RECYCLING & WASTE FACTS
Recycling Terms
- Post-consumer: a product made from recycled materials collected from consumers in the marketplace.
- Pre-consumer or Post-industrial: a product containing recycled materials from the factory or industrial setting as a byproduct of manufacturing.
Recycling creates
- 1.1 million U.S. jobs, $236 billion in gross annual sales and $37 billion in annual payrolls.
- Four jobs for every one job created in the waste management and disposal industries
Each ton (2,000 pounds) of recycled paper can save 17 trees, 380 gallons of oil, three cubic yards of landfill space, 4,000 kilowatts of energy, and 7,000 gallons of water. This represents a 64% energy savings, a 58% water savings, and 60 pounds less of air pollution.
Well-run recycling programs cost less to operate than waste collection, landfilling, and incineration.
Thousands of U.S. companies have saved millions of dollars through their voluntary recycling programs. They wouldn't recycle if it didn't make economic sense.
If you had a 15-year-old tree and made it into paper grocery bags, you'd get about 700 of them. A supermarket could use all of them in under one hour. This means in one year, one supermarket goes through 60,500,000 paper bags. Now, just imagine how many supermarkets there are in the U.S….
Industrial balers are machines that consist of a large metal chamber that is designed to hold waste material and a hydraulic or pneumatic press that bales the waste. Industrial balers are made specifically for this task. Balers can take just about any type of material, compress it, shear it, and then bind it for storage, shipping or recycling.
The average household throws away 13,000 separate pieces of paper each year. Most is packaging and junk mail.
The U.S. is the #1 trash-producing country in the world at 1,609 pounds per person per year. This means that 5% of the world's people generate 40% of the world's waste.
On average, each one of us produces 4.4 pounds of solid waste each day. This adds up to almost a ton of trash per person, per year.
Thirty-two truckloads of waste are created for every truckload of goods produced in the U.S.