The Perspective is Jarring.

Let's see, 9 billion tonnes of plastic divided by 7.5 billion human beings. That's 1.2 tonnes of plastic per person or 2,640 pounds.

More than 9 billion tonnes of plastic has been produced since 1950, and almost all of it is still around.

A new study that tracked the global manufacture and distribution of plastics since they became widespread after World War II found that only two billion tonnes of that plastic is still in use.

That sounds like a lot, and it is, but consider the "technosphere" which is mankind's overall footprint on the Earth. That's you and me and all of our stuff and every building, road, airport and bridge. Everything man made. That now comes in at 30-trillion tons. Your per capita share of that is a staggering 4 thousand tons, just over 3.6 thousand metric tonnes.

Brazil's Christ the Redeemer statue comes in at just 635 tons. Your share of the technosphere is almost six of those.  The Statue of Liberty comes in at a paltry 225 tons. 

These should be sobering numbers to any who doubt humankind's imprint on our planet especially when you consider that most of the technosphere was built with some sort of fossil fuel energy. That includes you and me for most of the food we have consumed was produced with fossil energy for everything from the machinery involved in planting, harvesting and transportation to the chemical fertilizers used to bolster crop yields.

Here's One You Might Not Have Heard Of - the "Technosphere"

Think of it as everything man has built on Earth that's still standing. That includes the pyramids and everything older provided it's still around.

Now I'm going to throw out a number that's pretty hard to digest - thirty - trillion - tons. That's the estimated weight of the stuff we've built. Those pyramids, sure, but also the Trump Tower, all our roads and houses and bridges and airports, your car, your kid's bike, everything manmade.

But how is one to make sense of 30 trillion tons. This might help. 30 trillion tons represents 50 kilograms of stuff for each square metre of the Earth's surface.

Technosphere is a new term and according to the study published in journal The Anthropocene Review, it comprises of all the human-made structures including houses, factories and farms to airplanes, rockets, computer systems, tablets, smartphones and CDs, to the waste in landfills and spoil heaps that have been built to keep humans alive.

Humans have been having a huge impact on the planet through their activities and that’s where the Anthropocene concept has its roots in. It is an epoch that highlights the impact humans have made to the planet and it provides an understanding of how we have greatly changed the planet ever since our species started dominating.

Technosphere has its roots in the biosphere, but over the years it has gained so much of ‘weight’ and development that it has become a phenomenon of its own. Further, it is having a parasitic effect on the biosphere – like all human activities have on our planet.

Professor Mark Williams at the University of Leicester says “Compared with the biosphere, though, it is remarkably poor at recycling its own materials, as our burgeoning landfill sites show. This might be a barrier to its further success — or halt it altogether.”

According to Wiki, the average human body weight is just over 80 kilos which adds an extra 600-billion kilos of insatiable, voracious consumers all on its own. Maybe Elon Musk is right. Maybe we should get ourselves a new planet.