Is Chinese Manufacturing Sustainable?
Here is an environmental question which I predict will dawn on all of us eventually but its worth thinking about now.
OK we see China as the cheap place to off-ship our production facilities. But why? Manufacturing offers many low skilled jobs but it also consumes massive amounts of resource including water. In short, to be totally honest with ourselves we couldn’t have maintained the mass production of general everyday crap for that much longer. In Australia, for example, most of our river systems are under extreme environmental pressure. Our resources are struggling without the added pressure of production factories we’ve sent overseas.
So if we can’t sustain the water resource to mass produce all of that stuff how can China achieve it? In the short term this is working out for all of us so why ask the question right? Why ask what the hell do we expect to happen when billions of nuclear armed Chinese actually need something to drink? Many of those Chinese will be well educated and demand a similar lifestyle to our own. And why shouldn’t they? Wars are fought over far less desperate resources than water.
I started asking this question when I saw a show on television this year about the struggle of modern map makers to keep up with environmental change. Shrinking seas and rivers that no longer reach the ocean all year round - like the Yellow River. Another show this week explained how much water goes into individual articles - a hamburger, a car tyre, or a cotton shirt. We’re massively over-consuming the resource that is next most important to air. Its over-consumed for just about everything commercially exploitable and yet our cities are teetering under the direct pressure of water restrictions.
We are all out there measuring our carbon emissions to fight Global Warming and that is critically important. We need a future on this planet for our children and our species to survive. But water seems to be sitting back there in second place at the moment. Why aren’t we seeing global pressure to the same degree on sustainable water use?
Why isn’t mass production, and for that matter globalisation, being identified as critically flawed. Try explaining how a tomato grown in China then shipped to Italy to be canned and then shipped to Australia and trucked to my supermarket can be sold cheaper than my local product? Carbon emissions on that tomato sale anyone? Water consumption in that entire process of one can of tomatoes into my bolognese?
We need another Al Gore to champion the world’s attitude to and use of water resources before we’re fighting over that last chemically polluted puddle for our water purification processors.
We need to stop measuring everything about the world in terms of economics. Life, after all, comes well before money and commodity. Now tell me how the friggen hell Chinese manufacturing can offer me these incredible cheap deals sustainably? They can’t. Our economic exploitation is going to backfire on us bigtime.
Ask the map makers where the water is going… not your local politicians.
