Marketing Review — Summer 2008 - (Page 47) 42 43 London and the surrounding region, landfills will run out of room by 2012. Recycling has proved to be an effective alternative to dumping. As of 2005, Germany recycled 60 percent of its municipal solid waste, 65 percent of manufacturing waste, 80 percent of packaging, and 87 percent of construction waste, according to the Environment, Nature Conservation, and Nuclear Safety. Largely as a result, the number of landfills for domestic waste has been reduced from about 50,000 in the 1970s to just 160. ASSESSMENT: The challenge of dealing with garbage will grow for so long as the world’s middle classes continue to expand or until technology finds ways to recycle virtually all of the materials used in manufacturing and packaging. This trend will remain intact through at least 2050. IMPLICATIONS: Recycling and waste-to-energy plants are a viable alternative to simply dumping garbage. This trend will push the development of so-called life-cycle design, which builds convenient recyclability into new products from SUMMER 2008 • 55 TRENDS FOR TRAVEL & HOSPITALITY scale migration out of afflicted areas. Climate change is expected to reduce the flow of Australia’s parched Murray River by a further 5 percent in 20 years and 15 percent in 50 years. Water wars, predicted for more than a decade, are a threat in places like the Kashmir: much of Pakistan’s water comes from areas of Kashmir now controlled by India. Other present and future water conflicts involve Turkey, Syria, and Iraq over the Tigris and Euphrates; Israel, Jordan, Syria, and Palestine over water from the Jordan River and the aquifers under the Golan Heights; India and Bangladesh, over the Ganges and Brahmaputra; China, Indochina, and Thailand, over the Mekong; Kyrghyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan over the Oxus and Jaxartes rivers; and Ethiopia, Sudan, and at least six East African countries, including Egypt, over the Nile. In the United States, repair of decayed water systems is likely to be a major priority for older cities such as New York, Boston, and Atlanta. Cost estimates for necessary replacement and repair of water mains range up to $1 trillion. IMPLICATIONS FOR HOSPITALITY AND TRAVEL: In the American Southwest, northern China, Australia, and other parched regions, water supplies will be a growing concern for hotels, restaurants, and other destinations. This is not likely to ease in the foreseeable future. As water become ever more scarce throughout much of the developing world, regional instability could put otherwise attractive destinations off limits for Western travelers. Parts of the Middle East are the obvious candidates for future avoidance. 42) Recycling has delayed the “garbage glut” that threatened to overflow the world’s landfills, but the problem continues to grow. 43) Preference for industrial develAmericans now produce about 4.5 pounds of trash per person opment over environmental conper day, twice as much as they threw away a generation ago. Seventy percent of U.S. landfills will be full by 2025, according cerns is fading slowly in much of to the EPA. Japan expects to run out of space for industrial waste as soon as 2008 and for municipal solid waste by 2015. In the developing world. their inception. Expect a wave of new regulations, recycling, waste-to-energy projects, and waste management programs in the United States and other countries in an effort to stem the tide of trash. In the United States, it will of course begin in California, a jurisdiction often cited by policy forecasters as a bellwether of change. State and local governments will tighten existing regulations and raise disposal prices in Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Louisiana, and other places that accept much of the trash from major garbage producers such as New York. Trash producers in the developed world will ship much more of their debris to repositories in developing countries. This will inspire protests in the receiving lands. Beyond 2025 or so, the developing countries will close their repositories to foreign waste, forcing producers to develop more waste-to-energy and recycling technologies. Ultimately, it may even be necessary to exhume buried trash for recycling to make more room in closed dump sites for material that cannot be reused. Waste-to-energy programs will make only a small contribution to the world’s growing need for power. IMPLICATIONS FOR HOSPITALITY AND TRAVEL: Hotels, resorts, restaurants, and other large-scale waste generators can expect to face the same kind of recycling requirements that many private homeowners have been complying with for years. This will increase handling expenses for recyclable bottles, cans, plastics, and paper, but it should ultimately reduce the cost of disposal. This may bring even more scrutiny to cruise lines. Any ship caught dumping waste at sea can expect to bring its company catastrophic publicity, with a risk of boycotts. The rest may profit from advertising their “green” credentials, especially if they donate to ocean-oriented environmental groups. The Pew Research Center reports that less than one-fourth of respondents in any African country rated environmental problems as the world’s most important threat. In Ethiopia, where desertification is at its worst and drought is a constant threat, only 7 percent did so. Beijing has made repairing the environment a national priority. Yet 70 percent of the energy used in China comes from coal-burning power plants, few of them equipped with pollution controls. The country intends to build over five hundred more coal-fired plants in the next ten years. Even Germany has committed to building more power plants fired by high-sulfur brown coal. ASSESSMENT: View this as a counter-trend to Trend 40. It will remain largely intact until the poor of India and China complete their transition into the middle class, around 2040. IMPLICATIONS: Broad regions of the planet will be subject to pollution, deforestation, and other environmental ills in the coming decades. Acid rain like that afflicting the United States and Canada 47
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