How the human race manages to use (that is, waste!) resources at such a pell-mell pace? Well, consider this example: Four trillion (that's 4,000,000,000,000) plastic trash bags sold annually worldwide (Worldwatch Institute, 2003).
A product whose only purpose is to be tossed onto the midden heap of civilization! Four trillion. Purchased by... WHO? I didn't look it up, but the usual suspect is the famous American Consumer.
Four Trillion-with-a-T divided by 6 Billion-with-a-B comes to about 666 trash bags per person per year, worldwide. That's including the population of the impoverished tribes scattered around Africa and Asia who have no idea what a trash bag even looks like. I suspect they aren't big consumers of throw-away items of any sort. Remarkable! Where do people put all those bags? No wonder the dumps are filling up. Just the bags to put the trash in are going to fill up a lot of space in the local dump. And at whatever price the things are, that's a lot of dollars. Especially with the value of a dollar these days (not very much), and the value of the oil used to make the one-way plastic bags (pretty high). I'd say the marketers have pretty well proven there's many more than one born every minute.
A product whose only purpose is to be tossed onto the midden heap of civilization! Four trillion. Purchased by... WHO? I didn't look it up, but the usual suspect is the famous American Consumer.
Four Trillion-with-a-T divided by 6 Billion-with-a-B comes to about 666 trash bags per person per year, worldwide. That's including the population of the impoverished tribes scattered around Africa and Asia who have no idea what a trash bag even looks like. I suspect they aren't big consumers of throw-away items of any sort. Remarkable! Where do people put all those bags? No wonder the dumps are filling up. Just the bags to put the trash in are going to fill up a lot of space in the local dump. And at whatever price the things are, that's a lot of dollars. Especially with the value of a dollar these days (not very much), and the value of the oil used to make the one-way plastic bags (pretty high). I'd say the marketers have pretty well proven there's many more than one born every minute.
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