Metal:
1) Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a TV for three hours -- or the equivalent of a half a gallon of gasoline.
2) During the time it takes you to read this sentence, 50,000 12-ounce aluminum cans are made.
3) Once an aluminum can is recycled, it can be part of a new can within six weeks.
4) An aluminum can that is thrown away will still be a can 500 years from now!
5) There is no limit to the amount of times an aluminum can can be recycled.
6) We use over 80,000,000,000 aluminum pop cans every year.
7) Every ton of recycled steel saves 2,500 pounds of iron ore, 1,000 of coal, and 40 pounds of limestone.
Paper:
1) To produce each week's Sunday newspapers, 500,000 trees must be cut down.
2) Recycling a single run of the Sunday New York Times would save 75,000 trees.
3) If all our newspaper was recycled, we could save about 250,000,000 trees each year!
4) During World War II when raw materials were scarce, 33% of all paper was recycled. After the war, this number decreased sharply.
5) If you had a 15-year-old tree and made it into paper grocery bags, you'd get about 700 of them. A supermarket could use all of them in under an hour! This means in one year, one supermarket goes through 60,500,000 paper bags! Imagine how many supermarkets there are in the U.S.
6) The amount of wood and paper we throw away each year is enough to heat 50,000,000 homes for 20 years.
7) Approximately 1 billion trees worth of paper are thrown away every year in the U.S.
8) The average household throws away 13,000 separate pieces of paper each year. Most is packaging and junk mail.
9) The 17 trees saved (above) can absorb a total of 250 pounds of carbon dioxide from the air each year. Burning that same ton of paper would create 1500 pounds of carbon dioxide.
10) The construction costs of a paper mill designed to use waste paper is 50 to 80% less than the cost of a mill using new pulp.
11) Each ton (2000 pounds) of recycled paper can save 17 trees, 380 gallons of oil, three cubic yards of landfill space, 4000 kilowatts of energy, and 7000 gallons of water. This represents a 64% energy savings, a 58% water savings, and 60 pounds less of air pollution!
Plastic:
1) Americans use 2,500,000 plastic bottles every hour! Most of them are thrown away!
2) Plastic bags and other plastic garbage thrown into the ocean kill as many as 1,000,000 sea creatures every year! 3) Recycling plastic saves twice as much energy as burring it in an incinerator.
4) American throw away 25,000,000,000 styrofoam coffee cups every year.
Glass:
1) Every month, we throw out enough glass bottles and jars to fill up a giant skyscraper. All of these jars are recyclable!
2) The energy saved from recycling one glass bottle can run a 100-watt light bulb for four hours. It also causes 20% less air pollution and 50% less water pollution than when a new bottle is made from raw materials.
3) A modern glass bottle would take 4000 years or more to decompose -- and even longer if it's in the landfill.
4) Mining and transporting raw materials for glass produces about 385 pounds of waste for every ton of glass that is made. If recycled glass is substituted for half of the raw materials, the waste is cut by more than 80%.
Landfills:
1) The first real recycling program was introduced in New York City in the 1890s. The city's first recycling plant was built in 1898.
2) About one-third of an average dump is made up of packaging material.
3) The U.S. is the #1 trash-producing country in the world at 1,609 pounds per person per year. This means that 5% of the world's people generate 40% of the world's waste.
4) Roughly 90% of landfill contents are recyclable.
5) Out of every $10 spent buying things, $1 (10%) goes for packaging that is thrown away. Packaging represents about 65% of household trash.
6) On average, it costs $30 per ton to recycle trash, $50 to send it to the landfill, and $65 to $75 to incinerate it.
7) Americans generate and throw away 9 times as much waste as does a person in Africa or Central America, but we also generate two to three times the amount of waste as people living in industrial countries with a comparable or better standard of living as us.
Misc:
1) More than 20,000,000 Hershey's Kisses are wrapped each day, using 133 square miles of tinfoil. All that foil is recyclable, but not many people realize it.
2) McDonald's saves 68,000,000 pounds of packaging per year just by pumping soft drink syrup directly from the delivery truck into tanks in the restaurant, instead of shipping the syrup in cardboard boxes.
3) Rainforests are being cut down at the rate of 100 acres per minute.
4) A single quart of motor oil, if disposed of improperly, can contaminate up to 2,000,000 gallons of fresh water.
5) You can walk 1 mile along an average highway in the United States and see about 1,457 pieces of litter.
6) The Washington, DC-based Institute For Local Self-Reliance calculates that recycling creates 36 jobs per 10,000 tons of material recycled compared to 6 jobs for every 10,000 of tons brought to traditional disposal facilities. (6 times higher employment!)
7) A typical family consumes 182 gallons of pop, 29 gallons of juice, 104 gallons of milk, and 26 gallons of bottled water a year. That's a lot of containers -- make sure they're recycled!
This is a list of fun facts that was found on the internet a while back the site that they were on is no longer a valid site so I would like to that the person that took the time to compile this list!!
