Recycling:Glass, Plastic and Others

GLASS

Americans throw away enough glass bottles and jars every two weeks to fill the 1.350-foot towers of the former World Trade Center.

Most bottles and jars contain at least 25% recycled glass.

Glass never wears out -- it can be recycled forever. We save over a ton of resources for every ton of glass recycled -- 1,330 pounds of sand, 433 pounds of soda ash, 433 pounds of limestone, and 151 pounds of feldspar.

States with bottle deposit laws have 35-40% less litter by volume.

If all the glass bottles and jars collected through recycling in the U.S. in 94 were laid end to end, they'd reach the moon and half way back to earth.

PLASTIC

Every year we make enough plastic film to shrink-wrap Texas.

Americans go through 25 billion plastic bottles every year.

26 recycled PET bottles equals a polyester suit. 5 recycled PET bottles make enough fiberfill to stuff a ski jacket.

In 1988 we used 2 billion pounds of HDPE just to make bottles for household products. That’s about the weight of 90,000 Honda Civics.

If every American household recycled just one out of every ten HDPE bottles they used, we’d keep 200 million pounds of the plastic out of landfills every year.

STYROFOAM/POLYSTYRENE

It is un-recyclable- you can't make it into new Styrofoam. The industry wants you to assume it is- don't BUY it!

Each year American throw away 25,000,000,000 Styrofoam cups, enough every year to circle the earth 436 times.

JUNK MAIL

If only 100,000 people stopped their junk, mail, we could save up to 150,000 trees annually. If a million people did this, we could save up to a million and a half trees.

The junk mail Americans receive in one day could produce enough energy to heat 250,000 homes.

The average American still spends 8 full months of his/her life opening junk mail.

GENERAL GARBAGE

In 1865, an estimated 10,000 hogs roamed New York City, eating garbage. Now, one of every six U.S. trucks is a garbage truck.

In a lifetime, the average American will throw away 600 times his/her adult weight in garbage. If you add it up, this means that a 150-lb. adult will leave a legacy of 90,000 lbs of trash for his/her children.

The average baby generates a ton of garbage every year.

The landfill gas produced daily at Fresh Kills Landfill is enough fuel to heat 50,000 homes.

TIRES/RUBBER

It takes half a barrel of crude oil to produce the rubber for just one truck tire.

Every two weeks, Americans wear almost 50 million pounds of rubber off their tires. That’s enough to make 3 1/4 million new tires from scratch.

Producting one pound of recycled rubber versus one pound of new rubber requires only 29% of the energy.

FOOD AND PACKAGING

$1 out of every $11 Americans spend for food goes for packaging.

Americans dump the equivalent of more than 21 million shopping bags full of food into landfills every year.

OTHER

One gallon of used motor oil can contaminate 1 million gallons of water.

Most cars on U.S. roads carry only one person. We have so much extra room in our 140 million cars that everyone in Western Europe could ride with us.

If today is a typical day on planet earth, humans will add fifteen million tons of carbon to the atmosphere, destroy 115 square mils of tropical rainforest, create seventy-two square miles of desert, eliminate between forty to one hundred species, erode seventy-one million tons of topsoil, add twenty-seven hundred tons of CFCs to the stratosphere, and increase their population by 263,000.

Almost four million computer diskettes are thrown away every day, which equals over on and a half billion disks per year or a stack of disks as tall as the Sears Tower in Chicago every 21 seconds. It will take nearly 500 years for the disks to degrade.