Hi guys, since this week is Energy week for the RecycleMania competition, I decided to look up some fun facts about energy conservation that you may or may not know about. I know I enjoyed reading them a lot and I hope you will too! They are taken from http://reslife.bloomu.edu.
• 25% to 30% of all the energy used in public schools across the U.S. is wasted.
• Turning off the lights in one classroom for one hour keeps over two pounds of pollutants out of the environment.
• The United States has about 5% of the world’s population, yet we consume about 25% of the world’s energy!
• It takes 16 times more energy to make a new aluminum can than it does to recycle one.
• Recycling one-aluminum saves enough energy to power a computer for 3 hours.
• Only about 700 paper bags can be made from one 15-year old tree.
• The typical American throws away 60 pounds of plastic packing each year.
• To produce one pound of butter, 10 gallons of water is required.
• About 75% of the water we use in our homes is used in the bathroom.
• Refrigerators in the U.S. consume equivalent of more than 50% of the power generated by all of our nuclear power plants.
• Lights consume about 20% of all the energy used in the United States.
• A ¼ inch crack under your front door will waste as much energy as a 2” X 2” hole in your wall.
• If we all installed “low-flow” showerheads, we could save billions of gallons of water every year.
• If we all recycled all our Sunday papers, 500,000 trees could be saved each week.
• A 10-minute shower can use more than 50 gallons of water.
• The junk mail Americans receive in one day could produce enough energy to heat 250,000 homes.
• Every year Americans throw away enough office paper to build a wall 12 feet high stretching from LA to NY.
• At the rate Americans are generating garbage, we need 500 new dumpsites every year.
• Over a billion trees are used to make disposable diapers every year.
• Americans buy over a billion incandescent light bulbs every year. That’s equal to 3 acres of bulbs a day.
• Compact florescent bulbs last 5 times longer than a conventional bulb and uses 70% less energy.
Written by Wendy Long, Class of 2016
By Obra19 (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons
