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RECYCLING FACTS

• Americans use 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour! Most of them are thrown away!
• Recycling plastic saves twice as much energy as burning it in an incinerator.
• Americans throw away 25,000,000,000 Styrofoam coffee cups every year.
• Over 1,600 businesses are involved in recycling post-consumer plastics.
• PET plastic can be recycled into: clothing, fiberfill for sleeping bags, toys, stuffed animals, rulers and more.
• Only around 27% of plastic bottles are recycled.
• 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.
• When the small particles from photodegraded plastic bags get into the water, they are ingested by filter feeding marine animals. Biotoxins like PCBs that are in the particles are then passed up the food chain, including up to humans.
• It has been estimated that recycling, re-use, and composting create six to ten times as many jobs as waste incineration and landfills.
• Recycling saves 3 to 5 times the energy generated by waste-to-energy plants, even without counting the wasted energy in the burned materials.
• 13.3% of plastic packaging was recycled in 2008.
• The recycling rate of 32.5 percent in 2006 saved the carbon emission equivalent of taking 39.4 million cars off the road, and the energy equivalent of 6.8 million households’ annual energy consumption, or 222.1 million barrels of oil.
• At least 90 percent of the price of a bottle of water is for things other than the water itself, like bottling, packaging, shipping and marketing.
• 827,000 to 1.3 million tons of plastic PET water bottles were produced in the U.S. in 2006, requiring the energy equivalent of 50 million barrels of oil. 76.5 percent of these bottles ended up in landfills.
• Because plastic water bottles are shielded from sunlight in landfills, they will not decompose for thousands of years.
• Recycling one ton of plastic saves the equivalent of 1,000–2,000 gallons of gasoline.
• 66% of energy is saved when producing new plastic products from recycled materials instead of raw (virgin) materials.
• For every 1 ton of plastic that is recycled we save the equivalent of 2 people’s energy use for 1 year, the amount of water used by 1 person in 2 month’s time and almost 2000 pounds of oil.
• A survey was done and 9 out of 10 people surveyed said they would recycle more if it was easier. Odd as it seems there are many people who do not realize that plastic bottles our water comes in is made out of oil. This is the same oil that is used to make gasoline. It's the same oil that is in such high demand and is not an unlimited resource.