Fun With Statistics: Add Your Own
We received an insert with our water bill this week that listed some interesting environmental statistics. Some of you might remember one or two of my past articles on statistics and know that I am a bit skeptical of manipulating them to make an point. However, the ones listed below are really just to get us thinking about the numbers and how the facts behind them can surprise. So, on with a short list. Please add any others that you find interesting or surprising in a comment.
1) Each Gallon of gas burned in a vehicle releases almost 20 pounds of CO2 into the air. The most common question I have heard regarding this one is: How can this be true when a gallon of gas weighs 6.5 to 7 pounds? I am sure there is a detailed answer somewhere that takes into account the octane level of different types of gas and the specific molecular weight of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen and the algebra needed to convert gas into CO2. However, the short answer is that when the gas burns, each carbon atom combines with 2 oxygen atoms to make CO2. And, even though oxygen is a little heavier that carbon, we can see that the resulting CO2 will be about 3 times the weight of the original carbon alone. (6.5 lbs of gas X 3 = 19.5 lbs of CO2.)
2) In the U.S. about 40 billion soda cans and bottles are thrown away each year. If glued end to end, these would stretch out into space more that 40 times the distance from Earth to the Moon. This is an interesting answer since the Moon has an elliptical orbit and, over the course of a year, the distance from the earth varies from about 220,000 to 250,000 miles. (Am I right on these numbers, Bob?) Multiplied by 40 times, that is a big margin of error. In any case whether the empty soda vessels would reach 8.8 million or 10 million miles into space, that is a long ways. I can’t help wondering about two things. How far would they go if we did not have recycling and bottle deposit laws? And, getting a bit off topic, how much soda is consumed in the U.S every year?
OK, I could not stand it and looked this last one up. U.S. residents consume an average of 54 gallons of soda, each, per year. This works out to a constantly increasing total as you can see from watching this entertaining web site for a few minutes. The total soda consumption in the U.S. as I write this would be sixteen billion, six hundred million gallons per year. When you account for infants and people like me that basically drink no soda, the average consumption is probably closer to 100 gallons, per person, each year!
3) We toss out enough wood and paper every year to heat 50 million homes for 20 years. Again, I wonder what it would be without recycling. I also debate whether this is a concerning statistic, other than from a waste standpoint. This is because in order to heat those billion homes, we would need to burn the wood and paper. I don’t know how much carbon this would add to the atmosphere each year, but it would be a lot.
Have any of you have run across any interesting ecology, health or diet statistics?
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