Environmental pollution by overproduction and irresponsible purchasing.

The Benefits of Repairing Over Replacing: Saving Money and the Environment" 

The rise in pollution is not a new thing for most of us now, and even after knowing about this uprising devil, which is a great threat to humanity, we as humans are the most careless ones towards it and so are its major contributors. The developing technology has been beneficiary to us as consumers over decades and years, but at the same time, it has exponentially been a nightmare for Earth and the species residing on it just other than some and especially humans.

But the point of fact is why are we not at all paying attention to environmental pollution and instead increasing out efforts to worsen the situation. The simple answer is lack of awareness. The majority of human population is just unknown to the alarming pollution rates and the severeness of the issue. They are not familiar to the harmed oceans, marine lives, polluted rivers, dying animals, dirty beaches, mountains, soil, and also to the uncontrolled damage towards unprivileged humans like respiratory disorders, cancer, cardiovascular illnesses, reduced life expectancies, infant mortalities, and what not!

Just due to the simple lack of awareness amongst us, we don't understand how even the simplest tasks which have no major significance in our day to day lives have been causing pollution in scale of tons and miles. Basic activities like brushing with open taps can waste up to 32 gallons of water, i.e., 121 liters per time brushed, which means approximately 50000 liters of water wastage per year. Shocked? There is more.

Bathing with showers uses 3.5 liters of water per minute, which means a shower of 30 mins twice a day uses 210 liters of water, and if scaled to a year, you would regret taking showers and start stinking. And I don't want you to be ignored by girls or boys. Anyways it means if you shower twice for 30 minutes a day, you are utilizing 80000 liters of water per year.

If we just broaden our perspective and look it for the whole country, just the two basic activities of brushing with an open tap and bathing 30 mins twice a day use up to 184416560000000 (one hundred eighty-four trillion, four hundred sixteen billion, five hundred sixty million) liters per year multiplied to the 1,428,627,663 population of India as per the Bloomberg Report. And if this figure is compared to the world ratio, it expands to 1,054,118,700,000,000 {one quadrillion, fifty-four trillion, one hundred eighteen billion, seven hundred million}.

And this figure in comparison to the total amount of available freshwater fit for human usage has frightened scientists all across the globe. The total amount of freshwater on Earth is approximately 35,000,000,000,000,000 liters or 35 quadrillion liters, and our wastage is approximately 1.5 quadrillion. Just imagine the severeness of this basic issue of water wastage. If this continues, then it is assumed that human population might extinct not in millions of years but just by the upcoming century!

Now you might argue that we have built technologies for desalination and purification of saline and polluted water, but my dear friend, how many countries can afford it? And leave countries if there won't be mass production of the machinery, will the common man be able to afford it? No, right? And even if we make it available and affordable still, it would have its adverse effects on marine life. So it is very, very important, not important but it must be the top priority not amongst only our country but across the whole world to address the issue of Pollution of natural resources unless we want to either quit life on Earth or we have strong machinery to establish life on Mars. And a secret is, we will also exploit mars similarly and then will have no planet to shift to .

Anyways I am not here to acknowledge the issue of pollution to you , but to discuss a major soaring issue which no one has till date focused or paid attention to . Before we dive deep into the topic , I would request you to follow me at my handles to support me . Creating content and research takes a lot of time and effort . I am a class 12 student and am managing to create informative content for you along with my studies , so your response will decide the continuity of my work .

When was the last time you bought something other than grocery or food item or a basic necessity from your nearest store , shop , mall . Its answer might be up to a week, right ? so have you ever thought even once that did I really require it immediately or does the thing pose any great importance to my life after I have bought it now ? No ! So you might think that what bullshit is this person telling , but me dear friend Let me take you to the depth of this undiscussed concept . 

