PSU Recycles!Recycling Facts

Following are some fun facts about the environmental benefits of recycling.

From the Can Manufacturers Institute

Recycling aluminum can saves 95% of the energy needed to make aluminum from bauxite ore. Energy savings in 1993 alone were enough to light a city the size of Pittsburgh for six years.

Since the early 1970's, Americans have earned $6.4 billion from their recycling of aluminum cans.

From The Earth Works Group's The Recycler's Handbook

  • The average college student produces 640 pounds of solid waste each year, including 500 disposable cups and 320 pounds of paper.
  • Making cans from recycled aluminum cuts related air pollution (for example, sulfur dioxides, which create acid rain) by 95%.
  • Americans throw away enough aluminum every three months to rebuild our entire commercial air fleet.
  • Every day Americans use steel and tin cans equivalent to make a steel pipe running from Los Angeles to New York and back.
  • The average American throws out about 61 lbs. of tin cans every month.
  • In prehistoric times, 60% of the earth's surface was covered by forests - today that amount has been reduced by 30% and is still shrinking.
  • It takes 17 pulpwood market-sized trees to make a ton of paper, or one tree makes about 11,500 pages of 8.5 X 11, 20 pound paper.
  • Each one million of pages of paper not printed saves 85 pulp trees.
  • To produce one trillion pages of paper takes 8.5 million acres of trees, representing an area larger than the country of Belgium or the state of Maryland.
  • It takes 390 gallons of oil to produce a ton of paper.
  • That ton of paper, when disposed of, takes up nearly 8 cubic feet of public landfill space.
  • That public landfill is approximately 36% waste paper products.
  • A ton of paper made from 100% wastepaper, instead of virgin fiber, saves 17 trees, 7,000 gallons of water and 60 pounds of air-polluting effluents, 4100kwh of energy, three cubic yards of landfill space and taxpayer dollars which would otherwise be used for waste-disposal costs.
  • Today, 62 million newspapers will be printed in the U.S., and 44 million will be thrown away. That means the equivalent of about 500,000 trees will be dumped into landfills this week.
  • The largest component of trash in landfills is newspapers (14% by volume).
  • According to Clean Ocean Action, recycling a 36-inch tall stack of newspaper saves the equivalent of about 14% of the average household electric bill.
  • The average person generates 8 pounds of newspaper in a month.
  • One person uses two pine trees worth of paper products each year.
  • Newspaper pulp starts out as 99% water and 1% fiber.
  • Americans throw away the equivalent of more than 30 million trees in newsprint each year.
  • If you recycled the New York Times every day for a year, you would prevent 15 pounds of air pollution. If everyone who subscribes to the New York Times recycled, we'd keep over 6,000 tons of pollution out of the air.
  • Americans discard 4 million tons of office paper every year - enough to build a 12 foot high wall of paper from New York to California.
  • Most bottles and jars contain at least 25% recycled glass.
  • Glass never wears out -- it can be recycled forever.
  • We save over a ton of resources for every ton of glass recycled - 1,330 pounds of sand, 433 pounds of soda ash, 433 pounds of limestone, and 151 pounds of feldspar.
  • In a lifetime, the average American will throw away 600 times his or her adult weight in garbage. This means that each adult will leave a legacy of 90,000 lbs. of trash for his or her children.
  • Enough energy is saved by recycling one aluminum can to run a TV set for three hours or to light one 100 watt bulb for 20 hours.
  • Five recycled plastic bottles make enough fiberfill to stuff a ski jacket.
  • Throwing away an aluminum beverage container wastes as much energy as pouring out a soda can half-filled with gasoline.
  • The energy saved from recycling a glass bottle will light a 100-watt bulb for four hours.
  • Americans comprise about five percent of the world's population, and annually produce 27 percent of the world's garbage.
  • One tree can filter up to 60 pounds of pollutants from the air each year.
  • Recycling one ton of paper saves about 17 trees.
  • It takes a 15-year-old tree to produce 700 grocery bags.