Lauren Brois January 29th, 2009

Recycling Facts:

• 1 ton of 100% virgin(non-recycled) newsprint uses 12 trees
• We save 17 trees for each ton of recycled newspaper
• Americans discard 4 million tons of office paper every year—enough to build a 12 foot-high wall of paper from New York to California
• Every ton of recycled office paper saves 380 gallons of oil
• Every year we save enough energy recycling steel to supply L.A with nearly a decade’s worth of electricity
• We save enough energy by recycling one aluminum can to run a TV set for three hours
• When you toss out one aluminum can you waste as much energy as if you’d filled the same can half-full of gasoline and poured it into the ground
• Americans throw away enough glass bottles and jars every two weeks to fill the 1,350-foot towers of the former World Trade Center
• If all the glass bottles and jars collected through recycling in the U.S. in 1994 were laid end-to-end they’d reach the moon and half way back to earth
• Every year we make enough plastic film to shrink-wrap Texas
• Styrofoam is un-recyclable!
• Each year Americans throw away 25,000,000,000 Styrofoam cups—enough to circle the earth 436 times
• If only 100,000 people stopped their junk mail, we could save 150,000 trees annually. If a million people did this, we could save up to a million and a half trees
• The junk mail Americans receive in one day could produce enough energy to heat 250,000 homes
• $1 out of every $11 Americans spend for food goes for packaging
• If everyone who subscribes to the New York Times recycled, we’d keep over 6,000 tons of pollution out of the air
• In a lifetime, the average American will throw away 600 times his/her adult weight in garbage. If you add it up, this means that a 150-lb. adult will leave a legacy of 90,000 lbs. of trash
• If today is a typical day on earth, humans will add 15 million tons of carbon to the atmosphere, destroy 115 square miles of tropical rainforest, create 72 square miles of desert, eliminate between 40 to 100 species, erode 71 million tons of topsoil, add 2700 tons of CFCs to the stratosphere, and increase our population by 263,000

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