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I own a Blunt umbrella. From their and other umbrella sites, there is a claim that over a billion umbrellas are thrown away every year.

Nobody quotes a source, and I cannot fathom how 1 umbrella is discarded for every 8 humans every year.

Glorfindel
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Mark Mayo
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    I haven't thrown away an umbrella in a couple of years, but I do have a small pile of ones that should definitely *be* thrown out... Also, I notice that Blunt offers only a two-year warranty for their supposedly "built to last" brand. Assuming only a quarter of the people on Earth own an umbrella, and they throw it out every two years... :) And your average umbrella supposedly lasts even less time than that! Just some back-of-the-envelope thoughts. – Luke Sawczak May 29 '22 at 13:41
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    As an anecdotal counterpoint, I have had the same three cheap umbrellas for 15 years, and they are still functional. I suspect location plays a large part in consumption and disposal of umbrellas, and any calculation would need to factor that. – bishop May 29 '22 at 13:53
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    Another way of saying "1 umbrella is discarded per 8 humans per year" is "An umbrella typically lasts 8 years (if everybody has one)". – Weather Vane May 29 '22 at 14:11
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    Anyone got a spare $US795? https://www.reportlinker.com/p03035735/The-World-Market-for-Umbrellas-Parasols-Walking-Sticks-and-Similar-Articles-and-Their-Parts-A-Global-Trade-Perspective.html – Oddthinking May 29 '22 at 15:02
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    According to Weather News' 2014 Global Umbrella Survey, there are currently about 19 billion umbrellas in possession world wide. If that is correct (and the number does not sound unreasonable), my gut feeling is, that it is an underestimate that only one billion of them break each year, but perhaps people also keep their broken umbrellas and don't actually throw them away. – Tor-Einar Jarnbjo May 29 '22 at 18:50
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    @Tor-EinarJarnbjo - I wouldn't rely too far on that survey, given the methodology "...cooperation of weather reporters from 35 countries around the world...a total of 38,603 weather reporters in the smartphone apps "Weather News Touch" and "Sunnycomb" responded" (Google Translate of Japanese language sources). So of the self-selecting pool of weather enthusiasts who used a Japanese weather (report submission?) app on their smartphone across 3 days 8 years ago, we have some idea of their umbrella predilictions. – Tom Goodfellow May 29 '22 at 20:34
  • [cont] with a wealth of simple statistics about use and abuse but no description of any more rigorous corrections for biases, etc. Apparently men report twice as many lost brollies as women but as the report notes: "Men have more opportunities to go out than women, so it may be that they often lose their umbrellas when they go out." – Tom Goodfellow May 29 '22 at 20:38
  • @Tor-EinarJarnbjo A person would only use one umbrella at a time, owning more would not influence the rate at which they break. – Loren Pechtel May 30 '22 at 00:28
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    @LorenPechtel I have two umbrellas, one of which is a backup that I probably should have tossed years ago. I always have at least two. All it takes is one nice wind gust to invert an umbrella. Sometimes that inverted umbrella can be rescued, kinda-sorta, and become the new backup. The backup umbrella might have holes, might have been inverted, but definitely has problems. But it's better to have a backup because even a brand new and supposedly sturdy umbrella can be utterly trashed by a sudden wind gust. – David Hammen May 30 '22 at 11:32
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    I would guess that this claim came about in reverse. If 1 billion new umbrellas are produced every year (a number that presumably is available and known to umbrella manufacturers) then it seems reasonable to assume that around that many umbrellas are thrown away every year as well. Some accumulation will happen but the number of umbrellas being thrown away each year should be of a simialar magnitude as the number of newly produced umbrellas every year. – quarague May 30 '22 at 11:50
  • @LukeSawczak Those Blunt umbrellas are incredibly expensive compared to run-of-the-mill umbrellas, by a factor of four or more, and as you have found, even those expensive Blunt umbrellas have a rather short guaranteed life span. I'm not at all surprised by the claim that over a billion umbrellas are tossed per year. – David Hammen May 30 '22 at 11:51
  • If "umbrella" includes parasols (which are used to to protect the user from solar radiation as opposed to rain), the statistic is not at all surprising. Parasols are cheap flimsy things made mostly of paper that don't last more than one summer. But even if one excludes parasols from the class of things called umbrellas, I still don't find the statistic all that surprising. – David Hammen May 30 '22 at 11:59
  • @DavidHammen There are higher quality sun umbrellas, also. As a hiker I own one that is light, but neither cheap nor flimsy. – Loren Pechtel May 30 '22 at 16:08
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    Does this include paper umbrellas out into tropical drinks? – Clint Eastwood Jun 03 '22 at 00:04

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According to 27 April 2010 The New Yorker:

The annual retail market in the United States alone is now three hundred and forty-eight million dollars — about thirty-three million umbrellas.

That's about 10% of the population, in a country with many regions where most people don't use umbrellas at all (e.g. it seldom rains, and when it does it's too windy).

If extrapolated to the world population, that's in the neighborhood of 1 billion umbrellas bought each year.

Assuming most umbrellas are bought to replace umbrellas that have been, or should have been, thrown out, the figure given in the question is quite reasonable.

Ray Butterworth
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    Can it be extrapolated to the world population? The population of the US are not representative of the world as a whole. If you tried to extrapolate global car ownership or household income from the US you'd get an improbable figure. – Stuart F Sep 30 '22 at 09:41
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    @StuartF, the US is certainly not representative of the world in general. But for low-cost products like umbrellas they might be. Some countries (e.g. UK) will go through a lot of umbrellas each year, while others will use very few, but that is similar to the variation within the US. The extrapolation doesn't have to be precise; but its being in the same ballpark as the disputed world-wide figure means that one billion isn't an unreasonable number, so why should we be skeptical about it? – Ray Butterworth Sep 30 '22 at 12:46