Sociology. Anthony Giddens
difficult. List all of the possible reasons why this is the case. What exactly is it that people enjoy about car-ownership, motoring and driving which makes them so reluctant to stop? Do any of these reasons also provide insights into the low take-up of electric cars so far?
Water pollution
Although water is one of the most valuable and essential natural resources, for many years waste products – both human and manufactured – were dumped directly into rivers and oceans with barely a second thought. For instance, in the summer of 1858, the River Thames in London emitted a stench so foul it brought the city to a standstill, forcing politicians to act. Only in the past sixty years or so have concerted efforts been made in many countries to protect the quality of water, to conserve fish stocks and the wildlife that depend on it, and to ensure access to clean water for the global human population.
Water pollution can be understood as contamination of the water supply by toxic chemicals and minerals, pesticides, or untreated sewage, and it poses the greatest threat to people in the developing world. Sanitation systems are underdeveloped in many of the world’s poorest countries, and human waste products are often emptied directly into streams, rivers and lakes. More recently, serious concerns have been raised about the levels of plastic waste that have been discovered in the world’s oceans and coastal regions, much of it being ‘singleuse’ plastics such as drinks bottles, carrier bags and packaging. Regardless of increasing levels of concern, water pollution remains a serious problem in many parts of the world.
Much progress has been made to improve access to safe drinking water. During the 1990s, nearly 1 billion people gained access to safe water and the same number to sanitation, though ensuring safe water supplies remains a problem, particularly in some parts of Africa, where people drink from unprotected wells and springs along with surface water (figure 5.3). The problem may worsen as water supplies in some developing countries are privatized, raising the cost for customers, while the effects of global warming also produce more regular droughts.
One of the ‘Millennium Development Goals’ set by the United Nations in 2000 was to ‘reduce by half the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water’ by 2015. This target was met well ahead of schedule in 2010. By 2015, 91 per cent of the world population had access to improved drinking water sources, and 2.6 billion people had gained such access since 1990. However, in the same year, the Caucasus region, Central Asia, Northern Africa, Oceania and sub-Saharan Africa missed their MDG targets, and some 663 million people – mainly in rural areas – still did not have access to improved sources of safe water (UNICEF/WHO 2015: 4). Many of the least developed countries store around 4 per cent of their annual renewable water flow compared with the 70 to 90 per cent stored in developed countries (UNESCO 2009).
Global society 5.2 Susan Freinkel on our love–hate affair with plastic
Plastic makes up only about 10 percent of all the garbage the world produces, yet unlike most other trash, it is stubbornly persistent. As a result, beach surveys around the world consistently show that 60 to 80 percent of the debris that collects on the shore is plastic. Every year, the Ocean Conservancy sponsors an international beach-cleanup day in which more than a hundred countries now take part…. Whether they’re working a beach in Chile, France, or China, volunteers inevitably come across the same stuff: plastic bottles, cutlery, plates, and cups; straws and stirrers, fast-food wrappers, and packaging. Smoking-related items are among the most common. Indeed, cigarette butts – each made up of thousands of fibers of the semisynthetic polymer cellulose acetate – top every list…. For all the dangers posed by floating bags, castaway lighters, and abandoned nets, the most profound and insidious threat may well be the trillions upon trillions of tiny pieces of plastic speckled across the world’s beaches and scattered through its oceans. These itsy bits, collectively known as microdebris, were scarcely on experts’ radar until recently…. The rise in microdebris is partly due to rising plastics production, which leads to an increase in pellets that can get into the environment: they’re now thought to constitute about 10 percent of all ocean debris. It’s also due to the growing use of teensy plastic beads as scrubbers in household and cosmetic cleaning products and for blasting dirt off ships…. But the main source of microdebris is likely macrodebris: the larger pieces of junked plastic that have been fragmented by the sun and waves. Increasingly, experts fear that these bits are just as dangerous to marine wildlife as the lethal necklaces of packing straps and nylon netting that can choke seals and sharks, and even whales.
Source: Extracts from Freinkel (2011: 127–8 and 134–5).
Pollution of the oceans by a variety of plastic items has only recently come to be seen as a potentially serious environmental problem.
Figure 5.3 Population without access to improved water sources, by region, 2015
Source: UNICEF/WHO (2015: 7).
Progress on sanitation has been slower. The MDG target was for 77 per cent of the global population to be using improved facilities by 2015, but only 68 per cent did so. This represents around 700 million people fewer than the target. Some 2.4 billion people did not have access to improved sanitation; of these, seven out of ten lived in rural areas, as did nine out of ten of those still practising open defecation (UNICEF/WHO 2015: 5). Clearly the MDG targets have proved to be an effective tool for encouraging and measuring progress on the provision of safe water and effective sanitation, but there remains much to be done. As a result, the MDGs were replaced in 2012 with a new set of seventeen interlinked Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), covering poverty reduction, gender equality, climate action, sustainable cities, clean energy, and much more.
There are very few things we can buy without packaging and, though there are clear benefits, in terms of displaying goods attractively and guaranteeing the safety of products, there are major drawbacks too.
Waste generation is closely tied to the relative prosperity of countries. Poland, Hungary and Slovenia, for example – countries that quite recently moved towards the model of Western capitalism and consumer culture – generate less than half the waste per capita of the USA, Denmark and Australia. However, the more established high-consumption societies do now manage their waste more effectively. As figure 5.4 shows, countries such as Germany, Norway and Ireland are steadily reducing the proportion of waste that ends up in landfill. The European Union aims to become a ‘recycling society’, and there is a move to recycle or compost waste (50 per cent of all municipal waste in the European economic area by 2020) as well as to reduce the amount of packaging used for products at the point of production (European Environment Agency 2013).
The industrialized societies are often called ‘throw-away societies’ because the volume of items discarded as a matter of course is so large. In most countries of the industrialized world, waste collection services are almost universal, but it is increasingly difficult to dispose of the enormous amounts of waste. Landfill sites are becoming full and many urban areas have run out of disposal room. In Scotland, for example, around 90 per cent of household waste was still going to landfill sites in 2006, and the Scottish Environment Protection Agency reported that household waste was growing at 2 per cent per annum.