Sustainability in Surrey ?

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Sustainability is a word which is frequently used by the UK government in many of their policy documents (I give some examples of official statements here).

But, what does sustainability mean in practice ??

First, we must describe the current situation. Then we can look at the progress being made, and at what needs doing. The current situation is summarised in the box to the right, and I have built separate pages on the following topics - food, transport, water and sewage, waste disposal, industry, energy consumption, trees. (Links at top right corner of each page)

In the overview page, I have described Las Vegas as the least sustainable place on earth. It seems to me that Surrey has a similar level of sustainability to Las Vetas, except Surrey has lots of trees, and seldom really needs air conditioning.

Surrey is very dependent on others - particularly for energy, food, and manufactured products, but also for water and waste disposal.

Yet, Surrey is also one of the wealthiest regions on earth ! Perhaps this is mostly because of its proximity to London, but it is still difficult to see how this level of wealth has been generated, and how it is maintained (perhaps I don't understand economics).

Please help me improve the information in these pages by posting on the Sustainability section of the EcoSurrey forum. Please report any progress too, there is also a page of positive developments.

Note:- Sustainable Development in Surrey is a major section of the Surrey CC website, but "sustainable development" is not the same as "sustainability". I am looking at sustainability on this site - the ability to sustain what we are doing in the future.

In Surrey, we have:

• 1.06 million people
• 0.52 cars/person (550,000 total)
• the cars use 350,000 tons petrol per year
• we use 550,000+ tons of oil for domestic and business (gas, electric, coal, etc.)
  
• our agriculture grows an estimated 1% of the food consumed
• our industries produce an estimated 1% of the products used
• we produce 580,000 tons of household waste a year plus more waste from shops, offices, etc
• about 18% of waste is recycled
• we produce 580,000 tons sewage
• we use 58 million tons water
• we have about 12 million trees

Surrey is in a situation which may not be sustainable in the medium and long term.