Environment

Recycle. Get More Money. Shop Sustainably.
Be Good To Your Future.

• Land-filling is not sustainable; eventually we are going to run out of space.
• Natural resources are finite: manufacturers enjoy substantial cost savings by incorporating recycled content into new products.
• Mining of virgin resources like metals and petroleum for plastics is more expensive and more environmentally detrimental than recycling.
• One Earth diverges from conventional "environmentalist" approaches: instead of demonizing consumption, we embrace consumerism and technology as the core of our unprecedented quality of life. One Earth makes the responsible retirement of used goods an integrated part of the process of procuring new goods and services.

Aluminum 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!
• 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.
• Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a TV for three hours — or the equivalent of a half a gallon of gasoline.
• More aluminum goes into beverage cans than any other product.
• Once an aluminum can is recycled, it can be part of a new can within six weeks.
• Because so many of them are recycled, aluminum cans account for less than 1% of the total U.S. waste stream, according to EPA estimates.
• An aluminum can that is thrown away will still be a can 500 years from now!
• 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.
• At one time, aluminum was more valuable than gold!
• A 60-watt light bulb can be run for over a day on the amount of energy saved by recycling 1 pound of steel. In one year in the United States, the recycling of steel saves enough energy to heat and light 18,000,000 homes!

Plastic Recycling Facts

• 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!
• Americans throw away 25,000,000 plastic beverage bottles every hour!
• Recycling plastic saves twice as much energy as burning it in an incinerator.
• American throw away 25,000,000,000 Styrofoam coffee cups every year.

Glass Recycling Facts

• 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.
• Mining and transporting raw materials for glass produces about 385 pounds of waste for every ton of glass that is made. If recycled glass is substituted for half of the raw materials, the waste is cut by more than 80%.

Solid Waste and Landfills

• About one-third of an average dump is made up of packaging material!
• Every year, each American throws out about 1,200 pounds of organic garbage that can be composted.
• The U.S. is the #1 trash-producing country in the world at 1,609 pounds per person per year. This means that 5% of the world’s people generate 40% of the world’s waste.
• The highest point in Ohio is "Mount Rumpke," which is actually a mountain of trash at the Rumpke sanitary landfill!
• The US population discards each year 16,000,000,000 diapers, 1,600,000,000 pens, 2,000,000,000 razor blades, 220,000,000 car tires, and enough aluminum to rebuild the US commercial air fleet four times over.
• Out of ever $10 spent buying things, $1 (10%) goes for packaging that is thrown away. Packaging represents about 65% of household trash.
• On average, it costs $30 per ton to recycle trash, $50 to send it to the landfill, and $65 to $75 to incinerate it.

Miscellaneous Recycling Facts

• More than 20,000,000 Hershey’s Kisses are wrapped each day, using 133 square miles of aluminum foil. All that foil is recyclable, but not many people realize it.
• Rainforests are being cut down at the rate of 100 acres per minute!
• A single quart of motor oil, if disposed of improperly, can contaminate up to 2,000,000 gallons of fresh water.
• Motor oil never wears out, it just gets dirty. Oil can be recycled, re-refined and used again, reducing our reliance on imported oil.
• On average, each one of us produces 4.4 pounds of solid waste each day. This adds up to almost a ton of trash per person, per year.
• A typical family consumes 182 gallons of soda, 29 gallons of juice, 104 gallons of milk, and 26 gallons of bottled water a year. That’s a lot of containers — make sure they’re recycled!

These recycling facts have been compiled from various sources including the National Recycling Coalition, the Environmental Protection Agency, and Earth911.org.