On the
average, the 140 million cars in America are
estimated to travel almost 4 billion miles
in a day, and according to the Department of
Transportation, they use over 200 million
gallons of gasoline doing it.
The public
transportation that we have is a wreck. The
U.S. continues to promote and invest in
private car travel rather than public
transportation.
At Home
Every year we
throw away 24 million tons of leaves and
grass. Leaves alone account for 75% of our
solid waste in the fall.
By turning
down your central heating thermostat one
degree, fuel consumption is cut by as much
as 10%.
Insulating
your attic reduces the amount of energy loss
in most houses by up to 20%.
If every
household in the U.S. replaced just one roll
of 1,000 sheet virgin fiber bathroom tissues
with 100% recycled ones, we could save:
373,000 trees, 1.48 million cubic feet of
landfill space, and 155 million gallons of
water.
One ton of
carbon dioxide that is released in the air
can be prevented by replacing every 75 watt
light bulbs with energy efficient bulbs.
Trash Talk
Every ton of
recycled office paper saves 380 gallons of
oil.
Energy saved
from one recycled aluminum can will operate
a TV set for 3 hours, and is the equivalent
to half a can of gasoline.
Glass produced
from recycled glass instead of raw materials
reduces related air pollution by 20%, and
water pollution by 50%.
Americans use
50 million tons of paper annually --
consuming more than 850 million trees.
Enough glass
was thrown away in 1990 to fill the Twin
Towers (1,350 feet high) of New York's World
Trade Center every two weeks.
Many banks
lent large sums of money to developing
nations. In order to pay those debts plus
interest many nations have turned to the
mining of their natural resources as a
source of financial aid.
Recycling 1
ton of paper saves 17 trees, 2 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 6 months),
3.2 cubic yards of landfill space, and 60
pounds of air pollution.
Americans
throw away enough aluminum to rebuild our
entire commercial fleet of airplanes every 3
months.
About 80% of
what Americans throw away is recyclable, yet
our recycling rate is just 28%.
Recycling
creates 6 times as many jobs as landfilling.
Recycling
glass instead of making it from silica sand
reduces mining waste by 70%, water use by
50%, and air pollution by 20%.
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.
The energy
saved each year by steel recycling is equal
to the electrical power used by 18 million
homes each year - or enough energy to last
Los Angeles residents for eight years.
