- Everyday US businesses generate enough paper to circle the earth 20 times!
- One tree can filter 60 pounds of pollutants each year
- Every Sunday, Americans waste 90% of recycled newspapers; which is the equivalence of 500,000 trees!
- Americans use an average of 100 gallons of water a day
- Many idle electronics (TV's, VCR's, DVD players, etc...) use energy even when switched off to keep display clocks lit, memory chips and remote controls working. Nationally, these energy "vampires" use 5% of our domestic energy and cost consumers more than $8 Billion annually.
- Americans use 100 Million steel and tin cans everyday
- Americans throw away enough aluminum every month to rebuild our entire commercial air fleet.
- Each year Americans throw away 25 Billion Styrofoam cups; that's enough to circle the earth 436 times! Use a coffee mug or a recyclable cup. There is no way to recycle Styrofoam!
- The average American throws away 61 lbs of tin cans every month. That's over 700 lbs a year or a half million pounds in a lifetime.
- If a million people stopped their junk mail we could save 500,000 trees a year!
- One in six trucks in the US is a garbage truck
- $1 out of every $11 spent on food in America is for the packaging
- One gallon of oil can contaminate 1,000,000 gallons of water
- Almost 4 million diskettes are thrown away everyday, which equals around a half billion disks a year. This means every 21 seconds a stack of disks as tall as the Sears Tower are thrown away. Disks take around 500 years to degrade.
- Turning the faucet off while you brush your teeth each day could save almost 3,000 gallons of water a year per person in your house.
- The Average American uses 7 trees a year in paper, wood and other products made from trees, almost 500 in a 70 year life.
- A new glass bottle takes 4,000 years to decompose - Longer if it is in a landfill
- To create just one T-Shirt, it takes on average -3 pounds of chemical fertilizers and 500 galllons of water. 4 million tons of textile waste are discarded each day!
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