Recycling Michigan » Recycling Facts

11 Facts about Paper

Rebecca Long — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 18:55:26 +0000

1. Year paper was invented: 105 A.D. (by Chinese imperial court official Lun Ts’ai).

2. Global comsumption of paper and paperboard in 2005: 368 million tons.

3. Projected consumption in 2021: 579 million tons.

4. Paper consumed per person, per year in the United States: 330 kilograms.

5. Paper consumed per person per year in Western Europe: 200 kgs; Latin America: 50 kgs; China and Asia: 28 kgs.

6. Sheets of paper used each year by the average U.S. office worker: 10, 000.

7. Percent of printed-on office paper discarded within one day of printing: 45%.

8. Municipal waste discarded in the U.S. in 2006: 251 million tons. Percent share accounted for by paper: 34%.

9. Beginning of the U.S. recycled paper industry: 1690.

10. Number of trees saved by one ton of recycled paper: 17.

11. Landfill spaced saved by one ton of recycled paper: 3.3 cubic yards.

Information obtained from January/February 2009 issue of World Watch.

11 Facts about Recycling

Steve Stiffler — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 15:23:48 +0000

1. The average American uses 650 pounds of paper each year – 100 million tons of wood could be saved each year if all that paper was recycled.

2. Americans use 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour.

3. A typical family consumes 182 gallons of soda, 29 gallons of juice, 104 gallons of milk, and 26 gallons of bottled water a year. That’s a lot of containers that can all be recycled!

4. About 80% of what Americans throw away is recyclable, yet our recycling rate is only 28%.

5. Every month Americans throw out enough glass bottles and jars to fill up a giant skyscraper (think: Empire State Building), but all of these jars are recyclable!

6. 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 and is floating somewhere between San Francisco and Hawaii. It’s also 80 percent plastic, and weighs in at 3.5 million tons.

7. Recycling one ton (about 2,000 pounds) of paper saves 17 trees, two barrels of oil (enough to run the average car for 1,260 miles), 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.

8. The 17 trees saved by recycling one ton of paper can absorb a total of 250 pounds of carbon dioxide out of the air each year.

9. If all of our newspapers were recycled, we could save about 250 million trees each year! If every American recycled just one-tenth of their newspapers, we could save about 25 million trees each year.

10. 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!

11. Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a TV for three hours. In spite of this, Americans throw away enough aluminum to rebuild our entire commercial fleet of airplanes every three months!

Why recycle aluminum?

Steve Stiffler — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 05:19:13 +0000

A used aluminum can is recycled and back on the grocery shelf as a new can, in as little as 60 days. That’s closed loop recycling at its finest!

Used aluminum beverage cans are the most recycled item in the U.S., but other types of aluminum, such as siding, gutters, car components, storm window frames, and lawn furniture can also be recycled.

Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a TV for three hours — or the equivalent of a half a gallon of gasoline.

More aluminum goes into beverage cans than any other product.