Weekly Recycling PLUS Fun Recycling Facts and Tips!
Happy New Year, everyone! Good news for everyone- Mayor Michael Nutter announced this week that recycling will now be picked up every week! I know that this won’t tickle everyone’s fancy as much as it does mine, but you can all admit it will simplify the process! And for those of you that do little or no recycling, weekly pick-up combined with a change earlier in 2008 that allows single stream (we can put glass, plastic, aluminum, and paper all in one container), there is no longer an excuse. Get to it!
I know that the bi-weekly recycling was tough in my household. There are three adults in my home that, let’s say, appreciate your occasional glass of wine or bottle of beer. That’s not going to change, but the recycling buckets were overflowing and I have had to purchase additional containers. I can only imagine what my trash men think of us! I have made some positive changes, though. First of all, when purchasing products such as detergents, cheap wine, and cat litter, buy the largest container available. It saves money and reduces waste. If you buy sodas or beer, buy in cans when available as cans are easier to recycle than glass or plastic, and can be recycled and infinite amount of times. Remember you can recycle most bottles for shampoo, dish washer and laundry detergent, toilet paper and paper towel rolls, junk mail, and more.
Here are some fun recycling facts:
- A used aluminum can is recycled and back on the grocery shelf as a new can, in as little as 60 days. That’s closed loop recycling at its finest!
- Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a TV for three hours — or the equivalent of a half a gallon of gasoline.
- Used aluminum beverage cans are the most recycled item in the U.S., but other types of aluminum, such as siding, gutters, car components, storm window frames, and lawn furniture can also be recycled.
- More aluminum goes into beverage cans than any other product.
- There is no limit to the amount of times an aluminum can be recycled.
- We use over 80,000,000,000 aluminum soda cans every year.
- To produce each week’s Sunday newspapers, 500,000 trees must be cut down
- If all our newspaper was recycled, we could save about 250,000,000 trees each year!
- The amount of wood and paper we throw away each year is enough to heat 50,000,000 homes for 20 years.
- Each ton (2000 pounds) of recycled paper can save 17 trees, 380 gallons of oil, three cubic yards of landfill space, 4000 kilowatts of energy, and 7000 gallons of water. This represents a 64% energy savings, a 58% water savings, and 60 pounds less of air pollution!
- The 17 trees saved (above) can absorb a total of 250 pounds of carbon dioxide from the air each year. Burning that same ton of paper would create 1500 pounds of carbon dioxide.
- Americans use 2,500,000 plastic bottles every hour! Most of them are thrown away!
- Plastic bags and other plastic garbage thrown into the ocean kill as many as 1,000,000 sea creatures every year!
- American throw away 25,000,000,000 Styrofoam coffee cups every year.
- Every month, we throw out enough glass bottles and jars to fill up a giant skyscraper. All of these jars are recyclable!
- The energy saved from recycling one glass bottle can run a 100-watt light bulb for four hours. It also causes 20% less air pollution and 50% less water pollution than when a new bottle is made from raw materials.
- A modern glass bottle would take 4000 years or more to decompose, and even longer if it’s in the landfill.
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