Aluminum cans are able to be recycled using less than 5% of the energy used to make the original product.
Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to keep a 100-watt bulb burning for almost four hours or run your television for three hours.
If all the aluminum cans Americans threw away in one month were stacked on top of each other, they would reach to the moon.
The worldwide fishing industry throws huge amounts of plastic garbage in the oceans. Amazing 150,000 tons go into the water every year, including packaging, plastic nets, lines and buoys.
Aluminum cans are able to be recycled using less than 5% of the energy used to make the original product.
Europeans are not that interested in recycling. They currently recycle only 2.5% of the plastic bottles they use.
Recycling a ton of aluminum save the equivalent in energy of 2,350 gallons of gas, enough to power the average car for more than 64,000 miles.
Every ton of paper that is recycled saves about 17 trees.
It takes 75,000 trees to print a Sunday Edition of the New York Times.
Recycling plastics can save up to 2/3 of the needed energy for producing plastic from raw materials.
Recycling a single plastic bottle can conserve enough energy to light a 60W bulb for up to 6 hours.
In recent years the plastic recycling business in the United States is nearly tripled. There are more than 1600 businesses involved in recycling plastics.
There are many countries which have banned or restricted the use of plastic bags. Australia, China, Austria, Bangladesh, Ireland and several European Union countries are among them.
Bottling and shipping water is the least energy efficient method ever used to supply water. Unfortunately, it remains the most popular one.
Surveys show that more than 90 percent of consumers reuse their plastic bags at least once for things like wastebasket lines or lunch totes.
Every tree provides enough oxygen for three people to breathe.
Another interesting fact about plastics and your money: 90% of the price you pay for the bottled water goes to the plastic bottle, while the water cost you only 10% of the money you give.
Even 40% of the total house plastic waste of average American family is due to the use of plastic bottles.
Americans throw away 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour.
Around 50% of waste in the average dustbin could have been put in a compost heap instead.
To make one tonne of paper, it takes on average 24 trees.
Nine out of Ten people say they would recycle more if the process was made easier for them.
The average American buys 167 bottles of water per year, avoiding using any alternatives.
You could power a computer for 25 minutes with the energy saved from recycling one glass bottle.
24 million gallons of oil are needed for producing of billion plastic bottles.
By recycling one tin can, you could power a television for 3 hours.
Only 25 recycled bottles are enough to make one adult’s fleece jacket.
Four out of five bags in the United States are plastic.
Each square mile of ocean is estimated to have 46,000 pieces of plastic floating in it.
Making plastic bottles to meet Americans' demand for bottled water requires more than 1.5 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel some 100,000 U.S. cars for a year.
Material like food scraps and plant clippings that go into landfills take up costly space and decompose to form methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
A single quart of motor oil, if disposed of improperly, can contaminate up to two million gallons of fresh water.
In 2009, American's generated 243 million tons of garbage.
Food and yard waste make up almost 30% of CA's waste stream.
Since California's beverage container recycling program began in 1987, Californians have recycled more than 120 billion bottles and cans, enough to circle the earth more than 375 times.
Over a lifetime, use of reusable bags by just one person (you!) will save over 22,000 plastic bags.
The largest landfill in the world is the Fresh Kills landfill, on Staten Island. It is more than 500 feet in height. Opened in 1948, it encompasses 2,200 acres about 2.8 by 3.8 miles and contains nearly 3 billion cubic feet of fill. The facility was closed in March 2001, but reopened to receive debris created by the fall of the World Trade Center.
It has been estimated that on average a school-age child using a disposable lunch generates 67 pounds of waste per school year.