-
Almost 85 percent of what we throw away can be recycled.
-
Americans throw away enough office paper each year to create a 12 feet wall reaching from LA to NY.
-
Production of recycled paper uses only half the water and 3/4 of the energy than new paper.
-
Each ton of recycled paper saves more than three cubic yards of landfill space. This is enough for a year's worth of one person's garbage.
-
Every ton of paper that is recycled saves seventeen trees.
-
Americans use an estimated 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour - only a small portion gets recycled.
-
If you recycle soda cans, the energy used and air pollution created, is 95 percent less than if the cans were produced from raw materials.
-
Theoretically, any type of plastic can be recycled.
-
Glass never wears out – it can be recycled forever.
-
Compact florescent (CFL) bulbs provide very comparable light quality, but use only 25% as much energy and last 5-7 years.
-
If a faucet leaks 60 drops per minute-you would waste 200 gallons/month.
-
Styrofoam can take 500 years to break down in a landfill.
-
You could operate a TV for up to 3 hours with the energy saved by recycling 1 aluminum can.
-
America's total yearly waste would fill a convoy of garbage trucks long enough to wrap around the Earth six times and reach halfway to the moon.
-
Since 1950, people in the United States have used more resources than any generation who ever lived before them.
-
At the consumption level of the average American, at least four additional planets worth of resources would be needed to support the planets six billion inhabitants.
-
By comparison, the average North American consumes ten times as much as the average person living in China and thirty times as much as the average person living in India.
-
According to the EPA, in 2001 less than 15% of students between the ages of 5-15 walked or biked to or from school, down from 48% of students in 1969. These travel choices are influenced by school siting and development patterns.
-
More than 90 percent of all travel in the U.S. is by automobile, and only 4 percent is by all forms of public transit.
-
In the United States, food travels an average of 1,300 miles to reach you.
-
60-70% of world's fish catch goes to feed livestock.
-
One hour of mowing a lawn with a conventional mower pollutes as much as 100 miles of driving and the average American spends 40 hours a year mowing – equivalent to 4000 miles of driving.
