Fact #1
How much carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere by telecommunications equipment serving 1 hour of videoconferencing?
At the height of the pandemic, researchers at Purdue University in the US estimated that equipment that serves one hour of videoconferencing in standard service ( 2.5 gigabytes per hour), emits 157 grams of CO2 per hour into the atmosphere. If the camera is turned off, then the outlier, whatever it may be, will be reduced by 96 percent, because audio transmission consumes much less resources than video streaming. If a million users give up video calls, they will not emit 9023 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in a month. A coal-fired thermal power plant supplying energy to a town with 36,000 inhabitants would give the same amount in a month.
Fact #2
How many tons of garbage does the average person generate per year?
According to statistics of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, municipalities in different countries collect from one and a half thousand to several hundred, sometimes tens of kilograms of garbage per person per year . For some countries, the data are amazing: from 170 g / year per person in Nepal to 4 tons of garbage per Kuwait - also per year. And for Armenia, the UN does not have data at all, so we took [data] as the basis for calculations (https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-and-recycling/national-overview-facts -and-figures-materials) United States Environmental Protection Agency: it has been collecting waste collection data from municipalities for over 35 years and has become adept at it. In 2018, Americans generated about 11 kilograms of garbage per day - or about 800 kilograms per year.
Fact #3
What percentage of the waste that a person produces in a year is plastic?
Most of all - up to half of all municipal solid waste - usually consists of banana skins, dirty (unsorted) packaging, offal, fish heads and other food waste. Plastic makes up about 10 percent - or rather, pure plastic that can be separated and recycled.
Source https://datatopics.worldbank.org/what-a-waste/trends_in_solid_waste_management.html
Fact #4
How much water does a person use per year?
It is probably possible to answer this question, but the average number will not tell us much: water consumption depends too much on the country. The average American, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency, spends at home 300 liters of water per day, the average Malian, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, manages three liters.
Fact #5
How many medicinal compounds end up in the wastewater of a million-plus city every day?
Medicinal compounds enter the sewer when they are excreted from the human body. Study, conducted in 2014 at 50 major municipal wastewater treatment plants in the United States, found small but detectable concentrations of a wide variety of drugs. The small concentrations in question are really small: they are measured in parts per trillion, and several doses of medicine from such water can be obtained only if you drink 2 liters for 10 years.
Fact #6
What kind of garbage is most in municipal waste?
The composition of municipal waste varies from country to country and strongly depends on the level of income of the population. Income determines the structure of consumption and, accordingly, the composition of garbage: in poor countries, food waste makes up up to half of the total mass, and where people are richer, only a third. But all over the world, it is food waste that makes up the majority of municipal solid waste. True, it is worth noting that contaminated packaging and polymeric materials that cannot be separated from household dirt, such as baby diapers, also belong to food. So, there is actually paper, plastic, wood, and glass in municipal solid waste (MSW).
Fact #7
How much CO2 does one car ride produce?
Emission data for e.g. Kia Rio disagree (e.g. 1 and [2](https://www.cars-data.com /en/kia-rio/co2-emissions) ): depending on the configuration, manual or automatic transmission and year of manufacture, it can produce from 102 to 205 grams of CO2 per kilometer, with cars of recent years closer to the range of 102-115
Fact #8
How much CO2 per passenger does a train ride provide?
High-speed trains are the greenest: they produce much lower CO2 emissions than conventional electric, diesel, and even more so coal-fired locomotives. One London office of statistics estimates that a high-speed train emits 40-100 grams of carbon dioxide per passenger per kilometer (although only over distances of more than 500 kilometers, if the journey is shorter, the specific emission is greater).
Fact #9
What is the carbon footprint of one passenger on a Moscow-Yerevan flight on a Boeing 777?
Aviation is one of the biggest sources of carbon dioxide in the air, but private jets are the worst, and large passenger jets at least share their carbon footprint with more people. For the Boeing 737-400, normal emissions is 115 grams of CO2 per passenger per kilometer, or 90 kilograms per flight hour. We fly from Sheremetyevo to Zvartnots without transfers. Until February 2022, the flight took 2 hours and 45 minutes, now it is an hour longer due to a reroute. Total - 157.5 kilograms of carbon dioxide straight into the atmosphere.
Fact #10
What is the carbon footprint of raising an average child from birth to age 18?
This calculated in 2017 by two scientists from the Swedish Lund University and the University of British Columbia in Canada. They found that a family from a developed country with one less child leaves 58.6 tons less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than a family with one extra child. Not having an extra child has proven to be the most effective private way to reduce CO2 emissions. For comparison: the refusal to travel by private car is equivalent to saving 2.4 tons of carbon dioxide per year, and switching to plant foods is equivalent to 0.8 tons. And if we multiply 58.6 “children's” tons by 18 years, we get 1054.8 tons. Of course, this is a very rough method of calculation - and yet it is unlikely that a small person, growing up, leaves behind less than a megaton of carbon dioxide.
