Good to Know

Plastic bag recycling may seem like a small thing, but plastic bags are a huge threat to the environment. Did you know that a plastic shopping bag can take anywhere from 15 to 1,000 years to decompose. Plastic bags don’t biodegrade, but are at risk for photo degradation, as sunlight exposure dissolves them into toxic

If every commuter car in the U.S. carried just one more person, 8 billion gallons of gas would be saved.

Half a million trees must be cut down to produce each week’s Sunday newspapers. Only 27 percent of all American newspapers are recycled. Recycling every newspaper would save about 250 million trees each year.

We use more than 80 billion aluminum soda cans every year. It takes 90 percent less energy to recycle aluminum cans than to make new ones. By simply recycling one aluminum can, you are saving enough energy to watch a TV for three hours.

The average office worker uses up to 500 disposable coffee cups per year. Styrofoam takes about one million years to fully decompose.

Approximately 1-billion-trees worth of paper is thrown away every year in the U.S. Recycled paper uses 64 percent less energy than making paper from virgin wood pulp and can save many trees. Every ton of recycled paper saves 17 trees.