So imagine a big firm which is producing an X number of electronic articles per day , and the firm somehow manages to sell Y articles per day and statistically we can say only a maximum 35% of the X articles produced per day would have been sold to its customers . Note that still 80 % articles were unsold . Let this process continue up to a month , okay , so now what are the statistics , an average month has 30 days , so let the X number of articles produced be 100 items , so in a month they scale up to 100 x 30 = 3000 items a month and considering 35% sales per day , 35 items sold a day scale up to 35 x 30 = 1050 items a month . This means that (3000-1050) 1950 articles were left unsold and this is figure only for a month , Even if we add up the factor of a +/- in sales still approx. 1500 articles would be left unsold . 

Suppose the firm even dismantles the unsold articles and manages to reuse the internal machinery still 800-900 articles will be left , also if each and every article is reused , still the making machinery , the designs , the body and some parts would not be reusable , its just not possible to have 0 wastage out of them .So we assume that out of every 3000 articles produced and 1950 sold ,we would still have 400-500 unsold articles , just abandoned for the product X. Also remember the firm wont only develop only one product , it would have a lineage of products and also each product would have its own lineup of models with varying features and a different set of target audience . So if the firm makes 20 types of products the monthly wastage would multiply to (20x500) 10000 unsold, waste articles .

 Also I would like you to focus on the point that we assumed 100 items produced per X type of item . And in the real world you are mature enough to be aware of the notion that nothing is manufactured in countable numbers , its mass manufactured . Therefore we conclude the real figure of monthly wastage considering a million articles circulated in the market to enlarge to a huge figure. (100:1000000::10000:?) Also Dear , this only for one firm , there are thousands of firms and tens of types of industries with a humongous amount of waste produced per month . Remember we did not consider any of the manufacturing pollution aspects , we just covered the final product rates , if we sum up each and every bit of pollution then it would become unimaginable .

So got some overview  about what I am going to deep dive into ? We would be discussing an underneath problem of industrial and ground level pollution caused due to the demand and supply chains and what we as customers can do . Here I would like to present you a case study or research whatever you can say which I personally conducted in my locality during my school vacations . I inquired on a specific item which most of us use daily , "Batteries". So for this work , I talked to 50 people and gathered data for 10 consecutive days , hereby present you the raw data which will show variability in different localities .

"Out of 50 people , 50 people used battery cells in their household appliances. "

"Out of 50 people , 4 people had to replace a battery every new day. "

"Out of 50 people , 43 people were using non-rechargeable battery cells."

"Out of 50 people , 50 people were aware of the fact of Rechargeable battery cells."

"Out of 50 people , 3 new people (currently non users i.e. a part of the 43)plan for buying rechargeable battery the next time."

"Out of 50 people , the average cost per non-rechargeable battery was 42 INR and the average cost per rechargeable battery was 130 INR."

"Out of 50 people , 37 people were aware of the pollution caused by every single used battery."

So that was just a small ground level research I conducted myself and was shocked to know that the rate of pollution by a small entity was also growing faster than my Dads yearly salary hike ! Based on the information we can say that for the 10 days , 40 new batteries would have been replaced and the 40 old batteries would have been discarded and only the 7 people using non-rechargeable cells would not buy a new one . The ratio of batteries wasted to the total people expunges to 4:5 ,and the rate of wastage is 0.8 and this is for 10 days . Exponent it to a year . this is like every battery which could not be reused just added to a waste . 

If we assume that the battery replacement rate for the 4 people who had to replace a battery every new day remains constant throughout the year, then we can estimate the number of batteries they would need to replace in a year based on the ratio we calculated earlier.

The ratio we calculated earlier was 0.8 batteries per person for 10 consecutive days. To estimate the number of batteries replaced by these 4 people in a year, we can first calculate the number of 10-day periods in a year:

Number of 10-day periods in a year = 365 days / 10 days per period

= 36.5 periods

We can then multiply the ratio of 0.8 batteries per person for 10 consecutive days by the number of periods in a year to estimate the number of batteries replaced per person per year:

Batteries replaced per person per year = 0.8 batteries per person per 10 consecutive days x 36.5 periods per year

= 29.2 batteries per person per year

Therefore, if we assume that the battery replacement rate for the 4 people who had to replace a battery every new day remains constant throughout the year, then each of these 4 people would need to replace approximately 29.2 batteries per year. Note that this estimate only applies to these 4 people and does not take into account the battery usage or replacement rate of the other 46 people.

