Earth Overshoot Day marks the date when humanity has used up nature’s annual resources. In 2020, Earth Overshoot Day fell on August 22, three weeks later than 2019’s date of July 29 as a result of COVID-19 lockdowns, meaning that humanity consumed less resources than last year.

According to research conducted by Global Footprint Network, an international research organization, COVID-19- related lockdowns resulted in a 9.3% reduction in humanity’s ecological footprint compared with the same period last year.

However, we would still need 1.6 Earths to keep up with our current use of ecological resources.

While Mathis Wackernagel, president of Global Footprint Network, called this year’s data “encouraging,” he called for further progress to be made “by design, not by disaster.”

CEO of Global Footprint Network Laurel Hanscom adds, “Sustainability requires that both ecological balance and people’s well-being be ensured over the long-term, therefore this year’s sudden Ecological Footprint reduction cannot be mistaken for progress.”

According to the research, Australia used up its resources in the first half year during its 2019/ 2020 forest fire season.

Wackernagel says, “We’re using up the future to pay for the present. We’ve only got one planet and that’s not going to change.”

The research organization says that sustainability of a society depends on the sound management of ecological resources. To do this, we need to change the way we produce our food, we move around, how many children we have and how much land we protect for wildlife. Reducing our overall carbon footprint by 50% would push the date back 93 days, cutting food waste in half, 13 days. And if we push the date back by 5 days each year, humanity would be using less than one planet before 2050.

At the top of a hill called Mount Lee in Los Angeles on the west coast of the USA is a very famous sign, recognizable to people around the world. My job is to look after this sign.     20     The first film was made there in 1907 and by 1912, at least 15 independent studios could be found making films around town.

In the 1940s, TV started to become popular and some Hollywood film studios closed, but then TV companies moved in and took them over. Modern Hollywood was born.     21     If one of them ever fell down I would have to put it back up at exactly the same angle. They follow the shape of Mount Lee and this is part of their fame.

I am responsible for maintaining and protecting the sign.     22     When I first arrived in 1989, security was pretty low-tech-we put up a fence around the sign to stop people messing with it. But people just jumped over the fence. The back of the sign was black with graffiti(涂鸦)there was wire across it, but they still got through. So I decided to improve the effectiveness of the security.

Now we have motion-detectors and cameras. Everything goes via the internet to a dedicated surveillance(监控)team watching various structures around the city. Even so, people still try to climb over the barrier, mostly innocent tourists surprised that you can’t walk right up to the sign. But they can get a closer look on one of my regular tours.

    23     They want to light the sign, paint it pink, or cover it in something to promote their product. You’ll get a really enthusiastic marketing executive call up, terribly excited because they think they’re the first person to think of this or that idea. They mostly get turned down. That’s because we don’t like to change the image and we hope it will have the same significance for generations to come.

Throughout the world, only 15% of the material that are used to make clothing is properly recycled, according to the Alle SacUrthur Club, an organization in Liverpool, UK, that boosts the circular economy. Most clothing waste—an     24    (estimate) 82 million tonnes from the fashion industry alone-produced every year ends up buried or burnt.

    25    (handle) all that waste, methods to recover and reuse the material are intended as an active response to the future risks by researchers and start-up companies. Much of their focus is on chemical recycling,     26     the material is broken down into its building blocks and applied to create new materials, including fibres that     27     (weave) into new clothes. The challenges lie in     28     (develop) the processes for such treatment. They have to be practical, but they also have to be at least as cost-effective as simply making new fibres.

    29     the natural cellulose fibres from cotton, some other materials include human-made cellulosic fibres. They are derived from wood-pulp cellulose and may be used to produce materials such as viscose (rayon) and a similar material called lyocell.

A change in the manufacturing process is being applied to the textile-waste problem by Essen, a start-up in Seattle, Washington.     30     the company has fundamentally devoted to the process is that it uses discarded textiles, instead of wood, as the source of its cellulose. It has also adjusted the process to produce a fibre that the firm’s co-founder and president Christo Stan says is superior to     31     other cellulosics and cotton, and that can be recycled more times.

Although there are abundant technical challenges, the main barrier     32     widespread textile recycling could be economic, says materials engineer Lijiang Jiang at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Atlanta. “Most of the materials are not that invaluable,” Jiang says. So cheap it is to produce polyester, cotton and other fabrics     33     there’s little profit margin unless the recycling processes themselves are very inexpensive.