Recycling: Good For Your Bottom Line and the Environment

• Recycling one aluminum can save enough energy to run a TV for three hours or the equivalent of half a gallon of gasoline.
• During the time it takes you to read this sentence, 50,000 12-oz aluminum cans are made.
• 350,000 aluminum cans are produced every minute.
• If we recycle the aluminum trash that Americans throw away we could rebuild the entire U.S. airline fleet every 3 months.
• We use over 80,000,000,000 aluminum pop cans every year.
• It is estimated that since 1972 some 16 million tons of aluminum cans have been recycled. These 785.6 billion aluminum cans placed end-to-end could stretch to the moon more than 249 times.
• Tin takes 100 years to break down, aluminum takes 500 years.
• The weight of aluminum cans recycled in 1996 was equal to the weight of 14 aircraft carriers 983,709 tons.
• Americans throw away enough steel to continuously supply all nations automakers.
• Recycling steel reduces air pollution, and water pollution and requires 70% less energy than producing it from raw materials.
• A 60-watt light bulb can be run for over a day on the amount of energy saved by recycling 1-lb of steel.
• In one year in the United States recycling of steel saves enough energy to heat and light 18,000,000 homes.
• More than 20,000,000 Hershey’s Kisses are wrapped each day, using 133 square miles of tinfoil. All that foil is recyclable.
• Since 1972, Americans have recycled 37 billion lbs., or 1,099 trillion, aluminum cans, and have earned over $25 billion by recycling aluminum beverage cans.
• Every 3 seconds, a baby is born. At that time, 140 cans are born.