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Recycling Facts



Where to start.  If you have been coming to see my site for a while now, you will have noticed that it is coming up slowly.  (but surely!!). When I chose which page should be in my main menu, I thought that this page would be the easiest to write because there is soooo much information to be found on “Recycling Facts”.


Well…. I am now realizing the value of the saying “a little goes a long way”… Because, every time I sit to gather the information for this page, I freeze up.  There is so much to go through that I get lost in all the recycling facts out there!!  If I spend the time it would take for me to write a perfect information page with all the relevant recycling facts, I would spend the next year just on this page and have to neglect the rest of the site.


So… here is my compromise.  For now, I will set down the 20 facts that I have seen that struck me the most.  I will then work some more on the rest of my site and continually come back here and add some more facts.


Here goes:

1-
With just 4% of the world’s population, North America consumes 25% of the Earth’s resources.
2-
The amount of wood and paper North Americans throw away each year is enough to heat 50,000,000 homes for 20 years.
3-
In a lifetime, the average North American will throw away 600 times his or her adult weight in garbage. This means that each adult will leave a legacy of 90,000 lbs. of trash for his or her children.
4-
Recycling an aluminum can saves enough energy to run a television set for three hours or light a 100 watt bulb for 20 hours.
5-
You can make 20 cans out of recycled material with the same amount of energy it takes to make one new one.
6-
Enough aluminum is thrown away to rebuild our commercial air fleet 4 times every year.
7-
A typical baby uses 10,000 diapers in their early life, using a cloth diaper cost 19 cents less than a disposable diaper. Each year 16 trillion diaper end up in landfills.
8-
10 million hectares of ancient forests are destroyed each year throughout the world, the equivalent of 1 football field every 2 seconds.
9-
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.
10-
A glass bottle can take as long as 4,000 years to decompose.
11-
An ink cartridge takes 1000 years to bio-degrade.
12-
Manufacturing 1 ton of office and computer  paper with recycled paper stock can save nearly 3,000 kilowatt hours over the same ton of paper made with virgin wood products.
13-
By recycling 1 ton of paper:  you reduce water pollution by 35% and air pollution by 74%; you save 4,800 kWh of energy, the equivalent of the average power consumption of one household over a seven-month period; you save 16,330 gallons of water;  you can make 11,324 simple rolls of bathroom tissue or 3,569 rolls of paper towels.
14-
A plastic bag takes 400 years to break down.
15-
Recycling saves enough energy to electrically power the equivalent of 18  million homes for a year. 
16-
The unreleased energy contained in the average dustbin each year could power a television for 5,000 hours.
17-
On average, 16% of the money you spend on a product pays for the packaging, which ultimately ends up as rubbish.
18-
Recycling lets you reduce waste by 80%, which adds up when you consider that 1 ton of paper takes up 2 m3 of landfill.
19-
Incinerating 10,000 tons of waste creates one job; land filling 10,000 tons of waste creates six jobs; recycling 10,000 tons of waste creates 36 jobs.
20-
9 out of 10 people would recycle more if it were made easier.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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