Human Footprint Part 4

Now our American boy and girl are teenagers, and we will discover that our human footprint is about more than just food. From now on, cleanliness, and the body beautiful will be important to us for the rest of our lives. But have you ever stopped to think about how many showers you'll take in your lifetime and how they add up? Each rubber duck represents one of them. 28,433 showers in a lifetime. And although showers use more than 700,000 gallons of water, enough to fill four pools, this size. Cleanliness is just the beginning. Once we're clean, we're ready to enhance ourselves with cosmetics, perfumes, and lotions. It's an ugly fact that Americans spend more on beauty than on education every year. Just take a peek inside your bathroom cabinet. 

How much did you spend to stalk it? Now multiply that by a lifetime. All those bars of soap, shampoos, gels, and cleansers, add up. If you were to win a lifetime supply of those products, this is what your bathroom might look like, 156 toothbrushes, 389 tubes of toothpaste to squeeze on to them. Here are all the bars of soap you'll use 656 of them, and 198 bottles of shampoo. You'll use 272 sticks of deodorant, and for the final twist, 35 tubes of hair styling gel. A woman will smooth on 411 skin care products, dab on 37 bottles of perfume, paint with 25 bottles of nail polish and 50 tubes of lipstick. Consider the dirty secret of cleanliness. Every time we wash ourselves with soap or rinse off our cosmetics, all that stuff goes someplace, the cosmetic industry uses more than 5000 different ingredients. 

One squeeze of an average beauty product could unleash a veritable science lab, including preservatives, antioxidants and antimicrobials to fight bacteria. Excluding showers each of us will use more than 1.2 million gallons of water in our lifetime. That's about as much water as in two Olympic swimming pools like these. Or the same as leaving your kitchen tap running for 62 weeks. Turn the shower on and that figure jumps to 1.8 million gallons worth. That's like leaving the tap on continuously for more than a year and 9 months. And to deal with all this water we have more than 600,000 miles of sewer lines running invisibly beneath our streets. That's enough to wrap around the world 24 times. 

Every day, each of us sends 20 gallons through the sewage system. That's 567,575 gallons each in a lifetime. And it then takes more than 16,000 treatment centers like this one to process and purify it all. But it's not just our human waste that goes down the drain. Every day we flush away millions of tons of tissue and paper. We don't think about where it goes. Everything that doesn't break down must be scooped out and removed. But what about all the trash that doesn't go down the drain? What happens to the trash can or the garbage truck? We throw something away in as far as we're concerned, that's the end of it. But it's not really the end at all. 

For example, as a nation we throw away 60 million plastic bottles every day. That means that every second we throw at 694 plastic bottles. We also toss out 11 million tons of glass bottles in jars every year. That's the same weight as 440 titanics or 30 Empire State buildings. And we dispose of 100 million aluminum and steel cans every day, enough to build a roof over all of New York City. That's 36 billion cans tossed every year. Each one of us sends 64 tons of waste to the landfill during our lives that's nearly four of these trucks filled to the brim. And there are more than 300 million of us, which means that together every year we generate 246 million tons of waste. 

Our young couple are growing up fast. Behind them, they're already leaving a surprising footprint, as our teenagers set off into adulthood, we will see how as we get older, our ever evolving footprint will expand in many, many ways. So far, we've seen the fuel we need to keep our bodies going. The food we put in