Waste Recycling Facts

Waste Recycling is vital if we want to save the planet. Why Recycle? Well, here are some cold hard facts to help create awareness on waste reduction recycling, Solid waste and scrap recycling.

-Every year Americans throw away enough paper and plastic cups, forks, and spoons to circle the equator 300 times, many of this trash doesn't go to waste recycling.

-The average American office worker uses about 500 disposable cups every year, most of it ends up in municipal solid waste.

-Over 7 billion pounds of PVC are thrown away in the U.S. each year. Only 18 million pounds of that, about one quarter of 1 percent, is recycled. Chlorine production for PVC uses almost as much energy as the annual output of eight medium-sized nuclear power plants each year.

-The state of California spends about 25 million dollars sending plastic bags to landfill each year, and another 8.5 million dollars to trash removal from the streets.

-Every year, Americans use approximately 1 billion shopping bags, creating 300,000 tons of landfill waste, handled mostly by waste management companies and waste services.

-Between Thanksgiving and New Year's, an extra million tons of waste is generated each week, millions of dollars are spent on waste management, trash disposal, trash pickup and garbage removal. Just a portion of this goes to waste recycling.

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

-Recycling aluminum creates 97% less water pollution than making new metal from ore.

-At least 90 percent of the price of a bottle of water is for things other than the water itself, like bottling, packaging, shipping and marketing.

-Because plastic water bottles are shielded from sunlight in landfills, they will not decompose for thousands of years.

-If we recycled all of the cell phones retired each year, we would save enough energy to power 18,500 homes for a year.

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

-About 40 million computers became obsolete in 2007, about twice as many as in 1998, very little of this electronic waste went to waste recycling.