Bottle and can wasting and littering has more than doubled since 1990, from 71 billion units in
1990 to over 141 billion units in 2006. It’s still true that only one in three beverage containers
are recycled in the U.S. each year. Of the containers that are recycled, nearly half of them (48%)
come for the 11 states that have container deposit laws. The Institute will be updating the 2006 report soon. from the Container Recycling Institute
Regarding Recycling and Climate Change: In one year alone, if Americans were to recycle 85 percent of all the
aluminum, steel, PET and HDPE plastic, and glass beverage bottles sold, [it would be] equivalent to taking an
additional 2.3 million cars off the road. From an energy perspective, recycling more beverage containers
would save the energy equivalent contained in nearly 2 billion gallons of gasoline. Compare that to this
year’s wildly popular “Cash for Clunkers” program, which will only save about 198 million gallons of gasoline
a year, at a cost to the American taxpayers of $3 billion. In other words, a national container deposit law
could have ten times the energy-savings impact of the Cash for Clunkers program, and uses no taxpayer money at all.
Recycling aluminum cans in the United States in 1996 saved enough
energy to power a city the size of Philadelphia for one year. from World Watch Institute, December 1998
Laid end-to-end, the 50.7 billion cans wasted in 2001 would
encircle the Earth 153 times.
Between 1990 and 2000, Americans wasted 7.1 million tons of
cans: enough to manufacture 316,000 Boeing 737 airplanes. from Container Recycling Institute,
Jennifer Gitlitz, "Trashed Cans: The Global Environmental Impacts of
Aluminum Can Wasting in America," 2002
Recycling one ton of aluminum is equivalent to not releasing
13 tons of carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) into the air. from Oregon Department of Environmental
Quality, "Rethinking Recycling: An Oregon Waste Reduction Curriculum," 2001
It takes approximately one million years for a glass bottle
to break down at the landfill. from Environmental Protection Agency, 2002
2001 recovery rates for glass in other countries: Austria: 83
percent, Sweden: 84 percent, Germany: 87 percent, Belgium and
Norway: 88 percent, Finland: 91 percent, and Switzerland: 92 percent. from European Glass Container Federation
(FEVE), February 2003
US glass recovery rate for 2000 was just more than 26 percent. from Environmental Protection Agency, "Municipal Solid Waste
in the United States: 2000 Facts and Figures," 2002
Used glass or "cullet" melts at a lower temperature than raw
materials, reducing the demand for energy and lowering production
costs. from Clean Washington Center, "Saving Energy with Cullet
and Preheating," November 1996
The energy saved from recycling one wine bottle will operate
a 100-watt light bulb for three hours. from Calculation, courtesy of Robert Kirby, manager
for R & D, Sandhill Industries, June 2003
If all our newspaper was recycled, we could save about 250,000,000
trees each year! Each ton 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
air pollution! That's because one tree can filter up to
60 pounds of pollutants from the air each year.
Americans throw away enough office and writing paper each year
to build a wall twelve-feet high stretching from New York City
to Los Angeles.
For all the world to live as an American or Canadian, we would
need two more earths to satisfy everyone, three more if population
should double, and 12 earths if worldwide standards of living
should double during the next 40 years. from Natural Capitalism; Paul Hawken, Amory and L.
Hunter, Lovin Little Brown & Co., September 1999
The area of forest required to provide for each U.S. citizen’s
annual wood needs is 1.7 acres, compared to the global average
of 0.7 acres. from Forest Products Journal, pp. 10-21, January 2001
Incinerating 10,000 tons of waste creates one job; landfilling
10,000 tons of waste creates six jobs; recycling 10,000 tons of
waste creates 36 jobs. from Environmental Protection Agency, "Resource Conservation
Challenge: Campaigning Against Waste," EPA 530-F-02-033, 2002
In 2000, the national recycling rate of 30 percent saved the
equivalent of more than five billion gallons of gasoline, reducing
dependence on foreign oil by 114 million barrels. from Environmental Protection Agency, "Resource Conservation
Challenge: Campaigning Against Waste," EPA 530-F-02-033, 2002
By recycling all of its paper, plastic, and corrugated waste
generated in a year, an office building of 7,000 workers could
reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 1,200 metric tons of carbon
equivalent. This is equivalent to taking 900 cars off the road
in one year. from Environmental Protection Agency, "Solid Waste and
Emergency Response," EPA 530-F-02-034, 2002
And for a more in-depth analysis of the value of recycling,
click
here to read an article (PDF) from Waste Management World
(article opens in new window). And hey, a dump site we cleaned
up is pictured in the article!
