Don't Throw That Away! -Recycling one ton of paper saves 17 trees, 6,953 gallons of water, 463 gallons of oil, and 3 cubic yards of landfill space.
-Recycling one ton of aluminum saves 27 cubic yards of landfill space.
-The average American family produces 100 pounds of trash per week.
-Over 1 billion trees are used each year to make disposable diapers.
-Using recycled beverage cans to produce new cans allows the aluminum can industry to make up to 20 times more cans for the same amount of energy.
-Americans throw away about 10 percent of the food they buy at the supermarket resulting in dumping the equivalent of more than 21 million shopping bags of food into landfills every year.
-Using recycled glass to make new glass cuts related air pollution by up to 20 percent.
-More than two-thirds of the material going into landfills is degradable. However, very little change occurs because moisture is the most important environmental variable of degradation. To help prevent groundwater contamination from runoff, landfills are kept as dry as possible, therefore, newspapers are still readable more than 20 years after being thrown away.
-One gallon of used oil can produce the same amount of motor oil as 42 gallons of crude oil while requiring about a third of the energy.
-The EPA has found that making paper from recycled materials results in 74 percent less air pollution and 35 percent less water pollution than making paper from virgin materials. This means that every ton of recycled paper keeps almost 60 pounds of pollutants out of the atmosphere.
-Over 46,000 pieces of plastic debris float on every square mile of ocean. Although plastics account for only 8 percent of the waste stream by weight, they occupy about 20 percent of the volume in a landfill due to their low bulk density.
-For every pound of steel that is recycled, enough energy is saved to light a 60-watt bulb for more than a day.
-In a lifetime, the average American will throw away 600 times their adult weight in garbage. This means that a 150 pound adult will leave a legacy of 90,000 pounds of trash for their children.
-We pay more for food packaging that we pay the American farmer for growing food.