Recycling and Energy Facts

Aluminum

• Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a TV for three hours
• A 60 watt light bulb can be run for over a day on the amount of energy saved by recycling 1 pound of steel
• An estimated 80 million Hershey's kisses are wrapped each day, using enough aluminum foil to cover 40 football fields

Paper

• To produce each weeks Sunday newspapers 500,000 trees must be cut down
• If every American recycled just 1/10th of their newspapers we would save about 25 million trees a year
• Recycling one stack of newspapers about 6 feet tall saves the life of one tree 35 feet tall
• The amount of wood and paper we throw away each year is enough to heat 50 million homes for 20 years
• Approximately 1 billion trees worth of paper are thrown away every year in the US


Plastic/Glass/Styrofoam

• Americans use 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour. Most of them are thrown away
• Americans throw away 25 billion Styrofoam coffee cups every year
• A glass bottle would take 4000 years to decompose
• About one third of an average dump is made of packaging material
• Packaging represents 65% of household trash
• A typical family consumes 182 gallons of soda, 29 gallons of juice, 104 gallons of milk and 26 gallons of bottled water each year. That's a lot of containers -- make sure they are recycled