I’ve stumbled upon some interesting facts about recycling a few days ago and I would love to share it with all of you. The following tips are from dosomething.org!!
Did you know that….
- The average person generates over 4 pounds of trash every day and about 1.5 tons of solid waste per year.
- In 2009, Americans produced enough trash to circle the Earth 24 times.
- Over 75% of waste is recyclable, but we only recycle about 30% of it.
- We generate 21.5 million tons of food waste each year. If we composted that food, it would reduce the same amount of greenhouse gas as taking 2 million cars off the road.
- Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to listen to a full album on your iPod. Recycling 100 cans could light your bedroom for two whole weeks.
- Recycling aluminum cans saves 95% of the energy used to make alum cans from new material.
- Americans throw away 25,000,000 plastic bottles every hour.
- Over 87% of Americans have access to curbside or drop-off paper recycling programs.
- In 2009, Americans threw away almost 9 million tons of glass. That could fill enough tractor trailers to stretch from NYC to LA (and back!).
- In 2010, paper recycling had increased over 89% since 1990.
- If every American recycled just one-tenth of their newspapers, we could save about 25 million trees each year.
Written by Wendy Long, Class of 2016
Source Reference: http://www.dosomething.org/actnow/tipsandtools/11-facts-about-recycling