This year, I was on the jury for the Royal Statistical Society’s International Statistics of the Year.
On December 18, we announced the winner: 90.5 percent, the amount of plastic that has never been recycled. Okay, but why is it so important?
As in the Oxford English Dictionary’s “Word of the Year” contest, international statistics aim to capture this year’s zeitgeist. The panel of judges accepted nominations from the statistical community and the general public for a statistic that, in their view, sheds light on today’s most pressing issues.
Last year’s winner was 69. That’s the annual number of Americans killed, on average, by lawnmowers, compared to the two Americans who die annually, on average, by immigrant jihadist terrorists and the 11,737 Americans who die annually. being shot by another American. That figure, which was first shared on The Huffington Post, was highlighted in a viral tweet from Kim Kardashian in response to the proposed ban on migrants.
This year’s statistic was highlighted in a United Nations report. The chairman of the judges and chairman of RSS, Sir David Spiegelhalter, said: “It is really disturbing that so little plastic has been recycled and as a result so much plastic garbage has leaked into the global environment. It is a huge problem, growing and genuinely global. “
Let’s take a closer look at this year’s winning stat. About 90.5 percent of the 6.3 billion metric tons of plastic waste produced since mass production began some 60 years ago is now on our planet in landfills and oceans or has been incinerated. If we don’t change our methods, by 2050, there will be approximately 12 billion metric tons of plastic waste.
When the panel started looking at this statistic, it really didn’t understand what billions of tons of plastic mean. Based on a 2015 study and later part of the envelope calculations, that’s the equivalent of 7.2 billion bags filled with plastic as of 2018.
But once again, he still had no idea how much that really is. People tend to use distance measures to compare numbers, so I gave it a try. Assuming a plastic grocery bag is about 1 foot tall, if you stacked the grocery bags, it could go to the moon and back 5,790 times. That is starting to seem a little more real.
In fact, if you could monetize all the plastic trash that clogs our environment, including the 12 percent that is incinerated, you could buy some of the world’s largest companies.
Assuming it costs 3.25 cents to produce a plastic bottle, we can estimate that a grocery bag contains about $ 1 worth of plastic material production. (I took a shopping bag and filled it with 31 bottles.) Therefore, 7.2 trillion shopping bags equals $ 7.2 trillion.
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 NFL teams, all NFL teams MLB and all 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 anyone else on the planet.
One of the most difficult aspects of statistics is putting the numbers in a context in which we can wrap our heads, in a format that means something to us. Whatever I speak to you, all I can say is that this speaks to me. Clearly it’s time to clean up our act.