Some Stats

Just some stats I came upon on the Clean Air Counsels website. Some will really make you think. Here are some of the ones that surprised me...

*Less than 1 percent of plastic bags are recycled each year. Recycling one ton of plastic bags costs $4,000. The recycled product can be sold for $32.

*38,000 miles of ribbon are thrown away each year, enough to tie a bow around the Earth

*Only 30% of people in the Southern region of the United States had curbside recycling collection in 2008. Eighty-four percent of people in the Northeast had curbside recycling. The South also has the most landfill facilities – 726, in contrast with 134 in the northeast

*Because microbes in compost can degrade some toxic organic compounds, including petroleum, compost is often used to restore oil-contaminated soils

*Making a ton of paper from recycled paper saves up to 17 trees and uses 50 percent less water than does creating paper from virgin pulp

*Nearly 77% of all corrugated boxes were recycled in 2008

*The energy saved by recycling one glass bottle can light a 100-watt light bulb for four hours or run a computer for 30 minutes

*63.4 percent of paper was recycled in 2009, an all-time high, according to the American Forest & Paper Association. 2009 was the first year the rate was over 60 percent

*If we recycled all of our aluminum cans for one year, we could save enough energy to light Washington, D.C. for 3.7 years.[3

*About 304 million electronics were disposed of from US households in 2005. Two-thirds of them still worked

*More than 20 million Hershey's Kisses are wrapped each day, using 133 square miles of aluminum foil. Believe it not, ALL that foil is recyclable, but not many people realize it so most it goes in the trash!