Facts

ALUMINUM CANS

More than 50% of a new aluminum can is made from recycled aluminum.

The 36 billion aluminum cans landfilled last year had a scrap value of more than $600 million.

GLASS

The Glass Recycling Process:
1. glass is sorted by colors
2. glass is taken to manufacturing plant and crushed into cullets
3. cullets are crushed, sorted, and cleaned to mix with raw materials
4. the recycled cullet is melted and molded into new glass products

Fun facts:
-making a bottle out of recycled glass uses 40% less energy
-22% of all glass is made from recycled glass
-7% of all waste is glass
-61% of US produced glass is clear, 31% amber, 7% green, 1% blue
-US produced 12.5 million tons of glass and recycles 3.7 million annually
-Americans annually dispose of over 28 million glass bottles
-every two weeks, americans dispose of enough glass to fill up both tower of WTC
-glass recycling employs over 30,000 workers in 76 plants in 25 states

Most glass 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.

If all the glass bottles and jars collected through recycling in the U.S. in 94 were laid end to end.

PLASTIC

Americans go through 2.5 million plastic bottles every year.

26 recycled PET bottles equals a polyester suit. 5 recycled PET bottles make enough fiberfill to stuff a ski jacket.

If every American household recycled just one out of every ten HDPE bottles they used, we’d keep 200 million pounds of the plastic out of landfills every year.
PAPER

1 ton of 100% virgin (non-recycled) newsprint uses 12 trees

10 reams of 100% virgin copier paper uses .6 trees

1 tree makes 16.67 reams of copy paper or 8,333.3 sheets

1 ream (500 sheets) uses 6% of a tree (and those add up quickly!)

At least 38.9% of the U.S. waste stream is paper.

Americans throw away 44 million newspapers everyday. That’s the same as dumping 500,000 trees into landfills each week.

If every household reused a paper grocery bag for one shopping trip, about 60,000 trees would be saved.

We save 17 trees for each ton of recycled newspaper.

Recycling a 36-newspaper stack saves the equivalent of about 14% of the average household electric bill.

Making one ton of recycled paper uses only about 60% of the energy needed to make a tone of virgin paper.

One person uses two pine trees worth of paper products every year.
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.

American’s throw out about 85% of the office paper we use.

Americans use 50 million tons of paper annually–which means we consume more than 850 million trees. That means the average American uses about 580 pounds of paper each year.

Every ton of recycled office paper saves 380 gallons of oil.

Each year, 27 million acres of tropical rainforests are destroyed. That’s an area the size of Ohio, and translates to 74,000 acres per day…3,000 acres per hour…50 acres per minute.

7 Recycling Numbers
#
Types:
Description:
1 Polyethylene Terephthalate (PETE) Common uses: 2 liter soda bottles, cooking oil bottles, peanut butter jars. This is the most widely recycled plastic and often has redemption value under the California.
2 High Density Polyethylene (HDPE) Common uses: detergent bottles, milk jugs.
3 Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) Common uses: plastic pipes, outdoor furniture, shrink wrap, water bottles, salad dressing and liquid detergent containers. Please note that plastic bags are not accepted for recycling curbside. However, Safeway Stores, Alberton’s Food and Drug, Raley’s, Ralphs Food Companies, and G&G Supermarkets accept plastic bags for recycling. Please remove food waste and receipts.
4 Low Density Polyethylene (LDPE) Common uses: dry cleaning bags, produce bags, trash can liners, food storage containers. Safeway Stores and Lucky Food Centers accept HDPE (#2) and LDPE (#4) plastic bags for recycling.
5 Polypropylene (PP) Common uses: bottle caps, drinking straws. Recycling centers almost never take #5 plastic.
6 Polystyrene (PS) Common uses: packaging pellets or “Styrofoam peanuts,” cups, plastic tableware, meat trays, to-go “clam shell” containers. Many shipping/packaging stores will accept polystyrene peanuts and other packaging materials for reuse. Cups, meat trays, and other containers that have come in contact with food are more difficult to recycle.
7 Other Common uses: certain kinds of food containers and Tupperware. This plastic category, as its name of “other” implies, is any plastic other than the named #1-#6 plastic types. These containers can be any of the several different types of plastic polymers. Recycling centers cannot recycle plastic #7. Look for alternatives.