Recycling Fun Facts!

An estimated 80,000,000 Hershey’s Kisses are wrapped each day, using enough aluminum foil to cover over 50 acres of space — that’s almost 40 football fields. All that foil is recyclable, but not many people realize it.
Every month, we throw out enough glass bottles and jars to fill up a giant skyscraper. All of these jars are recyclable!
A modern glass bottle would take 4000 years or more to decompose — and even longer if it’s in the landfill.
In 1993, U.S. paper recovery saved more than 90,000,000 cubic yards of landfill space.
Americans use 85,000,000 tons of paper a year; about 680 pounds per person.
The amount of wood and paper we throw away each year is enough to heat 50,000,000 homes for 20 years.
If all our newspaper was recycled, we could save about 250,000,000 trees each year!
An aluminum can that is thrown away will still be a can 500 years from now!
Every hour, Americans use 4 million plastic bottles, but we recycle only one-fourth of them.
About 80% of what Americans throw away is recyclable, yet our recycling rate is only 28%.
Each ton of recycled paper can save 17 trees, 380 gallons of oil, three cubic yards of landfill space, 4,000 kilowatts of energy and 7,000 gallons of water!
Where does the trash go? When you throw something “away”, it doesn’t go away! Trash is either burned, buried, recycled or dumped into rivers and oceans.
Disposable diapers last centuries in landfills. An average baby will go through 8,000 of them!
Every minute of every day over 120,000 aluminum cans are recycled in the U.S
Most bottles and jars contain at least 25% recycled glass. Glass never wears out – it can be recycled forever.
Americans throw away the equivalent of more than 30 million trees in newsprint each year.
Americans discard 4 million tons of office paper every year. That’s enough to build a 12-foot high wall of paper from New York to California.
The world’s forests are being destroyed at the rate of 1 acre per second. Every 16 minutes, a forest the size of New York’s Central Park is destroyed. Every day, a forest the size of Philadelphia (74,000 acres) is lost, and every year, an area the size of Pennsylvania (27 million acres) is ruined.
It takes 80-100 years for an aluminum can to decompose (break down) in a landfill.
Glass can be recycled into jars, jewelry, bottles, dishes, drinking glasses, coffee mugs and many other items
It can take up to 700 years for plastic to decompose (break down) in a landfill
1 recycled tin can would save enough energy to power a television for 3 hours.
1 recycled glass bottle would save enough energy to power a computer for 25 minutes.
1 recycled plastic bottle would save enough energy to power a 60-watt light bulb for 3 hours.
70% less energy is required to recycle paper compared with making it from raw materials.
In the United States the average person throws away 600 times their weight in garbage during their lifetime.
When an aluminum can is placed it the garbage, it is the same as wasting six ounces of gasoline.
Recycling 35 percent of our trash reduces global warming emissions equivalent to taking 36 million cars of the road.
In the United States, the amount of steel that is discarded and not recycled every year is enough to build all the new American-made cars.