Turn off the water faucet when brushing your teeth.
This simple act can save 9 gallons of water every time you
brush.
The normal faucet flow is 3-5 gallons of water per minute (gpm).
By attaching a low flow faucet aerator, you can reduce the flow
by 50%. Incredibly, although the flow is reduced, it will
seem stronger because air is mixed into the water as it leaves
the tap.
40% of the pure water you use in your house is flushed down
the toilet.
If a family of four takes 5-minute showers each day using a
standard shower head, they will use more than 700 gallons of
water every week -- the equivalent of a three-year supply of
drinking water for one person.
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ENERGY
Every winter, the energy equivalent of all the oil that flows
through the Alaskan pipeline in a year leaks through American
windows.
The average U.S. home uses the energy equivalent of 1,253
gallons of oil every year.
Microwaves use around 50% less energy than conventional
ovens; they're most efficient for small portions or defrosting.
Every time you open your oven door during cooking, you lose
25 to 50 degrees -- or more.
Washers and dryers can account for as much as 25% of the energy
you use at home (including the hot water for the wash).
As much as 90% of the energy consumed by washing machines and
80% of the energy used by dishwashers goes to heating the water.
During the winter, you can save as much as 3% of the energy
your furnace uses simply by lowering your thermostat one degree
F (if it's set between 65 F and 72F).
Dust on a light bulb or dirt on a glass fixture can reduce
the light it gives off by 10% and make it seem that you need a
brighter, higher wattage bulb.
You can save 10% or more on your heating and cooling costs by
insulating and tightening up ducts.
Efficiency counts. The most effective new appliances
typically use 50% less energy than the most wasteful ones.
Choose a refrigerator with a freezer on top, instead of a
side-by-side unit. On average, the savings amounts to 20%.
Between 15 and 30% of the energy your water heater uses goes
to keeping a tank of water hot, just in case you need it.
Consider using a more efficient, on demand water heating system.
Even during a mild winter, you can lose as much energy
through one single-pane window as a 75-watt light bulb uses
rinning seven hours a day, 365 days a year. On the other
hand, a double-pane window retains twice as much heat as a
single-pane window.
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PAPER
12 trees are required to make 1 ton of 100% virgin (no
recycled content) newsprint.
One carton (10 reams) of 100% virgin copier paper (20 lb weight) uses
6% of a tree -- and those add up quickly!.
One tree makes 16.67 reams of copy paper or 8,333.3 sheets.
One ton of coated, higher-end virgin magazine paper (used for
magazines like National Geographic and others) uses a little
more than 15 trees (15.36).
One ton of coated, lower-end virgin magazine paper (used for
magazines and most catalogs) uses nearly 8 trees (7.68).
Approximately 40% of the U.S. waste stream is comprised of
paper.
Americans throw away (not recycle) 44 million newspapers
every day. YES! EVER DAY! That's the same as
dumping 500,000 trees into landfills every week!!!
We save 17 trees for each ton of newspaper we recycle.
Making one ton of recycled paper uses only about 60% of the
energy needed to make a ton of virgin paper.
Americans discard 4 million tons of office paper every year
-- enough to build a 12-foot high wall of paper from New York to
California. That's about 85% of all the office paper we
use that's not being recycled!
Americans use 50 million tons of paper annually -- which means
we consume more than 850 million trees!
Every ton of recycled office paper saves 380 gallons of oil.
Each year, 27 million acres of tropical rain forests are
destroyed. That's an area the size of Ohio, and translates
to 74,000 acres per day...3,000 acres per hour...50 acres per
minute.
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METAL
Every year we save enough energy recycling steel to supply
Los Angeles with nearly a decade's worth of electricity.
We save enough energy by recycling one aluminum can to run a
TV set for three hours.
Recycling aluminum saves 95% of the energy used to make the
material from scratch (using virgin materials). That means
you can make 20 cans out of recycled material with the same
amount of energy it takes to make one can out of new material.
Energy savings in 1993 alone were enough to light a city the
size of Pittsburgh, PA for six years.
Americans throw away enough aluminum every month to rebuild
our entire commercial air fleet.
Recycling steel and tin cans saves 74% of the energy sued to
produce them.
Americans use 100 million tin and steel cans every day.
Americans throw out enough iron and steel to supply all the
nation's auto makers on a continuous basis.
A steel mill using recycled scrap reduces related water
pollution, air pollution, and mining wastes by about 70%.
When you toss out one aluminum can, you waste as much energy
as if you'd filled the same can half-full of gasoline and poured
it into the ground..
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ALUMINUM CANS
More than 50% of a new aluminum can is made from recycled
aluminum.
The 36 billion aluminum cans that are put in the trash and
sent to landfills last year had a scrap value of more than $600
million. Some are already mining our landfills for the
resources we've buried.)
When you toss out one aluminum can, you waste as much energy
as if you'd filled the same can half-full of gasoline and poured
it into the ground.
We save enough energy by recycling one aluminum can to run a
TV set for three hours.
