We all live on this planet and it is up to each and every person and business to do their part to help make our natural resources last for future generations.
A big part of making those natural resources last for future generations is recycling.
Recycling is something that can be easy to do and everyone can do things to play a role in recycling to do their part in helping to preserve our environment for future generations.
Below, we’ve listed some quite interesting facts about recycling that many people don’t know. See what you can learn that you didn’t already know!
Recycling facts that you may not know!
The most wasted natural resource on Earth is water!
The average person generates over 4 pounds of trash every day & around 1.5 tons of solid waste per year.
A plant takes a minimum of 15 to 20 years to grow into a full size tree, however it only takes less than 10 minutes for that tree to be felled, and the average mature tree can yield approximately 700 paper grocery bags, which will then be used up in less than 1 hour by a supermarket!
The energy that is required to recycle paper is approximately 70% less than when paper is prepared using virgin wood and other raw materials.
Over 75% of all of our waste is recyclable, however only approximately 30% of it is recycled.
Recycling about 14 trees worth of paper will reduce our air pollutants by over 165,000 tons.
A Styrofoam coffee cup thrown away today will remain in landfill space for about 500 years. That’s because it does not easily decompose, in other words, it’s not bio-degradable.
We generate 21.5 million tons of food waste each and every year. If we were to compost all of that food waste that’s generated, it would reduce just about the same amount of greenhouse gas that would otherwise be produced, as taking about 2 million vehicles off the road.
Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to listen to a full album on your MP3 player. Recycling 100 cans could light a bedroom for two weeks.
Recycling aluminum cans used for beverages saves about 95% of the energy used to make alum cans from new material.
Americans throw away just about 25 million plastic bottles every and every hour.
The average time that it takes plastic bottles to fully decompose in a landfill is approximately 700 years.
Over 87% of Americans have access to curbside or drop-off paper recycling programs.
If everyone in American recycled just 1/10th of their newspapers, we would save about 25 million trees every year.
Glass is one of the very few products that can be completely recycled over and over again. However, most glass ends up in a landfill and never decomposes.
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