Fun Going Green Facts - Central Coast News KION/KCBA

• Americans throw away enough aluminum every month to rebuild our entire commercial air fleet.

• Americans use 100 million tin and steel cans every day.

• Americans throw out enough iron and steel to supply all the nation's automakers on a continuous basis.

• 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 out.

• 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.

• The average American still spends 8 full months of his/her life opening 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.

• 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.

• $1 out of every $10-11 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.

• Every year, the average Californian consumes 550 single-use plastic shopping bags. Only a small percentage is recycled.

• A plastic shopping bag can take anywhere from 15 to 1000 years to decompose. In a compressed landfill, deprived of atmosphere to help them biodegrade, paper bags don't fare much better.
  
  
• Plastic bags don't biodegrade, but are at risk for photo degradation, light exposure dissolving them into toxic polymer particles. Most often, when this happens, it happens in the ocean.
  
  
• According to the Wall Street Journal, only 1% of plastic bags are recycled worldwide; the rest are left to live on indefinitely in landfills (or worse, in the environment).
• The United States alone uses approximately 100 billion new plastic bags per year.
  
  
• Thanks to their light weight, plastic bags are the debris most likely to fly away from landfills, settling instead in trees, storm drains, beaches, and the ocean.
  
  
• Public agencies in California alone spend over $300 million on coastal litter cleanup per year.  
  
  
• Plastic bags make up over 10% of washed-up debris polluting the US coastline.
  
  
• An estimated one million birds and 100,000 turtles and other sea animals die of starvation each year after ingesting discarded plastic bags that block their digestive tracks.
  
  
• Made from petroleum products and natural gas, plastic bags utilize nonrenewable resources, ultimately helping to drive up fuel prices.
  
  
• It takes 12 million barrels of oil to produce the amount of plastic bags the US uses per year.

• Paper bags aren't necessarily better than plastic bags. The United States cuts down 14 million trees per year simply to supply the demand for paper shopping bags.

• Over a lifetime, use of reusable bags by just one person (you!) will save over 22,000 plastic bags.

More bag facts: http://protectyourcentralcoast.org/earthdaybag.html

More general resource facts: http://www.oberlin.edu/recycle/facts.html