How much waste is your fault?
Americans create and toss out an alarming amount of waste each year. According to the Clean Air Council…
- Each day we fill up around 63,000 garbage trucks which means in a year we toss so much trash that if we piled it all up in garbage trucks it would form a line of trucks that will stretch from the earth, halfway to the moon.
- A huge amount of waste generated in the U.S. is packaging (one-third).
- We throw away 570 diapers per second. That’s insane.
- Each hour we toss (not recycle) 2.5 million plastic bottles.
- We make enough plastic film to shrink-wrap the state of Texas. Which is a funny thought to picture a shrink-wrapped state, but not so hilarious to the planet.
- If we kept all the aluminum cans that we actually toss out we could rebuild our commercial air fleet every three months.
- Throwing away one aluminum can wastes as much energy as if that can were 1/2 full of gasoline.
- Four million tons of extra wrapping paper and shopping bag waste is created during each holiday season.
- Americans receive almost 4 million tons of junk mail every year. Most of it winds up in landfills.
- We trash enough office paper annually to build a 12-foot wall from Los Angeles to New York City.
- The paper & plastic cups, forks and spoons we throw away every year could circle the equator 300 times.
- The average American office worker goes through around 500 disposable cups every year.
- We’ve got so much hazardous waste being generated that in just one year we could take that waste and fill the New Orleans Superdome 1,500 times over.
- Forty-three thousand tons of food is thrown out each day.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. We create so much waste that it’s a surprise to me that we still fit on the darn planet. Paper products alone are so used and abused that it’s been noted that the average American kills 7 trees a year due to paper product use. 7!
What to do – it’s not that hard to keep things a little cleaner. In fact you can boil it down to three easy points.
- Buy less junk.
- Recycle.
- Use reusable products over disposables.
Even if you do just one of the above you’ll make a huge dent in your own trash impact and if you do all three it’s even more awesome. It’s not so hard to make a difference and you sure don’t want to be part of the above equations.
[image via stock.xchng]
Post from: Blisstree