At any given moment, crude oil is being pumped from the depths of the planet. Some of that sludge is sent to a refinery and processed into plastic, then it becomes the phone in your hand, the shades on your window, the ornaments that hang on your Christmas tree.

Although scientists know how much carbon dioxide released to make these products (a new iPhone is like driving more than 200 miles), there is little research on how much is hidden in them. A study published Friday in the journal Cell Reports Sustainability It is estimated that billions of tons of carbon from fossil fuels – coal, oil, and gas – have been stored in gadgets, building materials, and other durable man-made objects over the last 25 years. stage, hidden in what researchers call the “technosphere.”

According to a study by researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, 400 million tons of carbon are added to the stockpile of the technosphere every year, growing at a faster rate than fossil fuel emissions. But in many cases, the technosphere does not store carbon permanently; when things are thrown and burned, it also warms the atmosphere. In 2011, 9 percent of all captured fossil carbon was sunk into goods and infrastructure in the technosphere, an amount roughly equivalent to the year’s emissions from the European Union if it were to burn.

“It’s like a ticking time bomb,” said Klaus Hubacek, an ecological economist at the University of Groningen and senior author of the paper. “We take a lot of fossil resources out of the earth and put them in the technosphere and then leave them sitting. But what happens after the lifetime of something?”

The word “technosphere” began 1960when a science writer named Wil Lepkowski wrote that “modern man has become an aimless, solitary prisoner of his technology,” in an article in Science magazine.. Since then, the term, a play on “biosphere,” has been used by ecologists and geologists to grapple with the amount of things man has suppressed on the planet.

“The problem is that we are very wasteful as we create and build things,” said Jan Zalasiewicz, a professor of paleobiology at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, who was not involved in the study at the University of Groningen.

In 2016, Zalasiewicz and his colleagues published a paper estimating that the technosphere grew by approximately 30 trillion tonsan amount 100,000 times greater than the weight of all the people piled on top of each other. The paper also found that the number of “technofossils” — rare types of man-made objects — exceeded the number of unique species of life on the planet. In 2020, a separate group of researchers found that the technosphere doubling in number roughly every 20 years and now probably more than all living things.

“The question is, how does the technosphere affect the biosphere?” Zalasiewicz said. Plastic bags and nets, for example, can suffocate animals that encounter them. And unlike natural ecosystems, such as forests and oceans that absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, humans are “not very good at recycling,” Zalasiewicz said.

Managing the disposal of all these things in a more climate-friendly way is exactly the problem that researchers from the University of Groningen want to pay attention to. Their research looked at 8.4 billion tons of fossil carbon in man-made things used for at least one year between 1995 and 2019. Almost 30 percent of this carbon was trapped in rubber and plastic, most of which in household goods, and another quarter is hidden in bitumen, a crude oil product used in construction.

“Once you discard these things, the question is, how do you treat that carbon?” said Kaan Hidiroglu, one of the authors of the study and a PhD student in energy and environment at the University of Groningen. “If you put them in incinerators and burn them, you immediately release a lot of carbon emissions into the atmosphere, which is something we really don’t want to do.”

Every year, the paper estimates, almost one-third of these fossil-products of the technosphere are burned. Another third ends up in landfills, which can act as a kind of long-term carbon sink. But unfortunately, the authors acknowledge, these sites are always leaching chemicalscry methaneor pour out the microplastics to the environment. A little less than a third is recycled – a solution that has its own solution problems – and a small amount is thrown away.

“There are many different aspects to the problem and treating it properly,” Hubacek said. Still, he said, landfills are a good start if managed well. According to the study, most of the fossil carbon placed in landfills slowly decomposes and remains for 50 years. Designing products in a way that enables them to be recycled and last longer will help keep carbon locked up for longer.

Ultimately, Hubacek says, the real solution starts with asking people if they really need more stuff. “Reduce consumption and avoid making it in the first place. But once you have it, that’s when we have to think about what to do next.”

This article originally appeared on Grist on https://grist.org/science/gadgets-carbon-sinks-technosphere-study/. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org.