14 DAY TRIAL // As if worrying about one's carbon footprint was not stressful enough, it turns out that there is one more thing greenheads might want to take into consideration when going about their daily routine: their material footprint.
A new paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences details that a person's material footprint is basically the amount of raw materials that is used to make the stuff and the energy that your average Joe or Jane uses throughout the course of a year.
The researchers who pieced together this paper explain that, more often than not, the final weight of a product is way smaller than the overall weight of the materials used to make it.
According to Mongabay, it can sometimes happen than an item's weight is about 100 times smaller than the combined weight of the raw materials that went into manufacturing it.
The average American is estimated to have an annual material footprint of about 25 tons. Just to put things into perspective, it must be said that these 25 tons are the equivalent of about 20 run-off-the-mill cars.
By comparison, ordinary folks living in China and India have a yearly material footprint of 12 and 4 tons, respectively.