Humans have produced 9.1 billion tons of plastic since 1950 – enough to cover Manhattan in TWO MILES of waste
Nothing like solving two problems at once, is there?
Humans have produced 9.1 billion tons of plastic since 1950 – enough to cover Manhattan in TWO MILES of waste
Nothing like solving two problems at once, is there?
Radio Three news this morning had 8.4 billion tons (US to RoW conversion?) “to cover a country the size of Argentina”.
I thought, “What a remarkably good idea.”
I thought Wales was the unit of large scale measurement?
Yes, but noone would notice if it was a mile deep in shit
I could cover the entire world if my historic plastic consumption was cling film.
George Carlin’s theory was that Gaia had no way to create plastic directly, so created Man for the purpose of making plastic.
And how many billions of tons of wood, steel, aluminium, glass, ceramics, leather, rubber, cotton, wool…. would be needed to provide anything even near a C21st lifestyle? And the energy needed to produce them?
Thank heavens for plastics
Area of the Earth is 500 million km², give or take. Area of Manhattan is 87 km². You have to zoom in pretty far on Google Earth before it’s even visible. It’s a fucking stupid comparison.
I make it only 150m deep.
Area = 60 sq km
60 million sq m
Density of polyethylene = .9 g per cm
About same as water = 1
So 1 m cube weighs 1 tonne
Volume of plastic = 9 billion m cube
Depth over Manhattan
= 9 billion \ 60 million
= 150 m
Yes Firefoxx, that’s exactly what I make it too (working independently).
I knew as soon as I saw that “miles deep” that something was very wrong.
Firefoxx said:
“I make it only 150m deep.”
That’s solid plastic. They’ve probably done the calculation based on it being uncrushed milk bottles or something like that.
Which wouldn’t work, because before you got to anything like a mile deep, the bottom layers would be crushed flat by the weight of the ones above.