 | Brian Shaw is the owner/operator of Action Hauling. Brian runs the company with the help of his fiance Michelle. Their goal is to help individuals and business’ by cleaning up and properly disposing of junk, debris, and rubbish. You can contact Brian by phone at 316-210-6309. |
Environment
2009-09-01 14:37:00
The truth about trash
Answer: The US population abandons each year well-over 15,000,000,000 diapers, 1,600,000,000 pens, 2,000,000,000 razor blades and 220,000,000 car tires. The United States is the #1 trash-producing country in the world, at just under 2,000 pounds per person per year. The amount of composition we throw away each year is enough to heat 50,000,000 homes for over 15 years! Approximately 1 billion trees worth of paper is thrown away every year in the U.S. Americans use 85,000,000 tons of paper a year; that’s about 700 pounds per person. And the average household throws away 13,000 separate pieces of paper each year. Most are items like parcels, sacks and junk mail! If all of our newspapers were recycled, we could save over 225,000,000 trees each year! To produce each week’s Sunday newspapers, 500,000 trees must be cut down. In 2007, the amount of paper recovered for recycling averaged 360 pounds for every person in the United States. Every ton of paper recycled saves more than 3.3 cubic yards of landfill space. By 2012, the paper industry’s goal is to recover 60 percent of all the paper Americans consume for recycling, which is approximately 60 million tons of paper.
A couple of other interesting facts: Americans use 2,500,000 plastic bottles every hour! And 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! Every month, we throw out enough glass bottles and jars to fill up a giant skyscraper. All of these jars are recyclable!
This one I found most interesting, 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.
Question: When I run to the grocery store for a few quick purchases, should I choose paper or plastic?
Answer: Neither, let’s say you had a tree between 15 and 20 years old and you made it into paper grocery bags; you’d get about 700 of them. Well a retail food store could use all of them in just under 60 minutes! This means that in one year, a supermarket could go through 60,500,000 paper bags!! You would be better off buying a canvas grocery bag for all of your “lighter” purchases!
