On average globally we can expect to live for 71.4 years before kicking the proverbial
bucket (World Health Organisation).
If you’re lucky and use the time you have wisely, you might just manage to achieve some
goals, fulfil a dream or two, and leave the world in a slightly better condition than
you found it.
Of course, just existing as a human being in the modern world uses up considerable amounts
of resources, and creates a helluva lot of waste as a result. But exactly how much waste
does a single person produce in their lifetime?
I’m Stu, this is Debunked, and we’re here to sort the truths from the myths, and the
facts from the misconceptions.
Let’s be sensible and start at the beginning… birth. Soon after you’re brought screaming
into the world, the adults around you go to considerable lengths to take care of the entirely
helpless bundle of joy for which they find themselves responsible. This obviously includes
protecting, teaching, and loving their child, but also means dealing with far more immediate
bodily concerns.
By the time babies are toilet-trained, usually somewhere between two and two and a half years
of age, the average disposable diaper-wearing tot will have gone through between 6,500 and
10,000 nappies. That’s roughly equivalent to about 2,000 pounds (907 kilograms) - yes,
an entire U.S. ton - of dirty baby underwear over the course of two years… per baby.
Indeed, disposable diapers represent around 30% of all non-biodegradable waste.
Even more shockingly, disposable diapers often take hundreds of years to break down...
...and though so-called ‘eco-friendly’ alternatives to non-biodegradable diapers
do exist, even biodegradable diapers will not degrade at the bottom of landfills in
the absence of sunlight and air, and the amount of parents who opt for reusable cloth diapers
is less than 5%.
All that waste is created just to cleanly dispose of the biological matter that babies
produce simply as a result of, y’know… existing. But while we're on this topic, it's
a good time to look at how much biological waste we all produce; in other words, the
waste products generated directly by our bodies.
The most obvious examples that spring to mind are good ol’ number ones and twos. It is
estimated that over the course of a year, the average person produces roughly 133 gallons
(605 litres) of urine...
...which works out to a lifetime total of 9,500 gallons (43,000 litres), equivalent
to around 120 bathtubs.
When it comes to feces, it is believed that the average person excretes around 360 pounds
(163.293 kilograms) of the brown stuff every year...
...which works out to a lifetime total of 25,700 pounds (11700.1 kilograms). That’s
about as heavy as two elephants, three hippos, or six giraffes, depending on which member
of the animal kingdom you want to use for defecation comparison.
Slightly less obvious and slightly less gross bodily fluids like tears, saliva and sweat
are, unlike urine and feces, produced constantly in order to make sure our mouths and eyes
stay moist and to keep us cool.
Collectively, the average person produces around 172 gallons / 782 litres of tears,
saliva and sweat every year, or about 12,700 gallons (57770 litres) in a lifetime. That’s
enough to fill roughly 820 beer kegs. Mmm… refreshing.
Moving on to less liquidy bodily waste, humans also produce a substance called keratin, which
appears on our bodies in the form of nails and hair. Over the course of our lifetimes,
the average person produces 107.1 inches (272.034 centimetres) per nail. If we multiply that
by the 20 nails that most people have, we can conclude that the average person grows
roughly 178 feet and 6 inches (54 metres and 40 centimetres) of nails in their lifetime,
equivalent in length to six and half London buses.
Hair on the other hand, while lighter, grows much quicker and in far more individual strands.
Over the course of their lifetime, the average non-bald human grows a head of hair measuring
roughly 35 feet and 8 inches (10 metres and 88 centimetres) in length. If we multiply
that by the 100,000 individual strands of hair that cover the average person’s head,
essentially creating one long strand of hair, that one long strand of hair would be over
676 miles (1088 kilometres) long, which is well over three times as long as the river
Thames, or two and half times the Grand Canyon.
Possibly the least obvious biological matter that we are constantly releasing into the
world is skin. We are constantly shedding dead skin cells and in such large amounts
that in a single lifetime, the average person sheds 628.32 pounds (or 285 kilograms) of
skin, that would outweigh a Blue Whale’s heart! The heaviest on the planet!. That’s
a lot of dead skin.
