1) The Solid Waste Association of North America (SWANA) claims that in 2008, more than 139 million Americans had access to curbside recycling programs - in fact, 9,349 national programs were available. Hmmm, doesn't seem like a lot, does it?
2) Recyclingfacts.org says that each American citizen generates 4.7 pounds of solid waste daily, the equivalent of 60 tons of garbage throughout the course of one lifetime, and yet the majority of it is in one way or another fully recyclable.
3) Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina and Wisconsin have recyclable material landfill bans, meaning that failure to comply by keeping plastic bottles, oil filters and wood pallets (among other materials) out of the waste stream results in violations and penalties. This has proven to be a fantastic incentive to streamlining the amount of waste they ultimately send to the landfill...perhaps the rest of the country should follow suit?
4) Making new products out of old recycled materials requires far less energy than using virgin materials - in fact, 30% less energy is necessary to reprocess old paper, 75% less energy for old copper and steel, and a whopping 95% less for old aluminum. Interestingly, more than 70% of the aluminum that is circulation right now is derived from virgin sources, and yet just 50% of the cans used in our country are actually recycled (compared to the global average of 63%).
5) The EPA determined that in 2008, just 2.12 million tons of the 30.05 million total tons of recyclable materials generated in the United States were actually recycled - the remaining glass, plastic, metal and paper materials (27.93 tons) were deposited in landfills.
6) Between the consumption of bathroom tissue, paper towels, magazines, newspapers and other wood pulp based products, the typical U.S. citizen is responsible for theoretically cutting down 525 trees in their lifetime (in other words, seven each year). The EPA says that if each of us merely swapped one single roll of conventional toilet paper for a 100% recycled alternative, we could free up 1.2 million cubic feet of landfill space, save 169 million gallons of water and prevent 470,000 trees from being pulped.
7) The number one recycled material in America is newspaper, 5.51 million tons of which were reclaimed and reprocessed in 2008. The EPA says that the remaining 780,000 tons were disposed of and if we recycled just 1/10 of the newsprint that passes through our hands each year, we could actually prevent 25 million trees from being cut down.
8) Despite the fact that the bulk of recyclable items can be sold to various firms for reprocessing, many municipalities don't break even offering the service to the community, which is why so many of them don't make it available.
9) 63,750 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions can be avoided altogether by recycling all household paper, glass, metal and plastic - which is the same volume of CO2 that a typical vehicle releases in a 5 year period.
10) Globally, 20 to 50 million metric tons of e‐waste are produced annually. It is estimated that in 2007 in the United States alone, just 18% of unwanted televisions and computers were recycled (the equivalent of 6.3 million units and 48.2 million units respectively), whereas a mere 10% of unwanted cell phones (14 million units) were recycled despite the fact that recycling programs are more accessible than ever.
Comments
Leave a comment