See this per person , 29.2~ 30 batteries per year and , 50 people would use (50x30) 1500 batteries total !

(Note: Before you think my data as a fake and start mocking me for my research ,This data was for my locality where there are many Electric appliances per house and if I give you an overview of the battery usage per house it is like - there are 2 ACs with 2 remotes using 2 batteries each, 2 TVs with total 4 remotes using 2 batteries each, 4 wall clocks using 2 cells each , Wearable watch chargers using one cell each , RC toys for toddlers using 8 cells for all toys like Drones , cars , etc. | i.e.  per household in my locality there are [4+8+8+1+8] 29 total cells.)

Want another Instance ? I also got one from the Maritime Industry  , the industry which is the Brain , Backbone , Heart whatever major organ we have , of the whole world . Out of 10 items of daily goods that we use , 7 are shipped and have once been a part of a ships container or were having the manufacturing machinery being shipped in a cargo container from some part of the world (majorly CHINA ) to your country . Lets transition the segment to the Maritime / Marine Navy / Shipping industry . 

A mega container ship costs around $ 300 million (24,54,58,50,000.00 Indian Rupees) and is in service for about 50-60 years or even less . According to an Indian sailor Karanvir Singh Nayyar , it costs around $40-50K to carry out the daily ship operations along with the cargo , the crew , excluding the transit activities which can cost ranging to $100K to 500K per visit to each different port.

 A big eight E class ship (8,000 TEU) would consume about 225 tons of bunker fuel per day at 24 knots [44.4 kmph]. Since no official data is made public for the daily wastes produced by container ships , we can estimate the waste produced by a similar passenger ship . According to a study published in the Journal of Environmental Management in 2015, estimated that a single cruise ship with 3,000 passengers and crew could generate over 200,000 gallons of sewage and wastewater and over 100 tons of solid waste during a one-week voyage. However, this is just a rough estimate and may not accurately reflect the waste production of eight E-class ships. Hence if we reduce the crew number to 25 on an average container ship , the waste production would be limited for human sewage . 

According to International Maritime Organization (IMO), the estimated average oil waste generated by a ship can range from 0.1% to 2% of the total fuel consumption. For example, if an E class ship consumes 200 tons of fuel per day, the amount of oil waste produced could range from 0.2 to 4 tons per day, assuming an average oil waste generation rate of 0.1% to 2%. However, it is important to note that this is a rough estimate, and the actual amount of oil waste produced by the ship may vary depending on several factors.

If you see the total number of ships floating and shoring across the oceans and seas the waste would be unexplainable , According to UNCTAD STAT 2022, there are 102,899 ships: Oil tankers - 11,565. Bulk carriers - 12,714. General cargo - 20,112. we can estimate the total amount of waste produced by these ships by taking the average amount of waste produced by each ship type and multiplying it by the total number of ships of that type. Assuming an average of 8,000 liters of oil waste per E class ship, the total amount of oil waste produced by all 11,565 oil tankers is approximately 92.52 million liters.

Similarly, assuming an average of 500 tons of solid waste per year per bulk carrier and 300 tons of solid waste per year per general cargo ship, the total amount of solid waste produced by all 12,714 bulk carriers and 20,112 general cargo ships is approximately 11.215 million tons per year.

Keep in mind that these are rough estimates based on assumptions, and the actual figures may vary depending on a variety of factors.

Just imagine the total waste we produce just in the few cases which we discussed above and there are tons of industries producing even more severe amount of waste . How much we humans have distorted out nature , its time to admit our mistakes and supposedly act upon .