Frans van Houten Quotes

The reality is that a consumer culture which chucks out its iPhones for a new version every nine months is completely unsustainable, because Earth has already reached the tipping point. 'The General Strike' attempts to personalize these issues and encourage listeners to look for a new model.

We face a simple choice. Either we go back to the days when everything was disposable and landfill dumps consumed our countryside at an increasing pace, or we recognise that we have limited resources and need to use them wisely and sustainably.

We're not going to persuade people in the developing world to go without, but neither can we afford a planet on which everyone lives like an American. Billions more people living in suburbs and driving SUVs to shopping malls is a recipe for planetary suicide. We can't even afford to continue that way of life ourselves.

There's no law of physics that says we have to be an unsustainable society - in fact, quite the opposite. The planet's ready to work with us if we're ready to think differently, but we do have to make that jump and start to do things in new ways.

Does this planet have enough resources so seven or eight billion can have the same level of consumption and waste that today is seen in rich societies? It is this level of hyper-consumption that is harming our planet.

We assume that everything's becoming more efficient, and in an immediate sense that's true; our lives are better in many ways. But that improvement has been gained through a massively inefficient use of natural resources.

Unless we practice conservation, those who come after us will have to pay the price of misery, degradation, and failure for the progress and prosperity of our day.

The cost of our success is the exhaustion of natural resources, leading to energy crises, climate change, pollution, and the destruction of our habitat. If you exhaust natural resources, there will be nothing left for your children. If we continue in the same direction, humankind is headed for some frightful ordeals, if not extinction.

The planet's environmental woes tend to be overlooked as we scramble for the latest high-tech gizmos - and conveniently ignore their energy consumption.

The Industrial Age is not sustainable. It's not sustainable in ecological terms, and it's not sustainable in human terms.

We can have technology, prosperity, nice homes and cars, but at the same time we must be conscious of what we are dumping into the water, the air and our food.

Civilization can never be sustainable.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that any way of living that's based on the use of non-renewable resources won't last.

I watch people throw aluminum cans in the trash, and I think of all the stories I've heard about the over-mining of aluminum, the erosion that happens, and the trees that fall down.

If the rest of the world aspires to our way of life ... we'll bury ourselves in waste.

Humanity is consuming the resources of the earth and life in an excessive and disordered way, forgetting the earth's own needs

For every person in the world to reach the present U.S. level of consumption with existing technology would require four more planet earths.

Our entire economy is based on waste. We produce stuff we don’t need… How far is this going to go? I have a 5 word answer for you: Zero waste equals zero commerce.

Our whole economy has become a waste economy, in which things must be almost as quickly devoured and discarded as they have appeared in the world, if the process itself is not to come to a sudden catastrophic end..

For too long, the world has been focused on short-term growth and development at the expense of our long-term survival as we have depleted our natural resources at historically reckless rates.

My father gave me this poster from National Geographic back in the very early 70s, so I was a young teenager. It showed how man polluted his world. And the issues that they talked about, whether it was water pollution, air, or terrestrial... The issues that they talk about on this poster are still very much present today.

All my projects are about sustainability, bioremediation, making things in a cleaner fashion.

We over-eat, over-buy, and over-built, spewing out our toxic wastes upon the earth and into the air.

We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.

Of all the waste we generate, plastic bags are perhaps the greatest symbol of our throwaway society. They are used, then forgotten, and they leave a terrible legacy.