Green
Visualizing the Scale of Plastic Bottle Waste Against Major Landmarks
View the original interactive visualization at Reuters Graphics.
Visualizing the Scale of Plastic Bottle Waste
By the time you’re finished reading this sentence, tens of thousands of plastic bottles will have been sold around the world.
The ubiquitous plastic bottle has proven to be a versatile and cost-effective vessel for everything from water to household cleaning products. Despite this undeniable utility, it’s becoming harder to ignore the sheer volume of waste created by the world’s 7.5 billion people.
Today’s data visualization from Simon Scarr and Marco Hernandez at Reuters Graphics puts into perspective the immense scale of plastic bottle waste by comparing it to recognizable global landmarks, and even the entirety of Manhattan.
Plastic Wasted in One Hour
Original image from REUTERS/Simon Scarr, Marco Hernandez.
Every hour, close to 55 million bottles are discarded worldwide. When accumulated, the pile would be higher than the Brazilian Art Deco statue, Christ the Redeemer.
Towering over Rio de Janeiro at 125 feet (38 meters) and with arms outstretched to 98ft (30m), the statue still pales in comparison next to the combined plastic bottle waste over this time period.
Plastic Bottle Waste: Daily and Monthly
Original image from REUTERS/Simon Scarr, Marco Hernandez.
In the span of a day, over 1.3 billion bottles are discarded. If you were to take the elevator up the Eiffel Tower (which has a total height of 1,063ft or 324m), you’d reach the tip of this pile about halfway up.
Fast forward this by a month, however, and it’s a different story. The Eiffel Tower seems like a figurine next to a heap of approximately 40 billion tossed plastic bottles.
Original image from REUTERS/Simon Scarr, Marco Hernandez.
Scaling this up, data from Euromonitor International reveals that over 481 billion plastic bottles are now wasted annually.
Accumulated, this would dwarf even Dubai’s famous Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest structure at an impressive 2,722ft (830m).
A Decade of Plastic
According to Reuters, nearly 4 trillion bottles were sold in the past ten years, each contributing to a 7,874ft high pile of plastic (2.4km).
Original image from REUTERS/Simon Scarr, Marco Hernandez.
If all plastic bottle waste were piled up in this manner, New Yorkers would see a translucent mountain every time they looked out their window rising to over half the elevation of the tallest peak in the Rocky Mountains, which is 14,440ft (4.4km) high.
The Global Flow of Plastic Waste Since 1950
Plastic bottles are just the tip of the iceberg for single-use plastics. Other examples include plastic bags, food packaging, coffee cup lids, and straws. As plastic use continues to flourish, even our best attempts at managing waste are falling short.
In fact, only an abysmal 6% of all plastic produced since 1950 has been recycled, with the majority ending up in landfills as litter, or getting incinerated.
Original image from REUTERS/Simon Scarr, Marco Hernandez.
Our plastic use is on an unsustainable trajectory, but countries are taking specific actions to curb use. Canada and the European Union (EU) will ban certain single-use plastics by 2021—and they are among 60 other nations enacting similar policies.
Corporations are also taking steps to reduce impact. A good example of this is Unilever, which made a commitment to make all its packaging reusable, recyclable, or compostable by 2025.
Green
The Carbon Emissions of Gold Mining
Gold has a long history as a precious metal, but just how many carbon emissions does mining it contribute to?
The Carbon Emissions of Gold Mining
As companies progress towards net-zero goals, decarbonizing all sectors, including mining, has become a vital need.
Gold has a long history as a valuable metal due to its rarity, durability, and universal acceptance as a store of value. However, traditional gold mining is a process that is taxing on the environment and a major contributor to the increasing carbon emissions in our atmosphere.
The above infographic from our sponsor Nature’s Vault provides an overview of the global carbon footprint of gold mining.
The Price of Gold
To understand more about the carbon emissions that gold mining contributes to, we need to understand the different scopes that all emissions fall under.
In the mining industry, these are divided into three scopes.
- Scope 1: These include direct emissions from operations.
- Scope 2: These are indirect emissions from power generation.
- Scope 3: These cover all other indirect emissions.
With this in mind, let’s break down annual emissions in CO2e tonnes using data from the World Gold Council as of 2019. Note that total emissions are rounded to the nearest 1,000.
| Scope | Type | CO2e tonnes |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mining, milling, concentrating and smelting | 45,490,000 |
| 2 | Electricity | 54,914,000 |
| 3 | Suppliers, goods, and services | 25,118,000 |
| 1,2,3 | Recycled Gold | 4,200 |
| 3 | Jewelry | 828,000 |
| 3 | Investment | 4,500 |
| 3 | Electronics | 168 |
| TOTAL | 126,359,000 |
Total annual emissions reach around 126,359,000 CO2e tonnes. To put this in perspective, that means that one year’s worth of gold mining is equivalent to burning nearly 300 million barrels of oil.
Gold in Nature’s Vault
A significant portion of gold’s downstream use is either for private investment or placed in banks. In other words, a large amount of gold is mined, milled, smelted, and transported only to be locked away again in a vault.
Nature’s Vault is decarbonizing the gold mining sector for both gold and impact investors by eliminating the most emission-intensive part of the mining process—mining itself.
By creating digital assets like the NaturesGold Token and the Pistol Lake NFT that monetize the preservation of gold in the ground, emissions and the environmental damage associated with gold mining are avoided.
How Does it Work?
Through the same forms of validation used in traditional mining by Canada’s National Instrument NI 43-101 and Australia’s Joint Ore Reserve Committee (JORC), Nature’s Vault first determines that there is gold in an ore body.
Then, using blockchain and asset fractionalization, the mineral rights and quantified in-ground gold associated with these mineral rights are tokenized.
This way, gold for investment can still be used without the emission-intensive process that goes into mining it. Therefore, these digital assets are an environmentally-friendly alternative to traditional gold investments.
Click here to learn more about gold in Nature’s Vault.
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