Scary Facts & Statistics

We're poisoning this gorgeous Earth, the only home we have.
• America is the queen of trash.
• Every day, we produce enough trash to equal the weight of the Empire State Building.
• We throw away 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour.
• We produce enough Styrofoam cups annually to circle the earth 436 times.
• We trash enough office paper to build a 12-foot wall from Los Angeles to New York City.
• Each year we fill enough garbage trucks to stretch from Earth halfway to the moon.
• 50 – 200 years: Length of time carbon dioxide stays in the earth's atmosphere before it is absorbed into carbon sinks.
• Average temperatures have climbed 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degree Celsius) around the world since 1880, much of this in recent decades, according to NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
• Every year we make enough plastic film to shrink-wrap Texas.
• Arctic ice is rapidly disappearing, and the region may have its first completely ice-free summer by 2040 or earlier. Polar bears and indigenous cultures are already suffering from the sea-ice loss. 
• Glaciers and mountain snows are rapidly melting—for example, Montana's Glacier National Park now has only 27 glaciers, versus 150 in 1910. In the Northern Hemisphere, thaws also come a week earlier in spring and freezes begin a week later.
• Most people realize that hot water uses up energy, but supplying and treating cold water requires a significant amount of energy too. American public water supply and treatment facilities consume about 56 billion kilowatt-hours per year — enough electricity to power more than 5 million homes for an entire year.
• If all U.S. households installed water-efficient appliances, the country would save more than 3 trillion gallons of water and more than $18 billion dollars per year!
• If one out of every 100 American homes was retrofitted with water-efficient fixtures, we could save about 100 million kilowatt-hours of electricity per year — avoiding 80,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions. The greenhouse gas savings would be equivalent to removing nearly 15,000 automobiles from the road for one year!
• If your toilet is from 1992 or earlier, you probably have an inefficient model that uses between 3.5 to 7 gallons per flush. Newer, high-efficiency toilets use less than 1.3 gallons per flush — that's at least 60 percent less water per flush!
• Leaky faucets that drip at the rate of one drip per second can waste more than 3,000 gallons of water each year; A leaky toilet can waste about 200 gallons of water every day. If your fixtures have leaks, you should get them repaired!
• Lighting consumes up to 34 percent of electricity in the United States.
• Many idle electronics — TVs, VCRs, DVD and CD players, cordless phones, microwaves — use energy even when switched off to keep display clocks lit and memory chips and remote controls working. Nationally, these energy “vampires” use 5 percent of our domestic energy and cost consumers more than $8 billion annually.
• Americans throw away enough aluminum every month to rebuild our entire commercial air fleet.Humans are pouring carbon dioxide into the atmosphere much faster than plants and oceans can absorb it.

These gases persist in the atmosphere for years, meaning that even if such emissions were eliminated today, it would not immediately stop global warming.

Below is the size of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Yes, its the size of TWO Texas's.

How can you help? The three R's, Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle!

Lets start with Reduce.

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  Buying products with minimal packaging (including the economy size when that makes sense for you) will help to reduce waste.
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  Repair or upgrade items instead of throwing them out.
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  Use pencils or re-useable pens instead of disposable pens.
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  Buy concentrated products (like concentrated juice, concentrated laundry detergent, and so forth), which come in smaller containers, instead of buying UN-concentrated items, which come in larger containers.
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  Use the feature on your printer or copier that reduces the size of the document so you can print two pages on one side of a sheet of paper (you usually can still read it just fine).
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  When printing things from the Internet (such as order confirmations), print them to PDF files by using a PDF printer driver instead of printing them out on actual paper. You can just delete them when you don't need the document anymore.
• Only buy products that have multiple uses rather than many products to do the same thing as that one item.

Now, Reuse.

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• Use reusable tote bags, instead of wasting landfill space with plastic and paper bags.
• Aluminum Foil: Wash if necessary, flatten, and reuse at a later time
• Bottles - Plastic Beverage: Wash out and fill with water to store for emergencies.
  Fill the smaller bottles with water and freeze to use in coolers or lunch boxes to keep items cool. Don't forget to leave some room in the bottle for the water to expand when it freezes.
• Use plastic containers to carry lunch to work and back. Lunch boxes and Tupperware containers rid landfills of brown paper sacks and plastic bags.

Finally, Recycle.

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  Recycling aluminum saves 95% of the energy needed to produce new aluminum from raw materials. Energy saved from recycling one ton of aluminum is equal to the amount of electricity the average home uses over 10 years. 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 for six years.
• Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a 100-watt bulb for 20 hours, a computer for 3 hours, or a TV for 2 hours.
• Recycling steel and tin cans saves 74% of the energy used to produce them.
• If every American household recycled just one out of every ten HDPE bottles they used, we’d keep 200 million pounds of the plastic out of landfills every year.
• Producting one pound of recycled rubber versus one pound of new rubber requires only 29% of the energy.
• Rinsing cans and keeping boxes out of the weather makes them easier to process. That keeps costs down.

Now, you don't have to completely change your way of life, but doing these three small things can make a huge difference in our enviroment.