The Associated Press has a truly stupid headline today that is reprinted throughout the U.S.: "World's plastic waste could bury Manhattan 2 miles deep."

The purpose of the article and headline is to predict disaster and scare the people, especially the children, by implying that we are destroying the Earth.

Industry has made more than 9.1 billion tons of plastic since 1950 and there's enough left over to bury Manhattan under more than two miles of trash, according to a new cradle-to-grave global study.

They calculated that of the 9.1 billion tons made, nearly 7 billion tons are no longer used. Only 9 percent got recycled and another 12 percent was incinerated, leaving 5.5 billion tons of plastic waste on land and in water.

"At the current rate, we are really heading toward a plastic planet," said study lead author Roland Geyer, an industrial ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "It is something we need to pay attention to."

I thought I would put this article in perspective.

Manhattan's area is 22.82 square miles.  The Earth is 196.9 million square miles, and Manhattan is 0.0000011644 percent of its surface.  According to my calculations, that makes it around  one 100th of an inch of the Earth's 96.9 million square miles.  And that is assuming that the amount of waste in this article is correct.  We know how often numbers are manipulated on temperatures, so why would we assume that these numbers are correct?  Does anyone believe that 5.5 billion is an actual or verified number?

One 100th of an inch does not look like a plastic Earth to me.  Would that headline scare anyone?

Why don't we incinerate more than 12%?  That would significantly fix the exaggerated problem.

The headline reminds me of the fictional prediction that Manhattan will be under water if we don't give the government trillions to control CO2.

I also remember all the false predictions from the early 1990s that we would soon be out of landfill space and forced to dump waste in the ocean.

It is truly a shame that most reporters just reprint or repeat what they are told.  No research is necessary when there is an agenda to push.