Recycling Facts

What to know who the greediest people on the planet are? Or how little the world is recycling in comparison to our consumption? We have gathered a few recycling factoids to emphasize that we, as a species, are consuming ourselves to death. We started with some general information to get you warmed up, followed by recycling facts divided according to material type.

General Factoids

Since 1950, Canadians have consumed as much as all the generations before us combined. (Source: Recycling 101)

In North America we produce enough garbage each day to fill 70,000 garbage trucks. Lined up bumper to bumper, over a year, they would stretch halfway to the moon. (Source: Recycling 101)

On average, every person in the UK throws away their own body weight in rubbish every 7 weeks.
—Recycle Now

To create just one kilogram of consumer goods, manufacturers create five kilograms of waste. (Source: Recycling 101)

Every year UK households throw away the equivalent of 3 ½ million double-decker buses (almost 30 million tonnes), a queue of which would stretch from London to Sydney and back. (Source: Waste Online)

On average, every person in the UK throws away their own body weight in rubbish every 7 weeks. (Source: Recycle Now)

$160 billion: the value of the global recycling industry that employs over 1.5 million people. (Source: Tree Hugger)

Canadians generate about 30 million tonnes (Mt) of waste annually. (Source: Recycling Council British Columbia)

Landfill sites account for about 38% of Canada’s total methane emissions. (Source: Recycling Council British Columbia)

Methane is 20 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. (Source: Recycling Council British Columbia)

Americans' total yearly waste would fill a convoy of garbage trucks long enough to wrap around the earth six times or to reach halfway to the moon. (Source: Kingwood Green)

If you throw away an aluminum can, it wastes as much energy as if you filled that can half full of gasoline and poured it on the ground.
—Kingwood Green

Aluminum & Steel

Every year in the UK residents use 13 billion steel cans that, if placed end-to-end, would stretch to the moon - three times. (Source: Recycle More)

Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to keep a 100-watt bulb burning for almost four hours or run your television for three hours. (Source: Earth911)

If you throw away an aluminum can, it wastes as much energy as if you filled that can half full of gasoline and poured it on the ground. (Source: Kingwood Green)

Glass

1 recycled glass bottle would save enough energy to power a computer for 25 minutes. (Source: Recycling Guide)

Each UK family uses an average of 500 glass bottles and jars annually. (Source: Recycling Guide)

Plastic

Americans throw away 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour. (Source: Do Something)

Plastic bags and other plastic rubbish thrown into the ocean kill as many as 1,000,000 sea creatures every year. (Source: Chemsoc)

Most families throw away about 40kg of plastic a year. (Source: Chemsoc)

The world's annual consumption of plastic materials has increased from around 5 million tons in the 1950s to nearly 100 million tons today. (Source: Recycle Now)

Every year Americans make enough plastic film to shrink-wrap the state of Texas. (Source: Kingwood Green)

Recycling a single plastic bottle can conserve enough energy to light a 60W lightbulb for up to 6 hours. (Source: Recycle More)

Each year, an estimated 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide. That comes out to over one million per minute. (Source: Reusable Bags)

Plastic bags don’t biodegrade, they photodegrade—breaking down into smaller and smaller toxic bits, contaminating soil, waterways and entering the food web when animals accidentally ingest. (Source: Reusable Bags)

It takes an entire forest - over 500,000 trees to supply Americans with their Sunday newspapers every week.
—City of Urbana

Paper

The number of computer printed pages stands at between 2.5 and 2.8 trillion worldwide and is predicted to grow over the next 10 years. (Source: Waste Connect)

Every ton of paper recycled saves more than 3.3 cubic yards of landfill space. (Source: Earth911)

The energy used to produce one day’s junk mail in the United States is enough to heat 250,000 homes. (Source: City of Urbana)

It takes an entire forest - over 500,000 trees to supply Americans with their Sunday newspapers every week. (Source: City of Urbana)

Recycled paper produces 73% less air pollution than if it was made from raw materials. (Source: Recycling Guide)

Americans throw away enough office and writing paper annually to build a wall 12 feet high stretching from Los Angeles to New York City. (Source: Kingwood Green)

Using recycled instead of virgin paper for one print run of the Sunday edition of The New York Times would save 75,000 trees. (Source: Kingwood Green)

100 million trees are cut down every year to make the paper for “junk mail”. One-half of junk mail is thrown away unopened and unread. (Source: Kingwood Green)

Styrofoam

Americans throw away 25 trillion Styrofoam cups that cannot decompose or be recycled. (Source: Do Something)

Resources

Chemsoc: http://www.rsc.org/chemsoc/
City of Urbana: http://www.city.urbana.il.us/Urbana/
Do Something: http://www.dosomething.org
Earth911: http://www.earth911.org/
Recycling 101: http://www.recycling101.ca/
Recycling Council of British Columbia: http://rcbc.bc.ca
Recycle More: http://www.recycle-more.co.uk/
Recycle Now: http://www.recyclenow.com/
Reusable Bags: http://www.reusablebags.com/
Treehugger: http://www.treehugger.com/
Waste Connect: http://www.wasteconnect.co.uk/
Waste Online: http://www.wasteonline.org.uk/

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