North Bay Green Sheet

Fun Recycling Facts!

• The first metal recycling in America occurred in 1776 when patriots in New York City melted down a statue of King George III and made it into bullets.
• The first recycling center was established in 1897 in New York City.
• On April 22, 1970, the very first Earth Day introduced the concept of recycling to the general public.
• The very first city-wide use of curbside recycling cans occurred in University City, Missouri for collecting newspapers in 1974.
• Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a TV for three hours -- or the quivalent of a half a gallon of gasoline.
• To produce each week's Sunday newspapers, 500,000 trees must be cut down.
• More than 20,000,000 Hershey's Kisses are wrapped each day, using 133 square miles of tinfoil. All that foil is recyclable, but not many people realize it.
• 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.
• Recycling 1 ton (2,000 lbs) of paper saves 17 trees
• 350,000 aluminum cans are recycled every minute!
• About 85% of the composition of an average dump contains recyclable or divertible material.
• Americans throw away 25,000,000 plastic beverage bottles every hour!
• Every year, each American throws out about 1,200 pounds of organic garbage that can be composted.
• There is no limit to the number of times an aluminum can may be recycled.