Britain started eating the planet on 15 April

Latest figures from the New Economics Foundation (nef) reveal Britain's rising global interdependence as the nation went into ecological debt on 15 April. nef has worked out that this is the day in 2007 that the UK, in effect, stops relying on its own natural resources to support itself and starts to live off the rest of the world. At current UK levels of consumption our Ecological Debt Day - the day we begin living beyond our environmental means - falls only a third of the way through the year and has crept ever earlier over the last four decades. The idea of the day was launched this time last year in nef's UK Interdependence Report. It revealed, for example, that we imported 14,137 tonnes of chocolate covered waffles and wafers and exported 15,856 tonnes...

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