On World Environment Day (June 5), it was announced that by July 30, humanity will have used up all the resources that the Earth can regenerate in a single year. That day is Earth Overshoot Day. For our own Overshoot Day (the day we, specifically in the Netherlands, have consumed more resources than the country can regenerate), the exact date cannot be calculated. The reason? The Dutch data isn’t up to par. That’s striking and unfortunate, says Gijs Derks, Managing Director of Milgro.
Guessing such a date for our country feels a bit like going for a run without your smartwatch. What’s your time and distance then? And how do you know if you’ve improved? Exactly. After such a run, you’re still in the dark about these things. I live by the adage “to measure is to know,” which is at the core of our company. If you want to stay motivated, it’s essential to get feedback on your performance.
The lack of an exact date for Dutch Overshoot Day deprives us of the opportunity to reflect on it—through a segment on the news, news articles, or blogs like this one. Moreover, we now lack a concrete incentive to use our scarce resources even more sparingly on a national scale. Or a warning or a hard lesson if the date has shifted in the wrong direction yet again.
The calculator goes haywire
One of the things that makes it difficult to calculate our Dutch Overshoot Day is our ever-expanding and increasingly complex trade flows. The tangled web of trade data has become so convoluted that it apparently sends the calculator into a tailspin. In addition, the calculation method has changed since last year, as we wrote about earlier. In 2025, Dutch Overshoot Day suddenly shifted back by a full month compared to the previous year, to May 5.
Before we could pat ourselves on the back for this huge leap in the right direction, we had to conclude that CO2 emissions from exported products would henceforth be attributed to the country of destination. This was beneficial for us, but this shift in emissions had nothing to do with our efforts to reduce resource use. All of this demonstrates how complex it is to accurately attribute ecological impact in an internationally interconnected economy like the Netherlands’.
Incidentally, the Netherlands is not the only country for which Earth Overshoot Day cannot be determined. As a country, we join the ranks of, among others, Bhutan, Iceland, Morocco, Norway, Slovenia, Panama, and Venezuela. The Belgians were able to calculate their day: it fell on April 11.
The Importance of Resource Security
This year, in particular, it would be both interesting and important to gain a more precise understanding of our ecological footprint through Dutch Overshoot Day. We are gradually entering a world in which resource security is becoming an increasingly dominant issue. For now, resource-related problems remain under the radar for most consumers, even though they are the cause of much of the current geopolitical unrest. It won’t be long before consumers naturally begin to experience these problems as resources run out. When it comes to businesses, the consequences are already being felt:78% of Dutch companies are experiencing this in the form of longer delivery times and rising prices. This is evident from a recent study by Milgro.
The energy transition—in which consumers are already visibly encountering the first barriers, such as grid congestion or rising energy costs—is a good predictor of how the raw materials transition will unfold. There is an increasing focus on the acute energy crisis. This is pushing our looming raw materials problem into the background. That is a concerning development.
Urban mining as a key pathway
The scarcity of raw materials will continue to increase in the coming years. Raw material security will therefore become a key prerequisite for the future, just as energy security is today. When we relocate our production sites to other parts of the world, we may shift part of our ecological footprint, but we also make ourselves much more dependent on other countries. We can provide ourselves with greater raw material security and more autonomy. The solution lies not in extracting raw materials from the earth, but from our waste products through “urban mining”—that is, recovering valuable raw materials from urban waste. We wrote a blog post about this earlier. This way of thinking needs to take even stronger hold collectively.
Running by Feel
Back to that run. Because, of course, you can go a long way just by relying on how you feel. With a flushed face and tired legs, you can safely conclude that you’ve had a good run. And I’m optimistic. Based on that same feeling, I draw hope from the many initiatives around me aimed at reducing our use of raw materials. Major car brands are using encouraging percentages of recycled material in their new models. Fortunately, waste management companies are increasingly committed to conserving raw materials. And there are more and more smart solutions for turning the “black mass” of lithium batteries into new ones. All those efforts combined must surely have pushed Dutch Overshoot Day back a little, right? Right? Next year, I really want to know for sure!
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