Scary Statistics: 65 Times Learning The Truth About The World Horrified People

Only about 10% of plastics get recycled in the end. Just because you threw a bottle into the recycling bin doesnt mean its getting recycled. Im not sure if this is true but I heard that one tiny piece of dirty plastic in the bag means they reject the whole bag and send it to the landfill. When the landfills are a problem, they just ship the trash to some other third world country, and of f'n course they are so happy to take that money. And perhaps a flood or just regular rain might bring away the plastics in some third world country landfill. That plastic goes into the ocean anyway, and first world countries deem themselves innocent because theyre not the ones directly chucking trash into the sea.

Recycling is a big unfunny joke. It has been a joke for more than 2 decades with no end in sight. We need to cut our losses and try something else. Perhaps pyrolysis is the answer. Plastics came from petroleum. We can turn it back to petroleum and reduce the demand for more oilwells. Make our oil supply stretch further while eliminating trash.

Black children are 14x more likely to be victims of gun violence than white children :(.

The act of non-fatal strangulation increases the risk of h**icide that the victim faces by 750% making them nearly 8 times more likely to end up dead at the hands of their a****r after strangulation occurred.

Only 1/3 of the Soviet Men born in 1923 survived past World War 2.

65% of couples that do a trial separation get divorced.

I don't remember the exact stat but apparently covid k****d so many people during the initial outbreak before the vaccines were developed that it lowered life expectancy in the us for the first time since the 1950s.

Children with autism are 160 times more likely to drown than a neurotypical child.

Back in 2024, amongst children with autism that died after wandering away, 91% of those deaths were from drowning.

That firefighters have a 68% chance of being diagnosed with some form of cancer at some point in their career.

Over the past 10 years, world insect populations went down about 40%

Edit: u/Wyntier said that that stat might be false and it’s about 9% per decade. Still really bad though.

Over one THIRD of women under 50 are iron deficient. And yet doctors dismiss us when we have clear symptoms. If your ferritin is <50 ng/mL and you have symptoms of iron deficiency, don't take no for an answer

10% of marriages in the world are with 1st and 2nd cousins........

I was reading a book and they noted that 1 in 3 African American men in the US will see in the inside of a jail cell in their lifetime. For white American males, it's 1 in 19.

(Largely due to the harsher sentencing, etc.).

There were 37,000 hit and run accidents in Chicago in 2025. Only 97 were solved.

28% of long haul truckers in the U.S. suffer from PTSD. When you think about it it makes sense. Dealing with constantly monitoring all around you while people cut you off, almost merge into, flip you off for no reason, the list goes on. I've definitely noticed a change of my psyche over the last 10 years.

That humans k**l 100 million sharks per year.

If you have two arms, you statistically have an above average number of arms.

Here in Texas, the Powers That Be use 3rd grade reading scores to project the number of prison beds to fund and build.

Approximately two-thirds of the world's chocolate is harvested by child slaves.

Not really a statistic but I learned a horrifying fact as a research assistant. Sometimes Amber Alerts cause the kidnapper to immediately k**l the kid.

The life expectancy of children whose parents divorced is around five years shorter than that of children who had a parent die.