By Frances Ringwood

As the world mourned iconic glam rocker David Bowie’s passing this week, numerous references were made on social media, at the singer’s Brixton birthplace and outside the gates of his New York home to his other worldly fashion statements, star-studded song lyrics and zany space cadet-personae like Ziggy Star Dust and Major Tom.

Bowie may have departed Earth to become a “star man waiting in the sky” but the rest of us are left here to muddle on in spaces increasingly made unliveable by pollution and expanding waste dumps. According to recent statistics released by the World Bank, ten years ago urbanites created about 680 million tonnes of solid waste per year.

Today, that number has soared to an unprecedented 1.3 billion tonnes, and is set to rise to 2.2 billion tonnes by 2025. That’s enough waste to fill 5 000km of rubbish trucks end-to-end each day. Clearly, there is a global waste crisis and it contributes towards making the world more and more unliveable, unattractive and unhealthy on a daily basis.

Landfills and air pollution

When solid waste is not recycled it goes straight to landfill, one of the biggest contributors to greenhouse gasses, such as carbon dioxide and methane, which are currently destroying the world’s ozone layer. One estimate puts global methane emissions from landfill at between 30 and 70 million tonnes each year.

Methane is itself more than 20 times more destructive than CO², an aggravating factor making landfills especially problematic. Moreover, the cost of sending waste to landfill is exorbitant, particularly when taking into account prime real estate used in cities, logistical costs and salaries of government workers who organise and implement waste collection. In South Africa alone it’s estimated that as much as R7-billion a year is wasted by sending recyclable waste to landfill.

Yes, there are technologies available for turning landfill gas into energy but these are costly and there remain significant waste by-products. The most effective way to prevent waste in the first place is to determine how to reduce the need to create throwaway items (reduce), then to look for ways to re-use items once purchased (re-use) and then, if an item cannot be re-purposed in the home or office, responsible stewardship means finding a way to re-process that item into something useful (recycle). These are the guidelines published in the European Union endorsed waste hierarchy, which has been adopted by South Africa’s own Department of Environmental Affairs.

Time is running out

Although there are governments, scientists and entrepreneurs working diligently towards combating waste problems through policy, strategy and technology, the world is dangerously close to reaching the point of no return.

At the recent COP 21 talks in Paris, stakeholders came together around the aim of preventing world temperatures from rising above 2 degrees Celsius by 2050 – an event that is predicted to cause a chain-reaction of catastrophic weather events which would cause a global refugee crisis as well as deepening issues of poverty, hunger and the divide between the rich and the poor – quite apart from major environmental impacts and species extinction.

Finding the above outcomes unacceptable, COP 21 saw 195 nations commit to the Paris Agreement to keep global temperatures from rising even as high as 1.5 degrees Celsius. While the goal is important and ambitious, it still remains to be seen whether major world polluters are moved to put effective policy in place to limit rising emissions.

Another world?

While the Earth doesn’t look to be in the best shape, some are looking to the stars for answers. Last year, the Obama administration announced that it had stepped up its NASA programme for deep space habitation by USD1.3-billion.

And in 2013, 200 000 people from 140 countries volunteered to be part of a one-way Dutch Mars colonisation mission which engineer Bas Lansdorp hopes will take off in 2022.

Even so, it seems like human beings would do better to invest in the existing Earth – after all, as the legendary David Bowie warned, “there are Spiders on Mars” – well, maybe not actually but it’s sure to be pretty tough going.