If you haven’t woken up to notice already, the Earth isn’t doing too well. Extreme temperatures are being experienced across the planet, and we are directly responsible for it. If we are to save our coming generations from the deadly wrath of nature, we need to start acting, now! Recycling is one such method to give back to nature. Here are 21 facts on recycling with jaw-dropping images of global warming that will definitely make you sit up and take notice.
1. Recycling one ton of paper saves 682.5 gallons of oil, 7,000 gallons of water and 3.3 cubic yards of landfill space.
2. 27,000 trees are felled each day to manufacture toilet paper.
3. 95% of all data in the world is still stored on paper. Most of it is never looked at again.
4. Recycling a single plastic bottle can conserve enough energy to light a 60 W bulb for up to 6 hours.
5. Americans throw away 2.5 million plastic bottles per hour. Each one takes 500 years to decompose. India is substantially higher in population, so you can imagine the waste created here. Scary.
6. Thousands of marine creatures die by mistakenly swallowing plastic bags that resemble jellyfish.
7. Each year, we throw out enough soda cans and bottles to reach the moon and back 20 times.
8. Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to listen to a full album on your iPod.
9. Recycling one ton of plastic can save up to 2,000 gallons of gasoline.
10. Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a TV for 2 hours
11. 14 billion pounds of garbage are dumped into the ocean every year. Most of it is plastic.
12. Recycling one ton of paper saves 17 trees.
13. In Finland, 9 out of 10 plastic bottles are returned for recycling and almost 100% of glass bottles are also recycled.
14. The average person generates over 4 pounds of trash every day and about 1.5 tons of solid waste per year.
15. We generate 21.5 million tons of food waste each year. If we composted that food, it would reduce the same amount of greenhouse gas as taking 2 million cars off the road.
16. In 2010, paper recycling had increased over 89% since 1990.
17. A glass container can go from a recycling bin to a store shelf in as few as 30 days.
18. One drip one second from a leaky faucet wastes 540 gallons of water a year.
19. It takes a 15-year-old tree to produce 700 grocery bags.
20. Disposable diapers last centuries in landfills. An average baby will go through 8,000 of them!
21. It takes between 400 and 500 years for a Styrofoam cup to decompose. It takes an orange peel six months to decompose.
If this doesn’t get you to consciously think about our environment, and start acting towards saving it, I don’t know what will.
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