Aluminum Recycling: 

• Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a TV for three hours -- or the equivalent of a half a gallon of gasoline.
• We use over 80,000,000,000 aluminum soda cans every year.
• here is no limit to the amount of times an aluminum can be recycled.
• A 60-watt light bulb can be run for over a day on the amount of energy saved by recycling 1 pound of steel. In one year in the United States, the recycling of steel saves enough energy to heat and light 18,000,000 homes!

Plastic Recycling:

• Americans use 2,500,000 plastic bottles every hour! Most of them are thrown away!
• Plastic bags and other plastic garbage thrown into the ocean kill as many as 1,000,000 sea creatures every year!
• 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.

Paper Recycling:

• To produce each week's Sunday newspapers, 500,000 trees must be cut down.
• Recycling a single run of the Sunday New York Times would save 75,000 trees.
• If all our newspaper was recycled, we could save about 250,000,000 trees each year!
• If every American recycled just one-tenth of their newspapers, we would save about 25,000,000 trees a year.
• If you had a 15-year-old tree and made it into paper grocery bags, you'd get about 700 of them. A busy supermarket could use all of them in under an hour! This means in one year, one supermarket can go through over 6 million paper bags! Imagine how many supermarkets there are just in the United States!!!
• The average American uses seven trees a year in paper, wood, and other products made from trees. This amounts to about 2,000,000,000 trees per year!
• The amount of wood and paper we throw away each year is enough to heat 50,000,000 homes for 20 years.
• Approximately 1 billion trees worth of paper are thrown away every year in the U.S.
• Each ton (2000 pounds) of recycled paper can save 17 trees, 380 gallons of oil, three cubic yards of landfill space, 4000 kilowatts of energy, and 7000 gallons of water. This represents a 64% energy savings, a 58% water savings, and 60 pounds less of air pollution!
• The 17 trees saved (above) can absorb a total of 250 pounds of carbon dioxide from the air each year. Burning that same ton of paper would create 1500 pounds of carbon dioxide.

Miscellaneous Recycling:

• The US population discards each year 16,000,000,000 diapers, 1,600,000,000 pens, 2,000,000,000 razor blades, 220,000,000 car tires, and enough aluminum to rebuild the US commercial air fleet four times over.
• On average, it costs $30 per ton to recycle trash, $50 to send it to the landfill, and $65 to $75 to incinerate it.
• An estimated 80,000,000 Hershey's Kisses are wrapped each day, using enough aluminum foil to cover over 50 acres of space -- that's almost 40 football fields. All that foil is recyclable, but not many people realize it.
• A single quart of motor oil, if disposed of improperly, can contaminate up to 2,000,000 gallons of fresh water.
• A typical family consumes 182 gallons of soda, 29 gallons of juice, 104 gallons of milk, and 26 gallons of bottled water a year. That's a lot of containers -- make sure they're recycled!