University of Georgia
Recycling Facts & Links
Recycling Trivia Facts
- Every minute of every day over 120,000 aluminum cans are recycled in the U.S.
- Americans discard enough aluminum to rebuild our entire commercial air fleet every 3 months.
- It's estimated that since 1972 some 13 million tons of aluminum cans have been recycled in the U.S. These 534.7 billion aluminum cans placed end-to-end could stretch to the moon some 170 times.
- According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), aluminum cans represent less than 1% of the nation's solid waste stream.
- Most bottles and jars contain at least 25% recycled glass. Glass never wears out - it can be recycled forever.
- We dump most of the magazines printed in the U.S. each year (about 8 million tons) into landfills. If we recycled just half of them, we could save over 12 million cubic yards of landfill space.
- A quart of motor oil can pollute 250,000 gallons of water and 1 acre of land 1 inch deep.
- Americans throw away enough used motor oil every year to fill 120 supertankers.
- If all used motor oil in the U.S. were recycled, it would result in a saving of 1.3 million barrels of oil per day.
- The U.S. currently imports about 60% of our oil and within 20 years we will be importing 100% at a cost of $150 billion annually.
- The world will need twice the raw materials in 2010 that it does today. Maintaining the same level of oil usage will require discovering as much in the next 10 years as has been found in all of history.
- Americans throw away the equivalent of more than 30 million trees in newsprint each year.
- Americans discard 4 million tons of office paper every year. That's enough to build a 12-foot high wall of paper from New York to California.
- The EPA has found that making paper from recycled materials results in 74% less air pollution and 35% less water pollution. This means that every ton of recycled paper keeps almost 60 pounds of pollutants out of the atmosphere that would have been produced if the paper had been manufactured from virgin resources.
- If the pilgrims had six-packs, we'd still have the plastic rings from them today.
- If you lined up all the polystyrene foam cups made in just one day, they would circle the earth.
- The world's forests are being destroyed at the rate of 1 acre per second. Every 16 minutes, a forest the size of New York's Central Park is destroyed. Every day, a forest the size of Philadelphia (74,000 acres) is lost, and every year, an area the size of Pennsylvania (27 million acres) is ruined.