Recycling has become much more popular and increasingly more necessary in the past few decades.So much is known about recyclable items and recycling processes, but there are some little-known facts and statistics surrounding recycling. They range from interesting, to surprising, to down right alarming.
- Hershey Chocolate Company manufactures 20,000,000 Hershey’s kisses every day, using about 133 square miles of aluminum to wrap the chocolates. This aluminum wrapping is recyclable, but most of it is thrown away instead of recycled.
- Americans throw away enough aluminum every month to rebuild our entire commercial air fleet.
- Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a 100 watt light bulb for 20 hours, a computer for 3 hours, and a TV for 2 hours.
- Aluminum cans can be recycled and reused within 60 days.
- Americans throw out enough iron and steel to continuously supply all the auto makers in the entire nation.
- More than 30 million trees are cut down to produce a year’s supply of newspapers.
- Enough plastic bottles are thrown away in the United States each year to circle the Earth four times.
- An estimated 87% of Americans have access to curbside or dropoff recycling programs.
- It takes 17 average-sized trees to make one ton of paper.
- It takes between 400 and 500 years for a Styrofoam cup to decompose.
- It takes an orange peel six months to decompose.
- Americans use 100 million steel cans and 200 million aluminum beverage cans every day.
- Five recycled two-liter soda bottles can be used to make one square foot of carpet.
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