[Music] on average you produce just over two kilograms of waste every day that may not sound like a whole lot but multiply it by every person on earth and suddenly you've got 14 point eight billion kilograms of waste being produced every 24 hours but what would happen if we suddenly stopped recycling with the world be quickly flooded with garbage would we fire it into space this is what if and here's what would happen if everyone stopped recycling nearly everything we buy has some recyclable component glass paper plastic metal and other materials the United States recycles
about 65 million tons of waste each year which is just 30% of it's 200 million tons of yearly waste around the world recycling as a massive industry countries in Europe like Austria and Germany recycle over 50% of their waste every year now what would happen if everyone in the planet just decided to stop if the world stopped recycling every single scrap of waste would end up in a landfill well most of it with a larger amount of trash it's inevitable that we'd get more in places where it shouldn't be at first you probably wouldn't notice
anything in a best-case scenario most landfills around the world expect to last 30 to 50 years one of America's largest landfills began accepting garbage back in 1957 and finally stopped in 2013 that's 56 years of trash it may take a couple of years even decades before garbage starts piling up everywhere so what happens when those landfills finally fill up when landfills become too full to take on anymore garbage they're covered with clay and soil to form large hills you might think the job is done at that point that you'll never need to think about that
stinky garbage ever again but sadly that isn't the case while the garbage is tightly packed underground it remains in an oxygen 'less environment there it creates methane gas a huge contributor to global warming landfills are the third largest producers of methane gas in the world and as the planets landfills continue to fill they have the potential to eclipse farming and fossil fuel production and become the highest producers with our landfills full where would the rest of our garbage go well we wouldn't blast it up into space that's far too expensive instead we'd most likely burn
it a practice that some European countries are currently doing however if every landfill did this it would create even more potentially deadly pollution making the air we breathe toxic recycling prevents almost 200 million metric tons of greenhouse gases from polluting our environment each year that's the equivalent of the fumes produced by over 39 million cars on the highway a lot of our trash would end up in places where it's not supposed to go like the ocean right now the world's oceans are home to millions of floating pieces of plastic with no one recycling even more
of this debris would end up in the water killing millions of fish and making the water unswerving but these might be the least of our worries at least in the short term what we would start to notice quickly would be our natural resources being destroyed you see recycling isn't just about keeping trash out of landfills it also helps us sustain our natural resources like timber it's estimated nearly 7 billion trees are cut down globally each year in 2017 the United States recycled over 68 million tons of paper without this more trees would have to be
cut down to sustain the paper supply leading to an even higher amount of deforestation than we have today you can say goodbye to fossil fuels in addition to making our cars go they're the source of all our plastic products fossil fuels are currently expected to deplete by 2050 but without recycling fossil fuel consumption would be higher than ever leading to the precious resource being gone much sooner so with no one recycling the world would have no choice but to change for instance new water bottles being researched today are being made out of biopolymer a material
that's composed of bacteria these bottles are designed to biodegrade in just 18 months that would help a lot as the world is currently using over a million plastic water bottles per minute other materials and products would eventually have to follow suit maybe one day we'll live in a world where everything is biodegradable even electronics but that's a story for another what if [Music]
