The combined weight of humanity’s building efforts now exceeds all the biomass on the planet.
Humanity has been busy. In an extensive study that analyzed all of humanity’s construction efforts, researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, concluded that, perhaps for the first time in history, the combined weight of all objects made by the man is now greater. than the weight of all living things.
While most of the mass created comes from infrastructure (bridges, buildings, roads, and the like), the researchers took into account everything from plastic and glass to paper. On the other side of the scale was biomass, which is primarily influenced by plants (about 90% of all living things), but also contains everything from people to bacteria and fungi.
According to the findings, human production has increased dramatically since the early 20th century, when man-made items made up just 3% of all global biomass. Today, the rate of production has reached the point where enough material is produced weekly to exceed the body weight of the entire human population.
What we are doing for the world:
The human population has grown more in the last 50 years than in the previous 4 million years.
Every year, human action destroys an area of rainforest equivalent to the size of Great Britain, or 50 million acres.
Humans are responsible for producing more than 3.5 million tons of waste every day.