sink in the long term. But unfortunately, the authors recognize, these sites often lye chemicalsbreak out methaneo remove microplastics in the environment. A little less than a third is recycled – a solution that comes with its own problems – and a small amount is littered.

“There are so many different aspects of the problem and how to deal with it well,” said Hubacek. However, he said, landfills are a good starting point if managed properly. According to the study, most of the fossil carbon that is put into landfill decays slowly and remains for more than 50 years. Designing products in a way that allows them to be recycled and last a long time can help keep carbon trapped for longer.

Ultimately, Hubacek said, the real solution starts with people asking themselves if they really need so many things. “Reduce consumption and avoid doing it in the first place. But once you have it, that’s when we need to think about what to do next.”

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