Lastly, we also have to factor in the gases that humans produce… BURP FART… no we’ll
get to that, I’m talking about carbon dioxide we all exude into the atmosphere simply as
a result of a crucial little process known as br eathing. Every day, the average person
exhales around 500 litres of CO₂, roughly equivalent to around 2.2 pounds (1 kilogram)
of mass, the same as a bag of sugar. Over the course of a lifetime, that works out to
around 14.3 million litres or around 31 ½ tons (nearly 29,000 kilograms) of carbon dioxide
that is expelled into the world by each and every one of us.
Add to that the 3 and a half pints (2 litres) of farts and burps the average person produces
every day and you alone contribute a further 232 pounds (or 57,444 litres) of gas over
the course of a lifetime.
So with nearly 8 billion of us on this little planet, we’re collectively pumping out over
3 million tons of the stuff each year! That’s around 8% of the annual global C02 emissions
created from burning fossils fuels. So on the face of it, it looks as though we
humans are pretty major contributors to greenhouse gases as a byproduct of merely existing.
But these biological waste products are A. unavoidable, and B. part of a larger natural
cycle that aren’t necessarily causing any extra damage to the environment.
The carbon dioxide we produce for example is part of a process where we convert carbohydrates
from CO2-absorbing plants into energy, plus water and CO2, and not actually adding any
extra carbon-dioxide.
In contrast, when we burn fossil fuels, C02 that has been stored up for millions of years
is instantly released, and this significantly increases the level of greenhouse gases.
Where as our biomatter will generally degrade quite easily and provide further nourishment
to the natural environment, even in the form of the bodies we leave behind after we die,
the same cannot be said for much of the artificial waste that we humans create, and that is where
we start getting into some real problems that, sadly, are only getting worse.
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Right now let's get back to the matter at hand, how much artificial waste do each of
us make?
According to researchers from the World Bank, the global population generates at least 3.5
million tons of solid waste a day, ten times more than people did a century ago. Of course,
there are far more people alive today, but only around four times as many (1.8 billion),
suggesting that we are far more wasteful than our comparatively frugal ancestors.
As we get older, each of us only adds to our own, personal, ever-growing pile of trash,
and in fact, it might be the case that we are at our most wasteful when we are young
adults - yep, us pesky millennials are at it again.
A study conducted in the UK in 2017 found that only 49% of people aged between 16 and
34 said they recycle as much as they can, compared to 70% of 35 to 54-year-olds, 83%
of 55 to 74-year-olds, and 81% of those aged 75 and older. These findings mirrored the
results of a 2014 Harris poll of adults in the United States, which found that millennials
were less likely to “always recycle” than any other age group.
Unfortunately, young people aged between 18 and 24 are also significantly more likely
to waste food compared to older people, which has been blamed on the transitory nature of
young adulthood. Unsurprisingly, moving away from home into multi-person households lacking
in fridge and freezer space, alongside people who haven’t yet learnt basic food management
behaviours leads to large amounts of unnecessary waste. Shocking, I know.
So what exactly are we all throwing away, and how much? The answers are perhaps both
fascinating and depressing in equal measure.
According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, the most frequently encountered
material found in municipal solid waste landfills is paper, which, in its various forms, may
constitute more than 40 percent of a given landfill’s contents.
The EPA report that the average American throws away 63 pounds (28.5 kilograms) of newspapers
and magazines every year - roughly the same weight as 90 HUMAN HEARTS! . In a lifetime,
that works out to somewhere around 4937 pounds 2240 kg of newspaper and magazines, this time
equivalent to a rhino!
Indeed, the much-anticipated ‘paperless society’ first conceived in the 1970s never
came to pass; with our consumption of paper only increasing since the 1980s. Currently
only 1% of offices are truly paperless.