Recycling aluminum saves 95% of the energy used to make the
material from scratch (using virgin materials). That means
you can make 20 cans out of recycled material with the same
amount of energy it takes to make one can out of new material.
Energy savings in 1993 alone were enough to light a city the
size of Pittsburgh, PA for six years.
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GLASS
Americans throw away enough glass bottles and jars every two
weeks to fill the 1,350 foot towers of the former World Trade
Center.
Most bottles and jars contain at least 25% recycled glass.
Glass never wears out -- it can be recycled forever. We
save over a ton of resources for every ton of glass recycled --
1,330 pounds of sand, 433 pounds of soda ash, 433 pounds of
limestone, and 151 pounds of feldspar.
States with a bottle deposit law have 35-40% less litter by
volume.
If all the glass bottles and jars collected through recycling
in the U.S. in 1994 were laid end to end, they'd reach the moon
and halfway back to earth;.
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PLASTIC
Every year we make enough plastic film to shrink-wrap Texas.
Americans go through 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour!
26 recycled PET (#1) bottles equals a polyester suit. 5
recycled PET bottles make enough fiberfill to stuff a ski
jacket.
If every American household recycled just one out of every
ten HDPE (#2) bottles they used, we'd keep 200 million pounds of
the plastic out of landfills every year. Just think what
we could do if we recycled ALL of them!
1.5 million barrels of oil per year are used just to make
bottles for the water we carry around in the United States.
Estimates say only 1 in 6 of those bottles is recycled. We
are throwing away a very precious commodity!
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STEEL
The steel industry's annual recycling saves the equivalent
energy to electrically power about 18 million households for a
year. Every time a ton of steel is recycled, 2500 pounds
of iron ore, 1000 pounds of coal, and 40 pounds of limestone is
preserved.
Every day Americans use enough steel and tin cans to make a
steel pipe running from Los Angeles to New York...AND BACK!
If we only recycle one-tenth of the cans we now throw away, we'd
save about 3.2 billion of them every year.
The average American throws out about 61 lbs. of tin cans
every month.
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JUNK MAIL
If only 100,000 people stopped their junk mail, we could save
up to 150,000 trees annually. If a million people did
this, we could save up to a million and a half trees.
The junk mail Americans receive in one day could produce
enough energy to heat 250,000 homes.
The average American still spends 8 full months of his/her
life opening junk mail.
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GENERAL GARBAGE
In 1865, an estimated 10,000 hogs roamed New York City eating
garbage. Now, one of every six U.S. trucks is a garbage
truck.
In a lifetime, the average American will throw away 600 times
his/her adult weight in garbage. If you add it up, this
means that a 150 lb. adult will leave a legacy of 90,000 lbs. of
trash for his/her children.
The average baby generates a ton of garbage every year.
The landfill gas produced daily at Fresh Kills Landfill in
New York is enough fuel to heat 50,000 homes. This is the
only landfill that is so huge it can actually be seen from space
with the naked eye!
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TIRES/RUBBER
It takes half a barrel of crude oil to produce the rubber for
just one truck tire.
Every two weeks, Americans wear almost 50 million pounds of
rubber of their tires. That's enough to make 3 1/4 million
new tires from scratch.
Producing one pound of recycled rubber versus one pound of
new rubber requires only 29% of the energy.
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FOOD AND PACKAGING
$1.00 out of every $11.00 Americans spend for food goes for
packaging.
Americans dump the equivalent of more than 21 million
shopping bags full of food into landfills every year.
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NEWSPAPERS
Every day America cuts down two million trees -- but throws
away about 42 million newspapers that could be recycled.
That means the equivalent of about 500,000 trees is dumped into
landfills every week.
If everyone who subscribes to the New York Times recycled,
we'd keep over 6,000 tons of pollution out of the air.
It takes an entire forest -- over 500,000 trees -- to supply
Americans with their Sunday newspapers every week.
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LIGHT BULBS
Every year Americans buy over a billion incandescent light
bulbs. That's three acres of bulbs every day.
A 60-watt bulb lasts about 750 hours; a fluorescent bulb with
1/3 the wattage will generate the same ligh and burn for 7,500
to 10,000 hours in five to ten years of normal use.
Substituting a compact fluorescent light for a traditional
bulb will keep a half-ton of CO2 out of the atmosphere over the
life of the bulb.
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OTHER
One gallon of used motor oil can contaminate 1 million
gallons of water.
Most cars on the U.S. roads carry only one person. We
have so much extra room in our 140 million cars that everyone in
Western Europe could ride with us!
If today is a typical day on planet earth, humans will add
fifteen million tons of carbon to the atmosphere, destroy 115
square miles of tropical rainforest, create seventy-two square
miles of desert, eliminate between forty to one hundred species,
erode seventy-one million tons of topsoil, add twenty-seven
hundred tons of CFC's to the stratosphere, and increase their
population by 263,000.
Almost four million computer diskettes are thrown away every
day, which equals over one and a half billion disks per year or
a stack of disks as tall as the Sears Tower in Chicago every 21
seconds. It will take nearly 500 years for the disks to
degrade.
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