Do you know how much the Eiffel Tower weighs? Don't worry, we didn't either.

But when we recently heard the German national radio station Deutschlandfunk claim that the amount of plastics waste thrown away daily equals the weight of 100 Eiffel Towers, it piqued our interest.

All sorts of things in the trash could be “100 times” the Parisian symbol – right? – and the concept itself is nuttier than almond butter. So, we checked Google, and low and behold, the gigantic static quadraped of metal weighs a whopping 10,000 t (12,200 results within 0.55 seconds can’t be wrong). At a height of 330 m, that seems pretty slender and makes the veracity of the comparison sound just as thin.

After cracking our knuckles and rolling up our sleeves, we got down to it and multiplied further: 100 Eiffel Towers times 10,000 equals 1 mn t. Converted to shirt bags, Plasteurope.com’s base unit for these calculations, that’s around 400 bn of such wrappers – or 200 bn shopping trips. The corner store must already be popping the champagne.…