Final Statistics Blog Entry for Now

For a while now, I’ve been trying to find a primary source that says how many whiteboard markers are thrown out a year. At first, I thought it was 400 million a year in the USA. Then I found a source that said a billion a year in North America and 500 million of that is from school teachers. Then I found a source that said 35 billion a year worldwide.

Continuing from previous research, I tried finding other sources that corroborated the 35 billion a year figure from Scribo. However, I could only find that figure on pages made by Scribo and people quoting Scribo. Once again, I can’t find the primary source.

With all these statistics, I can’t find a primary source, but I can try to figure out if they roughly agree with each other. Ultimately, it’s different amounts of markers in different subsets of the world: the USA, North America, and the world. To see if these stats agree with each other, I’m going to compare the amount of markers thrown away per capita for each stat.

To start, I need the population of each area. The USA has a population of about 332 million. The world has a population of about 8.05 billion people. As for North America, I’m getting very different population values depending on where I look. One place says 375 million, another says 594 million. The reason for this is that apparently different people have different opinions about what constitutes “North America”, a fact that is frustrating when I’m dealing with a statistic that mentions “North America” but doesn’t specify what they mean by “North America”.

After some more research, I found that the smaller population number is for Northern America and the larger population number is for North America.

By my calculations, every year, on average, each person in the USA throws out 1.2 markers. In North America, it’s 1.68 markers per capita per year. In the world, it’s 4.35 markers per capita per year.

Now it’s time to analyze these numbers. The world number is significantly higher than the North America and USA numbers. The question now is does that make sense? For all these stats to be correct, people outside of North America need to use significantly more markers per capita than people in North America. I don’t know if that’s correct or not. I’d need stats for regions outside of North America to know one way or the other.

After all this research and analysis, where does this leave me? In some ways, I feel just as confused as when I started this journey. Sometimes, research is like that. At times like this, the best move is to recognize that it’s good enough for now and that there are plenty of other confusing webs of mystery to unravel.