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The Hostage Release Trickle
At this point you’ve already got a fun icebreaker to deploy the next time you’re at a party: “Hey guess what? You flush a panda’s worthy of poop down the toilet every year! Hey wait, where are you going?” Questionable conversational choices aside, it’s true that people produce way more poop than they realize, in the same way that fancy lattes add up to hundreds of dollars per year. That 14 ounces of daily poop becomes 319 annual pounds, or 25,520 pounds by 80 years old — disregarding infancy and childhood vs. adult quantities. That’s the same as a big-sized trailer-less semi-tractor, over two average adult African elephants, and just for kicks, over 46 pigs. Side note: Pigs are heavier than you think.
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And in case you’re already dismayed at the heft of your fecal excretions, it can be shocking how much time you spend excreting them. Using data from a ukactive survey, Australian radio station Triple M makes a low estimate of 92 total days of life spent on the toilet, while sites like Green Gobbler go higher at 240 days. A study in Soft Matter, meanwhile, reports that it takes an average of 12 seconds to drop a single stool — that’s the same across all mammals, small to large. But of course, pooping isn’t as fast as racing in, doing a drop trou, and racing out. Even if it was, a one-a-day pooper would spend 73 minutes a year on the toilet — or 97 hours by 80 years old.
