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:

	With just 4% of the world’s population, North America consumes 25% of the Earth’s resources.
	The amount of wood and paper North Americans throw away each year is enough to heat 50,000,000 homes for 20 years.
	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.
	Recycling an aluminum can saves enough energy to run a television set for three hours or light a 100 watt bulb for 20 hours.
	You can make 20 cans out of recycled material with the same amount of energy it takes to make one new one.
	Enough aluminum is thrown away to rebuild our commercial air fleet 4 times every year.
	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.
	10 million hectares of ancient forests are destroyed each year throughout the world, the equivalent of 1 football field every 2 seconds.
	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.
	A glass bottle can take as long as 4,000 years to decompose.
	An ink cartridge takes 1000 years to bio-degrade.
	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.
	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.
	A plastic bag takes 400 years to break down.
	Recycling saves enough energy to electrically power the equivalent of 18  million homes for a year.
	The unreleased energy contained in the average dustbin each year could power a television for 5,000 hours.
	On average, 16% of the money you spend on a product pays for the packaging, which ultimately ends up as rubbish.
	Recycling lets you reduce waste by 80%, which adds up when you consider that 1 ton of paper takes up 2 m3 of landfill.
	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.
	9 out of 10 people would recycle more if it were made easier.