The United States is a shockingly wasteful country.
To be fair, the same could be said for much of the developed world. But there’s no getting around the fact that less than 5% of the world’s population lives in America but uses about 18% of its energy, wasting a great deal of it in the process.
What's more, an estimated 1 in 3 children— and 1 in 6 Americans overall — are food-insecure. And yet almost half the food the US produces on farms goes to waste, much of it ending up in the trash.
To put these and other staggering problems into perspective, Tech Insider has tallied up the losses per average American. While it's difficult to separate supply-chain from household waste for some of these figures, it's arguable that complicity with a wasteful system is just the same.
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