My family recycles anything that Waste Management will take. I’ve always been “recycle conscious.” When I was in high school, I spearheaded a group of about 20 or 30 friends to clean-up Riverside Drive in the downtown area of Memphis.
Part of my life spent growing up on a farm helped instill my recycling ways. My grandmother re-used anything she could for more purposes than anyone could imagine. I think, generally, country folks are that way. They don’t run to the store every time they need something because usually the store is inconvenient. Instead, you find something around the house to use. You recycle!
If you’re not recycling now, maybe these facts gathered from various websites will encourage you to start:
• Recycling one aluminum can save enough energy to run a TV for three hours, or the equivalent of half of a gallon of gasoline.
• Recycling a ton of aluminum saves the equivalent in energy of 2,350 gallons of gas, enough to power the average car for more than 64,000 miles.
• 350,000 aluminum cans are produced every minute.
• A recycled aluminum can is part of a new can within six weeks, and producing a recycled can requires less than 5 percent of the energy used to make the original product.
• A thrown-away aluminum can is still a can 500 years later.
• We use over 80,000,000,000 aluminum soda cans every year.
• Every ton of recycled paper saves about 17 trees.
• To produce each week’s Sunday newspapers, 500,000 trees are used.
• Recycling a single run of the Sunday New York Times would save 75,000 trees.
• If every American recycled just one-tenth of their newspapers, we would save about 25,000,000 trees a year.
• The average American uses seven trees a year in paper, wood, and other products made from trees. This amounts to about 2,000,000,000 trees per year!
• The amount of wood and paper thrown away annually is enough to heat 50,000,000 homes for 20 years.
• Approximately 1 billion trees worth of paper is thrown away every year.
• The average household throws away 13,000 separate pieces of paper each year, mostly all junk mail.
• Americans use 2,500,000 plastic bottles every hour, and 25,000,000 plastic bottles are thrown away hourly.
• Making plastic bottles to meet Americans’ demand for bottled water requires more than 1.5 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel some 100,000 U.S. cars for a year.
• The energy saved from recycling one glass bottle can run a 100-watt light bulb about four hours. It also causes 20 percent less air pollution and 50 percent less water pollution than when a new bottle is made.
• A modern glass bottle would take 4,000 years or more to decompose.
• A fridge made 15+ years ago uses twice as much energy as newer models.
• 90 percent of bottled water’s price is in bottling, packaging, shipping, and marketing.
• Every 100 pounds of weight in your car drops your mileage by 1 to 2 percent.
• Gas-powered vehicles cause 25 percent of CO2 emissions.
• A 100-watt incandescent bulb would be sufficient to drive a Toyota Prius from San Francisco to New York.
• 30 percent of U.S. vehicles are transporting food.
• A plane gives off three times more emissions than a car because it flies higher.
• Americans waste 1 million gallons of gas every day by idling.
• Change your vehicle’s air filter every 15,000 miles.
• A cow farm with 10,000 cows produces 37,075 pounds of pollution.
• The average home receives 41 pounds of junk mail annually. That’s like getting 1.5 trees mailed to you.
• Each year, the average household uses 22,000 gallons of water on bathing alone.
• Leaky toilets can waste up to 200 gallons of water PER DAY. Toilets use an average 20.1 gallons of water per person per day.
• 9,000,000 tons of clothing ends up in U.S. landfills each year.
• Global warming refers to a change in global temperatures and weather patterns over time, either due to natural variability or human activity.
• Material like food scraps and plant clippings that go into landfills take up costly space and decompose to form methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
• A single quart of motor oil, if disposed of improperly, can contaminate up to two million gallons of fresh water.
• In 2009, America generated 243 million tons of garbage.
• The largest landfill in the world is the Fresh Kills landfill, located on Staten Island. It’s more than 500 feet high. Opened in 1948, it encompasses 2,200 acres (about 2.8 by 3.8 miles) and contains nearly 3 billion cubic feet of fill. The facility was closed in March 2001, but reopened to receive debris created by the fall of the World Trade Center.