‘What Happens Next?’: Trash Talk – Are We Facing a Global Waste Crisis?
Borg
Academic and presenter Dr Susan Carland is talking trash in the first episode of Monash University's new podcast series, What Happens Next?, kicking the show off with a three-part investigation into the global waste crisis.
What Happens Next? adopts a unique, sliding-doors approach to the topics it will unpack, considering the pivotal challenges of our era and presenting divergent future scenarios. Throughout each arc within a season, Susan will discuss these issues with world-leading experts, including academics, advocates and changemakers, and ask each of them, “What will happen if we don't change? And what can we do to create a better future?”.
In this premiere episode, the focus lands squarely on waste. Susan is joined today by Research Fellow Dr Kim Borg and Senior Research Fellow Dr Mark Boulet, both from BehaviorWorks Australia, a research enterprise within Monash's Sustainable Development Institute. These behaviour-change experts chat through the issues surrounding single-use plastics, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, food waste and more.
Developed economies generate waste at far greater rates than their share of the population, and developing nations are pushing back on our strategy of shipping waste offshore. Unless we drastically change how we generate, dispose of and process waste, the future looks bleak, experts say.
Read: Breaking it down: Why 'biodegradable' isn't all it's cracked up to be
Mark paints a distressing picture: one-third of our produced food goes straight to landfill, a moral outrage compounded by its environmental and social ramifications. This inefficiency only adds fuel to the climate change fire and imperils the future of a burgeoning global population.
Kim, who specialises in plastic waste, steps in to unveil the magnitude of the planet's plastic problem. A staggering eight million tonnes of plastic infiltrate our oceans annually – equivalent to a daily deluge of a garbage truck's worth of plastic. Plastic, once championed for its convenience, now haunts us as a non-biodegradable, omnipresent menace.
Given humanity's sluggish response to critical issues, and our propensity for reactive rather than proactive change, will we be able to confront this scary situation in time? Listen now to find out the facts about the global waste crisis and discover how you can help drive the change we need.
“If we don’t change our behaviour, by the year 2050, we’re going to have more plastic in the oceans than fish.” – Dr Kim Borg
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In this series
About the Authors
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Kim borg
Research Officer, BehaviourWorks Australia
Kim’s research interests include the impact of human behaviour on the natural world, road safety, health, wellbeing and the environment. Prior to joining BehaviourWorks, she worked with a number of large organisations and departments such as Australia Post, DHHS, WorkSafe Victoria and TAC. She's also played an active role in designing and testing best-practice methods for survey data collection. She's recently started a behaviour change PhD via the Monash Graduate Research Industry Partnership (GRIP) program.
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Mark boulet
Research Fellow with BehaviourWorks Australia, MSDI
Mark’s research interests lie in the area of environmental sustainability, behaviour change and education. He has worked on a range of projects involving the identification and design of behavioural change interventions to tackle issues such as food waste, noise pollution, sustainable transport, stormwater pollution and wildlife management.
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Susan carland
Director, Bachelor of Global Studies, and Lecturer, School of Language, Literature, Cultures and Linguistics
Susan's research and teaching specialties focus on gender, sociology, contemporary Australia, terrorism, and Islam in the modern world. Susan hosted the “Assumptions” series on ABC’s Radio National, and was named one of the 20 Most Influential Australian Female Voices in 2012 by The Age.
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Introducing “What Happens Next?”
Monash University's podcast, ‘What Happens Next?’, hosted by Dr Susan Carland, examines some of the biggest challenges facing our world and asks the experts, “What will happen if we don't change? And what can we do to create a better future?”.