Not only that, the amount of electronic technological waste that we produce is increasing by as
much as 5% annually, with some estimates suggesting that the worldwide production of e-waste could
exceed 50 million tons in 2020 alone! That’s 150… EMPIRE STATE BUILDINGS! just in TVs,
laptops, toasters, microwaves and the like in a single year ! That’s more than half
the total of all the skyscrapers in the whole of New York City.
Following paper, the second most common thing that ends up in landfills is generally food
waste, consisting of all the food you didn’t finish and scraped into the bin or simply
didn’t cook at all and left to go bad at the back of your fridge like the wasteful
monsters you are. Interestingly enough, those to adhere to healthy diets rich in fruit and
vegetables are actually the biggest food wasters, though we certainly can’t blame the global
generation of food waste entirely on health nuts.
Shockingly, it is estimated that we waste more than 30% of all the food produced across
the globe, enough to feed every undernourished person on earth, according to the World Wildlife
Fund.
When researchers at the US Department of Agriculture analysed eight years of food data up to the
year 2014, they found that Americans waste as much as 150,000 tons of food every single
day, equivalent in weight to five and half Statue of Liberties. On an individual level,
this works out to about a pound of food waste per person per day, meaning that over the
course of their lifetime, the average American wastes around 14.36 tons of food, which is
about as heavy as two t-rexes, or to bring it closer to home, the equivalent of 9 cows!
It’s worth pointing out that both paper and food waste are biodegradable, and under
the right conditions will break down completely in as little as 6 weeks. However, many waste
products, even those that are biodegradable, often take much longer to decompose in landfills,
as they are often compacted and sheltered from the open environment.
In some cases, newspapers published decades earlier that had been excavated from landfills
can be found still intact and entirely readable, having been deprived of air and sunlight while
buried underneath piles of garbage.
Not only that, but biodegradable matter like food waste produces incredible amounts of
methane as it all rots away. Indeed, food waste is responsible for as much as 11 percent
of the greenhouse gas emissions that come from the production of food. Furthermore,
when we waste food, we’re not just wasting the actual food itself, but also all the energy
and water it takes to grow, harvest, transport, and package it.
Speaking of packaging, the next largest contributor to the amount of waste that we humans produce
is plastic, which, as most of us know, takes far, far longer to degrade.
While plastic bags may break down in as little as 10 years in favourable conditions, plastic
bottles can take around 450 years to degrade, and other plastic products can last as long
as 1,000 years in a landfill.
Since 1950, over 9 billion tons of plastic waste has been produced, and nowadays enough
plastic is thrown away annually to encircle the Earth in a monstrous ring of discarded
plastic not once... not twice… not even three times, but four times over.
Today, an average person living in a Western country works their way through as much as
220 pounds (or 100 kilograms) of plastic each year, equivalent to throwing away 6500 compact
discs, dvds or blu-rays.
Though this figure is obviously not equal across every country, sadly, we have to report
that the United States is the world’s biggest per capita producer of waste; in total, as
a country the US produces roughly half the amount of trash compared to that of India
and China, despite having a population roughly nine times smaller.
Obviously, plastic waste is no exception. According to the global risk consulting firm
Verisk Maplecroft, the average Westerner works their way through approximately 18,400 pounds
(or 8300 kilograms) over the course of a lifetime.
Ultimately, each of us will send roughly 64 tons of waste to landfills in our lives. And,
even worse, as much as a whopping 91 percent of that is not recycled, according to the
United Nations.
And so, by the time we bite the dust, the average human being will have produced an
enormous amount of waste,
which adds up to a truly colossal trash pile considering the fact that there are almost
8 billion of us scuttling around on the surface of our planet..
Much of our waste, sadly, ends up in landfills or at the bottom of the ocean, with only a
small amount of it being recycled or breaking down in a short amount of time.
Now more than ever, it is crucial that we all do our best to reduce waste and recycle,
so that future generations inherit a cleaner, less polluted Earth.
Thanks for watching, please do check out our link to Nord VPN and if you enjoyed this video
then watch myths about the human body next! We’ll see you next time!