MAT095
Recycling Fun Facts
Source - http://www.epa.gov/epaoswer/non-hw/muncpl/reduce.htm#recycle
Recycling turns materials that would otherwise become waste into valuable resources. In addition, it generates a host of environmental, financial, and social benefits. Materials like glass, metal, plastics, and paper are collected, separated and sent to facilities that can process them into new materials or products.
Benefits of Recycling
· Conserves resources for our children's future.
· Prevents emissions of many greenhouse gases and water pollutants.
· Saves energy.
· Supplies valuable raw materials to industry.
· Creates jobs.
· Stimulates the development of greener technologies.
· Reduces the need for new landfills and incinerators.
Facts -
1. 350,000 aluminum cans are produced every minute in the United States.
2. We use over 80,000,000,000 aluminum pop cans every year.
3. Every ton of recycled steel saves 2,500 pounds of iron ore, 1,000 of coal, and 40 pounds of limestone.
4. To produce each week's Sunday newspapers, 500,000 trees must be cut down.
5. 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 an hour.
6. 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!
7. The average household throws away 13,000 separate pieces of paper each year. Most is packaging and junk mail.
8. A family of four consumes 182 gallons of pop, 29 gallons of juice, 104 gallons of milk, and 26 gallons of bottled water a year. That's a lot of containers.
9. The chart below shows the composition of an average garbage dump. Notice how much of it is recyclable.
10.
11.
Answer the following questions based on the information given above.
1. How many aluminum cans are produced every day and every year in the United States?
2. How many aluminum pop cans do we use every day?
3. What is the ratio of aluminum cans we use to aluminum cans produced?
4. How many trees do you think should be cut down in order to produce Sunday newspapers for one year?
5. How many paper grocery bags does supermarket use in one year? Imagine how many supermarkets there are in the U.S.
6. Find the population of America using the fact # 6.
7. Calculate the amount of separate pieces of paper an average household throws away every day? Estimate how much you throw away every day.
8. Calculate the amount of pop, juice, milk, and water consumed by an individual per day?
9. Count how many recyclables you dispose every week? Estimate recyclable waste generated by our class and LaGuardia students.
Use the chart above to answer the following questions.
10. If total average dump/year is 75 billion tons, how much paper and glass can be recycled?
11. Find the ratio of yard waste to food waste dumped every year?