42,719 Pounds of Minerals for Every American Last Year (2009)

With the life expectancy in the U.S. now averaging 77.8 years, this means that the average American will need to have 3.3 million pounds of resources to be mined to provide the products and materials they will depend upon in their lifetime. The population of the U.S. is over 304 million people, so this means that last year, nearly 6 billion tons of different rocks and minerals had to be mined somewhere, to make the things we use in our everyday lives

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