Recycling Facts

Every year, Americans throw away enough paper and plastic cups, forks, and spoons to circle the equator 300 times.

Every year, Americans use approximately 1 billion shopping bags, most of which are not recycled.

The oil from just one oil change is enough to contaminate one million gallons of fresh water. Americans who change their own oil throw away 120 million gallons of reusable oil every year.

The average office worker in the US uses 10,000 sheets of copy paper each year. That’s four million tons of copy paper used annually. Office workers in the US generate approximately two pounds of paper and paperboard products every day.

Americans throw away enough office and writing paper annually to build a wall 12 feet high stretching from Los Angeles to New York City.

The estimated 2.6 billion holiday cards sold each year in the U.S. could fill a football field 10 stories high.

Between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, an extra million tons of waste is generated each week.

If we recycled all of our aluminum cans for one year, we could save enough energy to light Washington, D.C. for 3.7 years.

The amount of aluminum currently recycled in 1 year is enough to rebuild our entire airplane commercial fleet every 6 months.

If we recycled all of the cell phones retired each year, we would save enough energy to power 18,500 homes for a year.

Every month Americans throw out enough glass bottles and jars to fill up a giant skyscraper (think: Empire State Building), but all of these jars are recyclable.

Plastic bags and other plastic garbage thrown into the ocean kill as many as 1,000,000 sea creatures a year! Ever heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? It's twice the size of Texas and is floating somewhere between San Francisco and Hawaii. It's also 80 percent plastic, and weighs in at 3.5 million tons.

Five recycled plastic bottles make enough fiberfill to stuff a ski jacket.

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.

More than 20,000,000 Hershey's Kisses are wrapped each day, using 133 square miles of tinfoil. All that foil is recyclable, but not many people realize it.

Americans throw away 25,000,000,000 styrofoam coffee cups every year.

Roughly one third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year, approximately 1.3 billion tons, gets lost or wasted.