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One Year of Global Waste Visualized

by Bruno Venditti
This post is by Bruno Venditti from Visual Capitalist

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The following content is sponsored by Northstar Clean Technologies


One Year of Global Waste Visualized

Waste generation is expected to jump to 3.4 billion tonnes over the next 30 years, compared to 2.2 billion in 2019.

This is due to a number of factors, such as population growth, urbanization, and economic growth.

In this graphic by Northstar Clean Technologies, we show waste generation worldwide and discuss its impact and how it can be reduced.

The Growing Pile of Global Waste

The United States is the world’s most wasteful country, with each American producing a whopping 809 kg (1780 lbs) of waste every year.

Approximately half of the country’s yearly waste will meet its fate in one of the more than 2,000 active landfills across the nation. The country also has the largest landfill in the world, Apex, located in Clark County, Nevada.

The United States is followed by other industrialized countries like Denmark, New Zealand, Canada, and Switzerland based on average annual per capita municipal waste generation.

CountryAverage Annual per Capita Municipal Waste Generation (kg)
🇺🇸 United States809
🇩🇰 Denmark781
🇳🇿 New Zealand727
🇨🇦 Canada706
🇨🇭 Switzerland706
🇮🇸 Iceland656
🇮🇱 Israel644
🇩🇪 Germany633
🇮🇪 Ireland616
🇱🇺 Luxembourg607
🇦🇹 Austria570
🇦🇺 Australia560
🇫🇷 France514
🇳🇱 Netherlands513
🇫🇮 Finland510
🇬🇷 Greece504
🇮🇹 Italy489

Compared to those in developed nations, residents in developing countries are more severely (Read more...)

The Cost of Space Flight Before and After SpaceX

by Bruno Venditti
This post is by Bruno Venditti from Visual Capitalist

The Cost of Space Flight Before and After SpaceX

The Cost of Space Flight Before and After SpaceX

On December 21, 2021, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket launched a cargo capsule to deliver supplies and Christmas gifts to astronauts in the International Space Station.

Just eight minutes after liftoff, the rocket’s first stage returned to Earth, landing on one of SpaceX’s drone ships in the Atlantic Ocean. This marked the company’s 100th successful landing.

Like other companies such as Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, and Ball Aerospace, SpaceX is designing and building innovative spacecraft that are speeding up space delivery by making it more routine and affordable. But how much does it cost to launch a cargo rocket into space, and how has this cost changed over the years?

In the graphic above we take a look at the cost per kilogram for space launches across the globe since 1960, based on data from the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The Space Race

The 20th-century was marked by competition between two Cold War adversaries, the Soviet Union (USSR) and the United States, to achieve superior spaceflight capability.

The space race led to great technological advances, but these innovations came at a high cost. For instance, during the 1960s NASA spent $28 billion to land astronauts on the moon, a cost today equating to about $288 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars.

In the last two decades, space startup companies have demonstrated they can compete against heavyweight aerospace contractors as Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Today, a SpaceX rocket launching can be 97% cheaper (Read more...)

Mapped: Human Impact on the Earth’s Surface

by Nick Routley
This post is by Nick Routley from Visual Capitalist

mapping human impact on earths surface

View the full-size infographic

Mapped: Human Impact on the Earth’s Surface

With human population on Earth approaching 8 billion (we’ll likely hit that milestone in 2023), our impact on the planet is becoming harder to ignore with each passing year.

Our cities, infrastructure, agriculture, and pollution are all forms of stress we place on the natural world. This map, by David M. Theobald et al., shows just how much of the planet we’ve now modified. The researchers estimate that 14.6% or 18.5 million km² of land area has been modified – an area greater than Russia.

Defining Human Impact

Human impact on the Earth’s surface can take a number of different forms, and researchers took a nuanced approach to classifying the “modifications” we’ve made. In the end, 10 main stressors were used to create this map:

  1. Built-Up Areas: All of our cities and towns
  2. Agriculture: Areas devoted to crops and pastures
  3. Energy and extractive resources: Primarily locations where oil and gas are extracted
  4. Mines and quarries: Other ground-based natural resource extraction, excluding oil and gas
  5. Power plants: Areas where energy is produced – both renewable and non-renewable
  6. Transportation and service corridors: Primarily roads and railways
  7. Logging: This measures commodity-based forest loss (excludes factors like wildfire and urbanization)
  8. Human intrusion: Typically areas adjacent to population centers and roads that humans access
  9. Natural systems modification: Primarily modifications to water flow, including reservoir creation
  10. Pollution: Phenomenon such as acid rain and fog caused by air pollution

The classification descriptions above are simplified. See (Read more...)

