The turning point has come: Anthropogenic mass is surpassing Earth’s Biomass

This day was supposed to arrive and now it has finally come: the Anthropogenic mass is currently surpassing the global Biomass present on our Earth.

Actually, the 2020 dramatically marked an extraordinary record that had never been achieved before.
On 9 December 2020, Nature published an incredible study: “Global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass”, conducted by Emily Elhacham, Liad Ben-Uri, Jonathan Grozovski, Yinon M. Bar-On and Ron Milo from the Department of plant and environmental sciences, at Weizmann Institute of Science.
Thanks to this highly crucial research carried out by those israelian scientists, now it’s globally recognized that humanity has reached a turning point.
The main aim of this study was to calculate the amount of the total Anthropogenic mass on the world, which equals to all objects made by humans.
According to the Anthropogenic mass website, created after the publication of this study, “on average, for each person on the globe, Anthropogenic mass equal to more than his or her body weight is produced every week”.

On one hand, the proper definition of Anthropogenic mass is “the mass embedded in inanimate solid objects made by humans”, so, when we talk about it we refer for example to metals, asphalt, plastic, glass, houses, concrete.
On the other hand, with the term of Biomass we refer to the global “mass of all living things on Earth”, such as animals, plants or bacteria.
Actually, it’s really hard for us to understand the real amount of Biomass currently present on the globe and the size of all objects we’ve made, because especially for big quantities and numbers we struggle to quantify them in our mind.

For this reason, on the Anthropogenic mass website some examples are pointed out, in order to make people realize the human impact on Earth.
If we look at the mass of the Eiffel Tower, it equals about the weight of the 10.000 remaining white rhinoceroses in the world.
The great pyramid of Gyza, situated in Egypt, could be compared to a temperate forest approximately the size of the city of Kyoto in Japan.

To have an idea, the weight of the human-made mass in New York City is equal to all fish living in the world.

When did we start making a disproportionate amount of Anthropogenic mass?
According to the research, in 1900 the Anthropogenic mass was just 35 billion tonnes (or Gigatonnes), compared to the Biomass that was much more: 1160 Gigatonnes.
Especially after the Second World War, people started producing an increasing number of buildings, roads and objects of various types and composition.
For instance, since the 1960s asphalt became more and more common all around the world and from the second half of 1900 many plastic objects had been spread overwhelmingly.

Nowadays, humanity’s Anthropogenic mass has been surpassing the total amount of Biomass on Earth and future perspectives are dramatically alarming.
Today more than ever, we have to take responsibility for the environmental issue.
Humanity can no longer think that it’s possible to create, sell, distribute, build everything people want anytime and anywhere.
It’s necessary to think about the consequences of all anthropogenic mass currently present around us: we can make a difference in this world only through everybody’s efforts.

🍓 Subscribe to Berry, our monthly newsletter!