Recycling 1 ton of paper saves 17 mature trees, 7,000 gallons of water, 3 cubic yards of landfill space, 2 barrels of oil, and 4,100 kilowatt-hours of electricity — enough energy to power the average American home for five months. (EPA, 2008)
Recycling paper instead of making it from new material generates 74 percent less air pollution and uses 50 percent less water. (EPA, 2008)
Recycling aluminum saves 95% of the energy needed to produce new aluminum from raw materials. Energy saved from recycling one ton of aluminum is equal to the amount of electricity the average home uses over 10 years. (Keep America Beautiful, 2006)
Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a 100-watt bulb for 20 hours, a computer for 3 hours, or a TV for 2 hours. (EPA, 2008)
Americans throw away enough aluminum every month to rebuild our entire commercial air fleet.
Glass never wears out -- it can be recycled forever. We save over a ton of resources for every ton of glass recycled -- 1,330 pounds of sand, 433 pounds of soda ash, 433 pounds of limestone, and 151 pounds of feldspar.
Every year we make enough plastic film to shrink-wrap Texas.
If every American household recycled just one out of every ten HDPE bottles they used, we’d keep 200 million pounds of the plastic out of landfills every year.
Each year American throw away 25,000,000,000 Styrofoam cups, enough every year to circle the earth 436 times.
Every day Americans use enough steel and tin cans to make a steel pipe running from Los Angeles to New York... and back. If we only recycle one-tenth of the cans we now throw away, we'd save about 3.2 billion of them every year.
If only 100,000 people stopped their junk mail, we could save up to 150,000 trees annually. If a million people did this, we could save up to a million and a half trees.
Americans dump the equivalent of more than 21 million shopping bags full of food into landfills every year.
One gallon of used motor oil can contaminate 1 million gallons of water.
Facts courtesy of Oberlin College
