Recent visitors to the Ze-gen website will have noticed that an inauspicious milestone has been reached: 1 billion tons.  That’s one billion tons of waste sent to landfills around the world this year to date.  To put this in perspective, consider the number of equivalent items needed to equal one billion tons:

Dollar bills…………………………….907,184,995,885,916

Barrels of oil…………………………..6,549,646,319

Garbage trucks (empty)……………..55,555,556

Blue whales…………………………..5,128,205

Jumbo jets…………………………….2,061,856

Nimitz-class aircraft carriers………..9,882

Empire State Buildings………………2,703

Great Pyramids……………………….169

Uluru rock formations………………..0.27

Uluru (also known as Ayers Rock) is a convenient proxy for our purposes, but keep in mind that it is solid sandstone, a material whose density is more than nine times greater than even highly-compacted trash.  That means that while our billion tons of waste is barely one quarter the weight of Uluru, the space needed to contain all that waste would be 2.5  times larger than the volume of this colossal Australian monolith—literally a mountain of trash.  Uluru is more than 1,100 ft high and nearly six miles in circumference.

Landfills are responsible for 34% of all methane emissions, according to the EPA.  Some of this flammable gas can be captured and used in industrial processes.  If it reaches the atmosphere however, methane is over 21 times more problematic as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.  Surpassing a milestone this large reminds us that reducing waste needs to remain a priority in the fight against climate change.

Uluru (aka Ayers Rock), Northern Territory, Australia

View from space