How much glass is shattered per minute?

Before I had an interview today I thought of this as I was drinking tea from my glass and thought how that would be quite awkward if during the interview I dropped my glass and it shattered. So I wanted to know how many people shattered glass kitchenware per minute, so let’s do the Fermi calculation.

I can clearly remember one incident of shattering a glass kitchen item—which was my former tea infuser cup that suspends the tea piece above the water—in spring of 2025. And although I can’t think of any other incident, I definitely did it another time. So let’s say that on average, each person will shatter two pieces of glass kitchenware per year, which may likely be conservative. There are 8 billion people, so therefore 16 billion pieces of glass kitchenware are shattered per year. And once again, even writing this now seems quite conservative, but let’s keep with this assumption.

Therefore, we just need to calculate the number of minutes in a year and then divide that by 16, and divide 16 billion by that. So 365 times 24 times 60 equals 525 600, that’s not a lot of minutes in a year!

Finally, 16E9/525 600 = 30 441

Holy shit, even as a conservative estimate, that’s thirty thousand four hundred and forty-one pieces of glass kitchen are shattered per minute. And that means that if this blog post is ~300 words, then ssuming a reading speed of 300 words per minute, 30 441 pieces of glass kitchenware have been shattered according to this Fermi estimate since the start of this blog post.

BOOM!