World entered ‘ecological debt’ on 25 September - 25.09.09

Global recession will hardly alter overconsumption trend says new report
In spite of one of the biggest global recessions for a century – the trend toward ever greater over-consumption is hardly changing according to The Consumption Explosion: the Third UK Interdependence Day Report. The report is published on the day - Friday 25 September - that the world as a whole goes into ‘ecological debt’, consuming more resources and generating more waste than ecosystems can produce and absorb.
The Consumption Explosion also reveals some of the crazy and wasteful ways that the UK does business with the rest of the world through so-called ‘boomerang trade’. Because we do not pay the full environmental cost of transport, all around us there are ships, lorries and planes passing in the night, wastefully carrying often identical goods from city to city across the globe and back again to meet consumer demand. For example, the latest data shows that, in the UK:
* We export 5,000 tonnes of toilet paper from the UK to Germany, but then import over 4,000 tonnes back again
* 4,400 tonnes of ice cream gets exported from the UK to Italy, and 4,200 tonnes is then imported back
* We import 22,000 tonnes of potatoes from Egypt and export 27,000 tonnes back the other way
* 116 tonnes of ‘Sweet biscuits, waffles and wafers, gingerbread and the like’ (the official category for trade statistics) comes into the UK, rumbling passed 106 tonnes headed in the opposite direction.
http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/z_sys_PublicationDetail.aspx?pid=299