As a species, we create an exorbitant amount of garbage. To call our love of packaging “excessive” would be understating the problem. Obsessive might be a better word for it, since nearly everything we consume is either boxed, bottled or wrapped in plastic. The figures are staggering, really.

Consider that every American generates, on average, 4.4 pounds of trash daily. This means that your typical American male throws away his weight in garbage every 45 days or so. And if those numbers aren’t enough to make you dizzy, just multiply 4.4 pounds per day by our population of 325.7 million (as of 2017). That’s almost 1.5 trillion pounds of trash entering our nation’s landfills. Every. Day.

By, Dac Collins, Columbia Insight