Share
This year, I served on the judging panel for The Royal Statistical Society’s International Statistic of the Year.
On Dec. 18, we announced the winner: 90.5 percent, the amount of plastic that has never been recycled. OK – but why is that such a big deal?

Opinion
Liberty Vittert
Last year’s winner was 69. That’s the annual number of Americans killed, on average, by lawn mowers – compared to two Americans killed annually, on average, by immigrant jihadist terrorists and the 11,737 Americans killed annually by being shot by another American. That figure, first shared in The Huffington Post, was highlighted in a viral tweet by Kim Kardashian in response to the proposed migrant ban.
Very Little Plastic Is Recycled
This year’s statistic came into prominence from a United Nations report. The chair of the judges and RSS president, Sir David Spiegelhalter, said: “It’s really concerning that so little plastic has ever been recycled and, as a result, so much plastic waste has leached out into the world’s environment. It’s a great, growing and genuinely world problem.”
Let’s take a closer look at this year’s winning statistic. About 90.5 percent of the 6.3 billion metric tons of plastic waste produced since mass production began about 60 years ago is now lying around our planet in landfills and oceans or has been incinerated. If we don’t change our ways, by 2050, there will be about 12 billion metric tons of plastic waste.
When the panel first began looking at this statistic, I really didn’t have any comprehension of what billions of tons of plastic means. Based on a study from 2015 and some back of the envelope calculations, that’s the equivalent of 7.2 trillion grocery bags full of plastic as of 2018.
But again, I still didn’t quite have a feel for how much that actually is. People tend to use distance measurements to compare numbers, so I tried that. Assuming that a grocery bag of plastic is about 1 foot high, if you stacked the grocery bags, you could go to the moon and back 5,790 times. That’s starting to feel a bit more real.
In fact, if you could monetize all of the plastic trash clogging up our environment – including the 12 percent that is incinerated– you could buy some of the world’s biggest businesses.
Assuming it costs 3.25 cents to produce a plastic bottle, we can estimate that a grocery bag contains about $1 of plastic material production. (I took a grocery bag and filled it with 31 bottles.) So 7.2 trillion grocery bags is the equivalent of a cool $7.2 trillion.
You Could Be Richest Person on the Planet
What can you buy with that? Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Walmart, Exxon, GM, AT&T, Facebook, Bank of America, Visa, Intel, Home Depot, HSBC, Boeing, Citigroup, Anheuser-Busch, all the NFL teams, all the MLB teams, and all the Premier League Football teams.
In other words, if someone could collect and recycle all the unrecycled plastic on earth, this person would be richer than any individual on the planet.
One of the most difficult aspects of statistics is putting the numbers into a context that we can wrap our heads around, into a format that means something to us. Whatever it is that speaks to you, all I can say is that this speaks to me. It’s clearly time to clean up our act.
Liberty Vittert, Visiting Assistant Professor in Statistics, Washington University in St Louis
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
RELATED TOPICS:
Death Toll in Iran’s Bandar Abbas Port Blast Rises to 70
2 hours ago
Selma Mayor Responds to Criminal Charge
2 hours ago
Visalia Police Captain Charged With Embezzlement, Theft
4 hours ago
Autopsy Confirms Gene Hackman Died From Heart Disease
4 hours ago
Iran Proposes Meeting With Europeans Before Next Talks With US, Diplomats Say
4 hours ago
Trump to Sign Order Requiring List of Sanctuary Cities, States, Official Says
5 hours ago
Saudi Arabia and Qatar to Pay Off Syria’s Debt to the World Bank
5 hours ago
Pakistan Defense Minister Says Military Incursion by India Is Imminent
5 hours ago
5-Year-Old Girl and Parents Among Those Dead in Vehicle Ramming in Vancouver
17 minutes ago
Categories

5-Year-Old Girl and Parents Among Those Dead in Vehicle Ramming in Vancouver

Feds Again Bump Up Water Allocation for Many Fresno County Farmers

Levi Strauss Shareholders Vote Against Proposal to End Diversity Programs

Death Toll in Iran’s Bandar Abbas Port Blast Rises to 70

Selma Mayor Responds to Criminal Charge

Visalia Police Captain Charged With Embezzlement, Theft

Wired Wednesday: What’s the Future of Fresno Unified and the Superintendent Position?

Zakaria Draws Parallels Between Trump’s Tariffs, Failed 1930s Economic Policies
