Mahatma Gandhi once said that if China and India were to aspire to a western-style consumer culture, their citizens would quickly strip the earth bare like locusts.

Today, China’s state-owned energy and mining giants scour the world for the raw materials needed to power the workshop of the world and feed the growing appetite of its aspiring masses. As well as being the world’s biggest producer of everything from microwave ovens to jelly beans, the country has just overtaken the US as the largest producer of greenhouse gases. While millions of its citizens have been lifted out of poverty, its dirty and wasteful growth model has left large swathes of the country devastated and unable to support even basic ecologies.