In our daily lives, it’s easy to forget about the “minor” details happening somewhere in the background. Like, for instance, the 460 million tons of NEW plastic we globally produce every single year. Just a little annual packaging “innovation,” isn’t it? Who would ever bother with that? It’s just numbers, after all.
Where do those “insignificant” 400 million tons vanish to?
The real “magic” begins when this shiny new plastic is no longer needed. Annually, we simply “get rid of” (read: “dump the problem on someone else”) about 400 million tons of plastic waste. Oh, those innocent tons! One might think it’s just a pile of trash you see at the landfill. But have you ever stopped to consider its TRUE volume?
If this waste weren’t compressed – in the form it lands in our bins: bottles, yogurt containers, films, bags – it would occupy an unimaginable 18 BILLION cubic meters! Yes, billions. That’s not a typo. It’s not just “a lot”; it’s absurdly, horrendously, terrifyingly much.
A queue that wraps the earth… 229 times
For those who need more “tangible” proof of how “irrelevant” this problem is, here’s a little visualization. A typical garbage truck you might have seen this morning holds about 20-25 cubic meters of waste. If we assume our 18 billion cubic meters of uncompressed plastic had to be collected, we’d need around 920 MILLION garbage trucks to do it! That’s almost a billion vehicles hauling all of this to its “designated place.”
But let’s go further, because the “fun” really begins here. Imagine those 920 million garbage trucks lined up one after another. Each about 10 meters long. Together, they’d form a queue stretching 9.2 MILLION KILOMETERS! Yes, you read that right! The Earth’s equator is about 40,075 km long. So, our merry little convoy of garbage trucks would circle the planet… over 229 times! Because surely, we have nothing better to do than build cosmic highways out of trash, right?
A garbage truck in the ocean every minute? just a detail!
And finally, this “charming” statistic that surely won’t move anyone. Every year, an estimated 8 to 13 million tons of plastic ends up in our oceans. Just a tiny addition to the ecosystem. That’s like ONE FULL GARBAGE TRUCK OF PLASTIC BEING DUMPED DIRECTLY INTO THE SEA EVERY SINGLE MINUTE, 24/7! Because fish need new toys, and turtles need plastic straws, don’t they?
This scale is so abstract, we might as well pretend it doesn’t exist. It’s just our planet, after all. The consequences are “far off,” “intangible,” “not my problem.” Or are they? Can we really keep ignoring the fact that we’re drowning in our own waste, with a smile on our face and another single-use cup in hand?
