国家地理:没有垃圾的世界可能存在吗(1)

In Amsterdam I met a man who revealed to me the hidden currents of our lives -- the massive flows of raw materials and products deployed, to such wonderful and damaging effect, by 7.7 billion humans. Our shared metabolism, you might say. It was a crisp fall morning, and I was sitting in a magnificent old brick pile on the Oosterpark, a palace of curved corridors and grand staircases and useless turrets. A century ago, when the Dutch were still extracting coffee, oil, and rubber from their colony in Indonesia, this building had been erected as a colonial research institute. Now it houses assorted do-gooder organizations. The one Marc de Wit works for is called Circle Economy, and it's part of a buzzing international movement that aims to reform how we've done just about everything for the past two centuries -- since the rise of the steam engine, "if you need to pinpoint a time," de Wit said.

在阿姆斯特丹，一位受访者向我揭示了生活背后的潮流暗涌--供养77亿人口的原材料和产品的洪流，造成兼具建设奇迹与惨烈破坏的效果。这可以说是我们共享的新陈代谢。在清爽的秋季早晨，我坐在东部公园一座雄壮的古老砖块建筑里。这座宫殿拥有弧形走廊、宏伟的阶梯和闲置的塔楼。一个世纪前，当荷兰人从印度尼西亚的殖民地攫取咖啡、原油和橡胶时，它为开展殖民地研究而建。现在，这里成了各种公益组织之家。马克·德威特供职的那家叫做“环形经济”，归属于一场欣欣向荣的全球运动，致力于改革我们在过去两个世纪间几乎一切建设方式--从蒸汽机的崛起算起，“要是你需要一个具体起点的话。”德威特说。

De Wit is 39, genial, bespectacled, a little disheveled, a chemist by training. He opened a pamphlet and spread out a diagram he called "an x-ray of our global economy." Unlike natural ecosystems, which operate in cycles -- plants grow in soil, animals eat plants, dung replenishes soil -- the industrial economy is largely linear. On the diagram, fat, colored currents of the four types of raw material -- minerals, ores, fossil fuels, and biomass -- surged from left to right, splitting and braiding as they became products that met seven human needs. Sand went into concrete apartment towers on six continents. Metal ore became ships, cars, and also combine harvesters -- in a single year we harvested 22.2 billion tons of biomass, just to feed us all. Fossil fuels powered those vehicles, kept us warm, became plastic, became all kinds of things. The total flow into the economy in 2015 was 102.3 billion tons.

39岁的德威特为人和蔼，戴着眼镜，有点不拘小节，化学家出身。他打开一本小册子，铺陈图表，称之为“全球经济透视图”。相比于循环运转的自然生态系统--土地生长植物、植物喂养动物、畜粪给土地施肥--工业经济轨道主要是线性的。在图表上，四种原材料由宽幅彩带表示：矿物、金属、化石燃料和生物量，从左端铺向右端，在化为产品满足人类七大需求的过程中分叉、交织。沙子流入六大洲的混凝土大厦之林；金属矿石化为轮船、汽车，还有联合收割机--在一年里我们仅为吃饭就收割了222亿吨生物量；化石燃料驱动交通工具，为我们保暖，还被制成塑料，应用无限。2015年输入经济的资源总量是1023亿吨。