New York Dumps More Trash Than Any Other Major City In The Entire World

If you find New York incomparably dirty, it's probably because you're looking at the producer of more waste than any other major city on Earth.

The Big Apple creates over 33 million tons of waste a year, according to Motherboard, completely surpassing Mexico City's second-ranked 12 million tons.

Tokyo has about 12 million more people than New York, but the former city is efficient enough to tie with Mexico City's trash production.

These findings were uncovered by Chris Kennedy, a University of Toronto civil engineering professor whose research is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

He additionally determined the average New Yorker churns out 15 times as much solid garbage as the average resident of notoriously overcrowded Kolkata, India.

Factor in electricity and gasoline use, and New York becomes the world's most wasteful major city.

The city goes through the equivalent of "one oil supertanker" every day and a half, Kennedy found, and all of those lit-up screens and giant skyscrapers require a lot of electricity.

The city is also growing in wealth, and Kennedy says that leads to the infrastructure becoming less energy-efficient.

Then, there's the electricity consumed by innovation and the fact people who live in smaller spaces are more driven to use high amounts of energy.

Perhaps New York could learn a lesson from Tokyo's highly advanced public transit system or Moscow's method of keeping homes warm with wasted heat from power plants.

Citations: The Worlds Most Wasteful Megacity (Motherboard)