Amazing Environmental Facts

Earth is amazing!

Our world is a beautiful place and it has sustained everything living on it for millions of years. Although our presence has done much damage to it, we still have a chance to change it. 

The wonderful thing that’s happening today is that people are becoming more aware of the needs of our environment and are showing signs of willingness to make a change. When we talk of environment, it involves everything around us, not just the weather. It includes all the animals, plants and the human beings living in this planet.

Here are some amazing environmental facts that you need to know about.

• Human consumption of Earth's natural resources more than tripled between 1970 and 2015. Our use of natural resources is expected to continue growing and more than double from 2015 to 2050.
• According to NASA, the world's rainforests will be gone by 2100 if the current rate of destruction continues.
• If current patterns continue, we will have emptied the world’s oceans for seafood by 2050.
• The consumer society is thirsty. Very thirsty. "There will be no water by 2040 if we keep doing what we're doing today". (Professor Benjamin Sovacool of Aarhus University, Denmark).
• The world population is 215,000 people larger today than it was yesterday. 
• If all life on Earth was put on a scale, the human population would only make up about one ten-thousandth of the total weight of life on Earth.
• By 2100, the global urban population will produce three times more waste than today 
• 27,000 trees are cut down each day so we can have Toilet Paper.
• Aluminum can be recycled continuously, as in forever. Recycling 1 aluminum can save enough energy to run our TVs for at least 3 hours. 80 trillion aluminum cans are used by humans every year.
• American companies alone use enough Paper to encircle the Earth 3x! (It’s a good thing that businesses are moving towards going paperless)
• We can save 75,000 trees if we recycled the paper used on the daily run of the New York Times alone.
• When you throw plastic bags and other plastic materials in the ocean, it kills as many as 1 million sea creatures annually.
• A glass bottle made in our time will take more than 4,000 years to decompose.
• Only 1% of our planet’s water supply can be used. 97% is ocean water and 2% is frozen solid in the Arctic, for now.
• Our planet gains inhabitants numbering to 77 million people a year.
• An estimated 50,000 species inhabiting our tropical forests become extinct annually. That’s an average of 137 species a day.
• Rainforests are cut down at a rate of 100 acres per minute.
• The world’s oldest trees are more than 4,600 years old.
• Landfills are composed of 35% packaging materials.

Synthetic chemicals are seriously messing with the human body

• More than 250 billion tonnes of chemicals are produced a year. According to OECD projections, the global production of synthetic chemicals will increase a massive six times between 2000 and 2050.
• Pollution by endocrine disruptors such as polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) and dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) has distorted the sex-ratio of newborns. Up to two thirds of babies born are girls in the most polluted areas. 

More Amazing Environmental facts

• Up to half of all food produced is lost or wasted before or after it reaches consumers.
• By 2070, the world’s coral reefs could be gone altogether.
• Nearly 80% of the world's fisheries are fully exploited, over-exploited, depleted, or in a state of collapse. Globally, 90% of large predatory fish, such as sharks and tuna are gone. 
• The equivalent of one garbage truck of plastic is dumped into our oceans every single minute. By 2030, it will be two truckloads per minute and by 2050, four.
• By 2050, there could be more plastic than fish in the world’s oceans. 
• By 2050, 4 out of 10 people in the world population will live in areas of severe water stress. 
• The speed of groundwater pollution doubled between 1960 and 2000.
• Cotton production requires so much water  that it emptied a whole sea (the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan). It has been called one of the worst environmental disasters in history.
• We use 5 trillion plastic bags a year That’s about 160,000 bags a second.
• According to a 2018 article in Nature Magazine, the Great Pacific Plastic Garbage Patch stretches 1.6 million km2. That’s the size of Iran or over twice the size of Texas .
• Mining is considered the world’s Number One Toxic Polluter. Steel production, for example, results in 80 tons of toxic wastewater for each ton of steel produced.