So…. I was at church this last Sunday and I had a funny (irritating) little experience.
My wife drinks coffee. She loves it.
Recently we (our church) have had an addition to our kitchen. The kitchen captain some call her.
She is on a crusade. A crusade to stop styrofoam from destroying the planet.
She has gotten rid of all of the styrofoam cups and replaced them with clay/ceramic/whatever coffee mugs (She has also by the way replaced the plastic silverware with metal silverware). She washes these every week.
My wife does not like this. She likes her styrofoam cups (me too, if I drank coffee that is).
So this sunday I went up to get her a cup of coffee. There happened to be soup that week, for which there was a stack of styrofoam cups set up since we don’t have bowls.
I grabbed one of the styrofoam cups to get my coffee in. She (the Kitchen Kaptain) grabbed my hand and said, “no don’t use that, use a coffee mug!”. I continued picking it up and pulled my hand away and said “No thanks, I’m going to use this”. She said, “Oh well, we are trying to move away from styrofoam…”. I asked “why?”, and was rewarded beyond my wildest dreams with the EXACT answer I was hoping for.
“Because someday your little grand-children won’t be able to sit in the grass because the world is so cluttered up with non-biodegradeable styrofoam cups“.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11!!11!!111one1!!1
So let’s take this premise.
There are 196,935,000 sq miles of land area on the planet.
Let’s (for the sake of this example) say that 35% of that land is taken up by trees, bushes, and buildings. That leaves:
128,007,750 square miles of open land area.
Now let’s say that one styrofoam cup takes up 18 square inches (It’s rather large).
There are 63,360 inches to a mile. Which means there are (if my math is correct) 4,014,489,600 sq inches to a mile.
This means that 223,027,200 styrofoam cups can fit in each square mile if not stacked and if not crushed, and if only loosely lain next to eachother (not crammed together).
This means (again, assuming my math is correct, which is a giant leap of faith) that it would take 28,549,210,060,800,000 styrofoam cups, loosely lain side by side (uncrushed, untouched by the wind) to cover the face of the earth and keep my grandchildren from sitting in the grass.
Just how many is that?
As of writing this, there are 6,563,476,189 people on earth. Let’s say that half of them use styrofoam cups once a day, and lay them loosly on the ground.
That’s 3,281,738,095 cups a day lain on the ground.
It would take 8,699,418 days for the land on earth to become covered in cups.
That’s 23,834 years.
OH CRAP!!!! SHE’S RIGHT!!! MY POOR GRAND CHILDREN!!!!!!
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Now, keep in mind that you can smash a styrofoam cup down to about 2 square inches BY HAND. and that a smashing machine can further smash it down to about 1/2 a square inch, and that that 1/2 a square inch can then be burned at a very high temperature with almost no (if any) ill effects to the environment.
If anyone would like to check my math and prove/disprove me, please do. I am interested to see if I am right or not. I did this rather quickly, and it has been a very long (about 6 years) time since I worked with square numbers (or large numbers/geometry in general).
Happy drinking.
