The Weight of Everything Humans Have Made

Sep 24

2 min read

Updated: Sep 29

A building goes up. A road is repaved. A delivery truck pulls away from another doorstep.

Together, the things we build and buy are becoming one of the heaviest features of the planet.

By 2020, the world’s buildings, roads, vehicles and other human-made objects still in use weighed an estimated 1.1 trillion metric tons, about equal to the weight of every living thing on Earth. Researchers pinpointed 2020, give or take six years, as the year the two lines crossed. The comparison counts living things, not their surroundings: a fish, but not its river; a tree, but not the mountain beneath it.

What weighs so much?

Mostly what we build. Concrete and gravel account for much of the weight, with bricks and asphalt adding more, and producing the cement that binds it all releases large amounts of carbon dioxide of its own. Our purchases count too, but construction materials dominate the total, and the 1.1 trillion ton figure counts only what is still in use.

Demolished buildings and discarded products form another pile. Researchers estimated that by 2020, it weighed roughly 300 billion metric tons, nearly a third as much as the 1.1 trillion total. Human-made mass in use has been doubling roughly every 20 years, and at this pace, researchers project it will reach 2.2 trillion tons by 2040, twice the weight of everything alive on Earth.

A road can serve people for decades. A building can shelter generations. Their weight tells us how much material we have used, but how long they serve matters too. An older building can find a new purpose, materials can be recovered when one comes down, and a product can be repaired instead of replaced. Each extends the life of something we have already made.

None of it stops the tally from climbing. Each of us adds more than our own body weight to it every week, one small contribution to the heaviest thing humans have ever built.

For a closer look at the scale of it all, visit anthropomass.org.