Plastic Tips

• Recycling waste materials supports almost six times as many waste-related jobs as if the same materials were simply thrown away.
• The number of cities in the U.S. that offer some type of recycling service increased from 40 in 1990 to 250 in 1996 – 500% in 6 years.
• Americans use an average of 2.5 million plastic bottles per hour.  Over half of them are thrown away.
• Plastic garbage and waste including plastic bags are thrown into the ocean.  Each year that plastic is known to kill roughly 1,000,000 sea creatures.
• Recycling plastic saves two times as much energy as burning it in an incinerator.
• About 1/3 of the average dump is made up of packing material.
• A typical family consumes 182 gallons of soda, 29 gallons of juice, 104 gallons of milk, and 26 gallons of bottled water each year.  Think about all the plastic bottles.
• In 2006 Americans threw away 38 billion plastic water bottles.
• Old scrap grocery bags, if recycled, could become new mail wrappings for magazines and catalogs, new dog food bags, as well as new grocery bags.
• Over 20,000 U.S. facilities produce plastic materials, products, and equipment.
• Plastic makes up almost 10% of Americans trash.
• The U.S. post consumer plastic industry employees over 50,000 people.
• Over 1 billion pounds of post consumer plastics are recycled in the U.S. each year.
• Over 23 million pounds of plastic foam peanuts are recycled each year; that is enough to fill the Empire State Building.