Man-made items ‘outweigh ALL things living on Earth’

MAN-MADE objects and structures now outweigh every living thing on Earth, scientists have estimated.

Experts say 2020 is the year the mass of our buildings, roads and machines may have surpassed the weight of animals and plants for the first time.

When concrete, bricks, asphalt and other materials used to build cities, towns and everyday items are all combined together they come to around 1.1trillion tons.

And while natural ‘biomass’ – including trees, shrubs, animals, fungi and bacteria – used to weigh around two trillion tons, human activities such as farming and deforestation have now brought that down to around 1.1trillion tons as well.

If current trends continue, human-generated mass, including waste, is expected to exceed three trillion tons by 2040.

In another sobering estimate, all the plastic we have produced, and wasted, is thought to weigh around eight billion tons – twice as much as every land and marine animal on Earth, whose numbers have been depleted by hunting and overfishing.

Emily Elhacham, lead author of the study from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, said: ‘This study holds a mirror up to humanity, and shows how large our footprint has grown. We are no longer a smaller player on Earth, and with that comes a shared responsibility.’

The study, published in the journal Nature, plots the change in the mass of man-made objects and living natural things from 1900 onwards using previous scientific data. Most man-made mass comes from buildings and infrastructure.

Miss Elhacham said: ‘We examined humanmade mass, from buildings to roads, which is rapidly growing, recently doubling every 20 years. When we compared this with living biomass – the mass of all living things on our planet – the figures were really surprising.’

Human beings ourselves only make up 0.01 per cent of the total mass of living things, but have had a devastating impact.