A Visual Introduction to the Dwarf Planets in our Solar System

by Anshool Deshmukh
This post is by Anshool Deshmukh from Visual Capitalist

A Visual Introduction to the Dwarf Planets of our Solar SystemA Visual Introduction to the Dwarf Planets of our Solar System

Pluto and the Introduction of Dwarf Planets

Since its discovery in 1930, Pluto has been a bit of a puzzle.

For starters, not only is Pluto smaller than any other planet in the solar system, but it’s also smaller than Earth’s moon. It also has an extremely low gravitational pull at only 0.07 times the mass of the objects in its orbit, which is just a fraction of the Moon’s own strength.

At the same time, Pluto’s surface resembles that of terrestrial planets such as Mars, Venus or the Earth, yet its nearest neighbors are the gaseous Jovian planets such as Uranus or Neptune. In fact, Pluto’s orbit is so erratic that it led many scientists to initially believe that it originated elsewhere in space and the Sun’s gravity pulled it in.

These qualities have challenged the scientific view of Pluto’s status as a planet for years. It wasn’t until the discovery of Eris in 2005, one of many increasingly identified trans-Neptunian objects (objects beyond the planet Neptune), that the International Astronomical Union (IAU) defined criteria for classifying planets.

With Eris and other trans-Neptunian objects sharing similar characteristics with Pluto, the definition for dwarf planets was created, and Pluto got downgraded in 2006.

So what are dwarf planets, how do they differ from “true” planets and what are their characteristics?

The History of Dwarf Planets

A dwarf planet is a celestial body that almost meets the definition of a “true” planet. According to the IAU, which sets definitions (Read more...)

Mmhmm, it’s the most ridiculous story we’ve ever heard

by Alex Wilhelm

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Danny and Alex were on deck this week, with Grace on the recording and edit. Natasha will be back with us starting next week. So, it was old times on the show with just two of our team to vamp on the news. And oh boy was there a lot of news to get into. Like, loads.

  • What’s going on with Didi? Didi’s woes have continued this week, with the company seeing its share price continue to fall. The Equity team’s view is that the era of Chinese companies listing in the United States is over.
  • What’s going on with facial recognition tech? With AnyVision raising a $235 million round, Danny and Alex tangled over the future of privacy, and what counts as good enough when it comes to keeping ourselves to ourselves.
  • Nextdoor is going public: Via a SPAC, mind, but the transaction had our tongues wagging about its history, growth, and how hard it can be to build a social network.
  • Dataminr buys WatchKeeper: In its first-ever acquisition, Dataminr bought a smaller company to help it better visualize the data it collects. It’s a neat deal, and especially fun given taht Dataminr should go public sooner rather than later.
  • Planet and Satellogic are going public: One week, two satellite SPACs. You can read more about Planet here, and Satellogic here.
  • FabricNano and Cloverly raise (Read more...)

Alba Orbital’s mission to image the Earth every 15 minutes brings in $3.4M seed round

by Devin Coldewey

Orbital imagery is in demand, and if you think having daily images of everywhere on Earth is going to be enough in a few years, you need a lesson in ambition. Alba Orbital is here to provide it with its intention to provide Earth observation at intervals of 15 minutes rather than hours or days — and it just raised $3.4M to get its next set of satellites into orbit.

Alba attracted our attention at Y Combinator’s latest demo day; I was impressed with the startup’s accomplishment of already having 6 satellites in orbit, which is more than most companies with space ambition ever get. But it’s only the start for the company, which will need hundreds more to begin to offer its planned high-frequency imagery.

The Scottish company has spent the last few years in prep and R&D, pursuing the goal, which some must have thought laughable, of creating a solar-powered Earth observation satellite that weighs in at less than one kilogram. The joke’s on the skeptics, however — Alba has launched a proof of concept and is ready to send the real thing up as well.

Little more than a flying camera with the minimum of storage, communication, power, and movement, the sub-kilogram Unicorn-2 is about the size of a soda can, with paperback-size solar panel wings, and costs in the neighborhood of $10,000. It should be able to capture up to 10 meter resolution, good enough to see things like buildings, ships, crops, even planes.