Ver 1.0 (May 23)
Confidential & Proprietary | 2023 CBRE Inc.
So far in 2023.....
A 2018 Scientific Report in Nature puts the size of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch at 1.6 million km2. The development of the size of the patch is very difficult to predict. We use an estimate based on the assumption that it will double in size over a decade as reported by the NY Times.
Our plastic waste has created a gigantic “plastic soup” in the Pacific of the size of 1.6 million square kilometers. That’s the size of Iran or over twice the size of Texas or Turkey. Some estimates even put the great pacific garbage patch size to 15 million square kilometers - almost the size of Russia.
2,120,000,000 Tons of waste dumped on the planet. Every year we dump a massive 2.12 billion tons of waste on the planet. If all this waste was put on trucks they would go around the world 24 times.
What waste is dumped? The waste is dumped on land-based dumpsites or in the oceans and include:
- Construction waste
- Industrial waste
- Household waste
- Plastic waste
- Electronic waste
- Radioactive waste
- Sewage
- Run-off waste (fertilizers, pesticides, and oil from for example farms running off into groundwater, rivers, oceans)
Waste dumping has become a way to “solve” the world’s enormous waste problem. We need to come up with better ideas pretty quickly or it will spin completely out of control. This stunning amount of waste is partly because 99 percent of the stuff we buy is trashed within 6 months.
E-waste is the most rapidly growing waste problem in the world. We generate about 50 million tons of it every year. This is equivalent to throwing out 1000 laptops every single second. In some places the amount of e-waste increases with 500 % in the years to come.
In absolute terms, Asia produces the most electronic waste followed by Europe and North America. However, Europe has the highest generation of e-waste per capita with 16 kilograms per person and Africa the lowest with 1.7 kilograms per person.
We throw out over 2 billion tons of household waste a year globally. That’s more than 60 tons of waste every second. Most waste goes to landfills or is burned.
Burning waste is the world’s largest source of dioxins, which is one of the most toxic chemicals known to science. The burning of waste therefore adds to the problem of air pollution.
We use 5 trillion plastic bags… per year! That’s 160,000 a second! And over 700 a year for every single person on the planet. We can do better than that.
In total, we use 100 million tons of plastic every year. Some 10 percent of this plastic end up in the oceans. An estimated 300 million plastic bags every year end up in the Atlantic Ocean alone.
We produce 400 million tons of hazardous waste each year - almost 13 tons a second. Hazardous wastes are wastes that can cause substantial harm to our health and the environment.
Almost 60 kg of hazardous waste is generated a year for every single person in the world - and the amount is increasing. In just one generation the production of man-made chemicals has increased by 40,000% from 1 million to 400 million tons.
All information courtesy of The World Counts (HTML links have been made available for free public use)