Recycling:
What can be recycled , and
what are the benefits of
recycling those products?
Student Name
Class period
Ten mind-blowing recycling
facts!
1. Recycling 1 ton of paper saves: 17 trees (35’ tall), 2
barrels of oil (enough fuel to run the average car for
1,260 miles or from Dallas to Los Angeles), 4,100
kilowatts of energy (enough power for the average
home for 6 months), 3.2 cubic yards of landfill space
(one family-size pickup truck), 60 pounds of air
pollution. Trash to Cash, 1996
2. Americans throw away enough aluminum to
rebuild our entire commercial fleet of airplanes every
3 months. Environmental Defense Fund
3. About 80% of what Americans throw away is
recyclable, yet our recycling rate is just
28%.Environmental Protection Agency
4. Over ½ million trees are saved each year by
recycling paper in Boulder County. Eco-Cycle
5. Recycling creates 6 times as many jobs as
landfilling does. Colorado Recycles
6. Recycling just one aluminum can saves enough
energy to operate a TV for 3 hours. Eco-Cycle
7. If we recycled all of the newspapers printed in
the U.S. on a typical Sunday, we would save 550,000
trees--or about 26 million trees per year. California
Department of Conservation
8. The energy saved each year by steel recycling is
equal to the electrical power used by 18 million
homes each year - or enough energy to last Los
Angeles residents for eight years. Steel Recycling
Institute
9. If every household in the U.S. replaced just one roll
of 1,000 sheet virgin fiber bathroom tissues with
100% recycled ones, we could save: 373,000 trees,
1.48 million cubic feet of landfill space, and 155
million gallons of water. Seventh Generation Co.
10. The U.S. is 5% of the world's population but uses
25% of its natural resources. Environmental
Protection Agency
CANS & BOTTLES
Cans include steel and aluminum cans such as soup,
tuna fish, vegetables, and beverage containers.
Bottles include both glass and plastic. Shampoo,
cooking oil, milk jugs, laundry detergent,
soda and water.
PLASTIC
Recycle any plastic container with a 1 or 2 on the
bottom!
PAPER
Just remember:
”If it tears, it’s recyclable”!!!
• Printer and copier paper of all colors, newspaper,
magazines, cereal boxes, junk mail, file folders,
notebooks and even pizza boxes (minus the left over
pizza!) are all recyclable! Place them in any of the mixed
paper containers in the halls.
• Break down/flatten your boxes and place them next to
the mixed paper containers or place them in the large
green dumpsters outside of your hall.
• Now, let’s take a quiz and test your
knowledge! Take a sheet of paper (REDUCE:
share a sheet with a friend!), and number it
from 1-6.
• Don’t forget to toss the paper in the RECYCLE
bin once you’re done!
Quiz Time!!!
Here is
some more
recycling
motivation
for you…
Stack the nearly 19 billion steel cans recycled in 1996 end to
end, and you would have a line stretching from here to the
moon and back more than three times (based on a can
height of 5 inches).
Every month, we
throw out enough
glass bottles and jars
to fill up a giant
skyscraper.
Glass can be recycled an infinite number
of times.
Recycling one ton of glass
saves the equivalent of 10
gallons of oil.
A modern glass bottle would
take 4000 years or more to
decompose – and even
longer if it’s in the landfill.
The energy saved from recycling one glass bottle
will operate a 100-watt light bulb for four hours.
The amount of
wood and paper
we throw away
each year is
enough to heat
50,000,000
homes for 20
years.
If all our newspaper was recycled, we could
save about 250,000,000 trees each year.
We throw away enough office paper
annually to build a wall twelve feet high
stretching from Los Angeles to New
York City.
Americans use 2,500,000 plastic
bottles every hour. Most of them
are thrown away.
Five 2-liter recycled PET bottles provide enough fiberfill for a ski
jacket.
Every year, we make
enough plastic film to
shrink-wrap the state of
Texas.
Recycling plastic saves twice as much energy as
burning it in an incinerator.
So, find the nearest
recycling bin, and start
recycling today!
Resources
• www.tennesseeamericanrecycling.com
• www.epa.gov
• recyclingfacts.org