The Reality of Using Up the Earth’s Resources — in Numbers

Vol.7— The Real Story Behind Resource Extraction —

Every day we put on clothes, buy a drink, use a smartphone, or get into a car.
It feels so natural we hardly ever stop to think.

But what does the Earth lose in the process of making just one of these things?
What is the true cost behind our “convenience”?

In this Circular Economy Basics, Vol. 7, we’ll unpack the hidden reality of resource exploitation that powers our everyday lives—through numbers that make it visible.

One Pair of Jeans = 50 Bathtubs of Water

From cotton farming to sewing and dyeing, producing a single pair of jeans requires 7,500–10,000 liters of water—about 50 bathtubs’ worth, or 13 years of drinking water for one person.

One major U.S. jeans brand alone produces about 100 million pairs per year, consuming over 1 trillion liters of water before those jeans even reach the store—equivalent to a quarter of Japan’s annual household water use, or about 6,000 Tokyo Domes filled to the brim.

Smartphones and Lithium: A Thousand Truckloads of Ore

Lithium—essential for smartphones and EVs—is mined largely in South America’s dry salt flats, particularly in Chile and Bolivia.

One leading smartphone manufacturer uses 5,000–7,000 tonnes of lithium annually—roughly 1,000 large dump truckloads of ore.
Extracting 1 tonne of lithium requires over 20,000 liters of water—more than 120 million liters for that company alone—draining groundwater that local farmers and ecosystems rely on.

That smartphone in your hand may be accelerating water scarcity on the other side of the world.

And yet, smartphones are typically designed for replacement every 2–3 years.
Globally, we generate 62 million tonnes of e-waste each year—but only 17% is properly collected and recycled. The rest is landfilled or incinerated, releasing hazardous substances into air, water, and soil.

PET Bottles and Oil: Over 2 Million Barrels a Year

One of the world’s largest beverage companies produces an estimated 100 billion PET bottles annually—around 30,000 bottles per second.

Each bottle contains about 80 ml of oil in the form of PET (polyethylene terephthalate), adding up to 8 billion liters of fossil fuel every year. That’s equivalent to:

• 40 million 200-liter oil drums
• Enough energy to heat water for 100 million households for 5 years

And while PET bottles are often said to be “recycled,” less than 10% are truly recycled into new bottles. Most are “downcycled” into lower-grade products or burned for energy recovery. The rest escapes into the environment, where it eventually breaks down into microplastics—some of which have already been found inside the human body.

Behind the convenience of a PET bottle lies a triple loss:

1. Overreliance on fossil fuels
2. Waste management limits
3. Irreversible environmental accumulation

That single bottle of water in your hand may come at the cost of underground resources, someone else’s waste burden, and future ocean pollution.

Cars: A One-Tonne Appetite for Metals and Plastics

Building a single car requires far more material than most people realize:

• ~1,000 kg of steel for the body and frame—about the weight of 15 adults
• ~200 kg of aluminum, which is energy-intensive to produce
• ~25 kg of copper—roughly 4,000 Japanese 500-yen coins—embedded in wiring, motors, and electronics
• ~150 kg of plastic, derived from over 100 liters of crude oil

Electrification: The New Resource Hunger

EVs are often seen as “environmentally friendly”—but that’s mostly about emissions while driving. Inside, they are essentially giant devices packed with electronics—2,000–3,000 semiconductor chips, the equivalent of 300–500 smartphones.

The battery alone can contain:

• 20–30 kg of lithium (tens of thousands of smartphone batteries)
• ~10 kg of cobalt (linked to mining labor in Africa)
• Up to 40 kg of nickel (often from rainforest mining)

At a production rate of 1 million EVs per year, a single company can consume tens of thousands of tonnes of these minerals annually—drying salt lakes in Latin America, polluting mines in Africa, and consuming massive energy in Asian refineries.

Modern EVs are not just “moving appliances”—they’re moving mines. Sleek and silent from the outside, but inside they are crammed with Earth’s buried treasures, extracted and assembled at a cost the road never shows.

We Don’t Want to Stop the Economy—We Want to Redesign It So It Doesn’t End

You might be thinking: Should we stop making cars or smartphones altogether? Should we give up economic growth?

That’s not the point.
We’re not rejecting products or convenience—we’re questioning why they are designed for disposability and mass waste. This mindset is built into our manufacturing, consumption, and policy systems.

No matter how much we recycle or recover energy, products made with waste in mind from the start will always hit a dead end somewhere.

The real question is:

• How can we design products so they don’t need to be discarded?
• How can we create a society where value circulates multiple times instead of just once?

This is not about halting growth—it’s about ensuring it lasts.
With finite resources, only wisdom in circulation can keep the economy from consuming itself.

The circular economy is not just a model—it’s a quiet revolution to avoid that fate.