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Here's some things you may not have known about recycling that may just make you get up and DO SOMETHING!
Fact 1
The average American used 650 pounds of paper each year. 100 MILLION TONS of wood could be saved each year if all that paper was actually recycled.
Fact 2
About 80% of what Americans throw away is recyclable, yet our recycling rate is only 28%.
Fact 3
Americans use 2.5 MILLION plastic bottles every hour! Most of them are thrown away ...
Fact 4
Every month Americans throw out enough glass bottles and jars to fill up a giant skyscraper (think: Empire State Building). All these jars are recyclable!
Fact 5
Plastic bags and other plastic garbage thrown into the ocean kill as many as 1,000,000 sea creatures a year! Ever heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? It's twice the size of Texas and is floating somewhere between San Francisco and Hawaii. It's also 80 percent plastic, and weighs in at 3.5 million tons.
Fact 6
Recycling one ton (about 2,000 pounds) of paper saves 17 trees, 2 barrels of oil (enough to run the average car for 1,260 mile), 4,100 kilowatts of energy (enough power for the average home for six months), 3.2 cubic yards of landfill space, and 60 pounds of pollution.
Fact 7
The 17 trees saved by recycling a ton of paper can absorb a total of 250 pounds of carbon dioxide from the air each year.
Fact 8
If all our newspapers were recycled, we could save about 250 MILLION trees each year! If every American recycled just one-tenth (that's one out of ten) of their newspapers, we could save about 25 MILLION trees a year.
Fact 9
More than 20,000,000 Hershey's Kisses are wrapped each day, using 133 square miles of aluminum foil. Believe it not, ALL that foil is recyclable, but not may people realize it so most it goes in the trash!
Fact 10
Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a TV for three hours - or the equivalent of a half a gallon of gasoline. In spite of this, Americans throw away enough aluminum to rebuild our entire commercial fleet of airplanes every three months!
Fact 11
A typical family consumes 182 gallons of pop (aka soda), 29 gallons of uice, 104 gallosn of mil, and 26 gallons of bottled water a year. That's a lot of containers - make sure they're recycled!