Recycling Facts
Below is information to demonstrate just how important it is to recycle!

• New Mexico has a 16.2% recycling rate. (NM Environment Dept: Solid Waste Bureau 2010)

• Nationally, Americans recycle 34% of discarded materials. (EPA)

• Nearly 1.5 million more recycling jobs would be created if the national recycling rate reached 75%, according to a 2011 report by Tellus Institute and Sound Resource management

• Nationally, Americans generated 4.6 pounds of garbage per day per person. (EPA)

• 2006 U.S. Waste Breaks Down Into Paper 33.9%, Yard Trimmings 12.9%, Food Scraps 12.4%, Plastics 11.7%, Metals 7.6%, Rubber/Leather/Textiles 7.3%, Glass 5.3%, Wood 5.5%, Other 3.3% (EPA)

• Recycling 1 ton of paper saves 17 trees, 2 barrels of oil (average car can go 1,260 miles), 4,100 kilowatts of energy (average home power use for 6 months), 3.2 cubic yards of landfill space, and 60 pounds of air pollution.

• Recycling 1 aluminum can = 3 hours of energy to power a TV (Can Manufacturers Institute)

• Recycling a 3 foot high stack of newspaper – 1 tree preserved (American Forestry & Paper Products)

• Recycling 5 plastic bottles = 1 XL T-shirt or 1 sq. foot of carpet (American Chemistry Council: Plastics Division)

• Construction and Demolition waste accounts for 19% of New Mexico’s landfill discards (NM Environment Dept: Solid Waste Bureau, 2008)

• Americans throw away enough aluminum to rebuild our entire commercial fleet of airplanes every 3 months. (Environmental Defense Fund)

• About 80% of what Americans throw away is recyclable. (EPA)

• Recycling creates 5 times on average as many jobs as landfilling. (EPA)

• Recycling glass instead of making it from silica sand reduces mining waste by 70%, water use by 50%, and air pollution by 20%. (Environmental Defense Fund)

• If we recycled all of the newspapers printed in the U.S. on a typical Sunday, we would save 550,000 trees--or about 26 million trees per year. (California Department of Conservation)

• The energy saved each year by steel recycling is equal to the electrical power used by 18 million homes each year. (Steel Recycling Institute)

• If every U.S. household replaced one roll of 1,000 sheet virgin fiber bathroom tissues with 100% recycled ones, we could save: 373,000 trees and 155 million gallons of water. (Seventh Generation Co.)

• The U.S. is 5% of the world's population but uses 25% of its natural resources. (EPA)

• Americans discard 35 billion aluminum cans annually. If all were recycled, we would save an amount of energy equivalent to 150 Exxon Valdez oil spills annually. (State of California)

• Aluminum can recycling saves 95% of the energy needed to make aluminum from bauxite ore. (Can Manufacturers Institute)

• In test corn plots in Minnesota, fields treated with both compost and fertilizer achieved yields 17% higher than fields spread with only commercial fertilizer. (R.W. Beck and Associates.)

• One pound of red worms can consume half a pound of food waste every day. (Compost! A Teacher’s Guide)

• A quart of motor oil can pollute 250,000 gallons of water. (EarthWorks Group)

• Do-it-yourself oil changes in the US produce at least 200 million gallons of used oil each year. More than half of it is wasted. (CT Dept of Environmental Protection.)

• Americans throw away the equivalent of more than 30 million trees in newsprint each year. (EarthWorks Group)

• Recycling half the world’s paper would free 20 million acres of forest land. (EarthWorks Group)

• If you stacked up all the paper an average American uses in a year, the piles would be as tall as a two-story house. (EarthWorks Group)

• The EPA has found that making paper from recycled materials results in 74% less air pollution and 35% less water pollution.

• Plastics are made from petroleum - a limited nonrenewable resource. It is predicted that by the year 2040, the Earth‘s usable petroleum reserves will have been depleted. (State of California)

• It takes 1,050 recycled milk jugs to make a 6-foot plastic park bench. (EarthWorks Group)

• If you lined up all the polystyrene foam cups made in just one day, they would circle the earth. (EarthWorks Group)

• Plastics are the fastest growing share of the US wastestream, accounting for 5% of household throwaways. Every American uses almost 200 pounds of plastic in a year — 60 pounds of it for packaging. (San Diego County)

• When buried, some plastic materials may last for 700 years. Manufacturers add inhibitors that resist the decomposition process necessary to break down the plastic. (San Diego County)

• Americans use 4 million plastic bottles every hour — yet only one bottle out of four is recycled. (EarthWorks Press)

• Every year enough energy is saved by recycling steel to supply Los Angeles with nearly a decade’s worth of electricity. (EarthWorks Group)

• Making tin cans from recycled steel takes only one-fourth of the energy needed to make them from new steel and creates only one-fourth of the water and air pollution created by making cans from new steel. (EarthWorks Press)

• Americans use 100 million steel cans a day. We throw away enough steel every year to build all the new cars made in America. (EarthWorks Press)

• Americans throw away enough aluminum to rebuild the entire American air fleet 71 times, enough steel to reconstruct Manhattan and enough wood to heat 5 million homes for 200 years. (San Diego County)

• In the United States, we throw away enough garbage per day to fill 63,000 garbage trucks. Annually we fill up enough garbage trucks to form a line that would stretch from the earth halfway to the moon. (Indiana Department of Education)

• In a lifetime, the average American will throw away 600 times his or her adult weight in garbage. If you add it up, this means that a 150 pound adult will leave a legacy of 90,000 of trash. (EarthWorks Group)

• For every $1000 of fast food sales, 200 pounds of trash is created. (San Diego County)

• An average American uses eight times the natural resources of the average world citizen and produces five times the air pollution of the average world citizen. (WRAP)

• Sixty percent of the world’s lead supply comes from recycled car batteries. Virtually 100% of the car batteries returned to gas stations and battery dealerships get recycled. (EarthWorks Group)