Recycling

Hey All,
Recycling is a really important thing, and not recycling is one of the reasons causing global warming! Here are some facts about recycling:
-The average American uses 650 pounds of paper each year. 100 MILLION TONS of wood can be saved each year if all that paper was actually recycled.
-About 80% of what Americans throw away each year is not recycable, yet our recycling rate is only 28%.
-Americans use 2.5 MILLION plastic bottles every hour! Most of them are thrown away...
-Everymonth Americans throw away enough glass bottles and jars to fill up a giant skyscraper(think: Empire State Building). All these jars are recycable!
-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 (my home state) and is floating somewhere between San Francisco and Hawaii. Its also 80 percent plastic, and weighs in 3.5 million tons.
-Recycling one ton (about 2,000 pounds) of paper saves 17 trees, 2 barrells 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.
-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.
-If all our newspapers were recycled, we could save about 250 millions 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.
-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 recycable, but not that many people realize it so most it goes in the trash!
-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 commericial fleet of airplanes every three months!
-A typical family consumes 182 gallons of pop(aka soda), 29 gallons of juice, 104 gallons of milk, and 26 gallons of bottled water a year! Thats a lot of containers-make sure they're recycled!
I bet most of you didn't know this. I didn't know it either! We need to do something. My next post will be ways to help recycle. So check in tommorow! I give a BIG thanks to dosomething.org for these facts. This is where I'm getting all my information. So check that website out one day and even become a member. It's one of the greatest website ever! Leave comments!
-Alley