Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

While reading "Waste as a Resource" from Regenerative Design for Sustainable Development (1994) by John Tillman Lyle, I came across what appeared to be a most surprising statistic.  I will reproduce it here verbatim:

"In the United States each person produces 50,000 pounds of waste each year and almost 20,000 gallons of sewage."

Now, given the amount of water that people use on a daily basis for toilets, showers, sinks and so on, the sewage number didn't really set off any alarms of skepticism in my brain.  However, it seemed very ludicrous to me that your average American produces that much solid waste.  So based on the assumption that this factoid is referring to 50,000 pounds of solid waste (since sewage basically covers most liquid waste, and pounds are generally the units used in measuring solids) I set out to verify that my hunch about the ridiculousness of this number was correct.

Buried within a 2009 EPA report on municipal solid waste I found a table which details the amount of solid waste (in pounds) generated per person per day in America, shown below:

The nice thing about this table is that it shows a decent amount of historical data as well, which I will get to in a moment.  4.34 pounds of solid (non-sewage) waste per day still seems pretty high (at least for myself) but it rings true in my head as a number that could at least be feasible.  When we adjust this to show yearly amounts (per day x 365.25) and graph the three different levels of waste shown in the table, we get this:

This data shows that the amount of waste that a person produced in 2009 was just below 1,600 pounds. After various recovery methods (recycling and composting) were taken into account and after some amount of combustion with energy recovery was used the actual amount of waste that remains (red line) was approximately 860 pound per person in 2009.  This is still a lot but is a great improvement over the nearly 1,200 pounds that remained after recovery efforts in 1980.

But nowhere on this graph does the data ever approach anything resembling 50,000 pounds per person per year.  So how does one go about trying to reconcile such a disparity in 2 alleged "facts"?  The first thing that comes to mind is that John Tillman Lyle's book was written prior to 2009 and thus the data might have changed since then.  But the EPA data goes back to 1960 so that hypothesis is out.

Another possibility is that the 50,000 number includes "raw material processing."  This, I assume, would be due to attributing a portion of manufacturing and industry waste to each individual person.  Mathematically this may play itself out, but it is not what someone would understand when reading the quote that I originally took issue with.  The quote reads as though each person personally produces 50,000 pounds of waste.

At worst this quote is a lie, and at best it is a misleading statistic, either intentionally (to make a point) or erroneously.  But either way it demonstrates an important point:  When reading anything purporting to be truth it is important to be skeptical about what you are being told.  If a claim is outlandish or hard to believe or seems to defy common sense, it's worth investigating further.  This is the essence of science.

Using statistics that may not be an accurate accounting of what we claim they are does nothing to bolster the integrity of the science underlying the need for sustainability.  There are enough simple direct facts that easily support the need for sustainability and it only ultimately hurts the cause of attempting to create a sustainable planet when we try to play twister with the numbers.