April 20, 2014 – 2 Days until Earth Day…
Americans make more than 200 million tons of garbage each year, enough to fill Bush Stadium from top to bottom twice a day!
Creating Some Perspective
- Every day in the United States, we produce enough trash to equal the weight of the Empire State Building.
- We produce enough Styrofoam cups annually to circle the earth 436 times.
- 27,000 trees are felled each day for toilet paper.
- More than 20,000,000 Hershey’s Kisses are wrapped each day, using 133 square miles of tinfoil.
- Americans throw away 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.
- It takes 500,000 trees to publish the NY Sunday Times – every week!
- Americans throw away enough aluminum to rebuild our entire commercial fleet of airplanes every 3 months.
- The estimated 2.6 billion holiday cards sold each year in the United States could fill a football field 10 stories high.
- It would cost about $13 billion annually to satisfy the world’s basic sanitation and food requirements. That’s roughly equivalent to what Americans and Europeans spend on perfume and cologne every year.
- Each year Americans alone throw away 18 billion disposable diapers. In perspective, this is enough to extend from the earth to the moon and back 7 times.
- During the time it takes you to read this sentence, 50,000 12-ounce aluminum cans are made.
- Every day, American businesses generate enough paper to circle the earth 20 times!
- Every month, we throw out enough glass bottle and jars to fill up a giant skyscraper.
- On average, ONE supermarket goes through 60,500,000 paper bags per year!
- The amount of wood and paper we throw away each year is enough to heat 50,000,000 homes for 20 years.
- Every year in the U.S. we pave over roughly 1.3 million acres of formerly unpaved land, almost twice the size of the Hawaiian Islands.
- McDonald’s saves 68,000,000 pounds of packaging per year just by pumping soft drink syrup directly from the delivery truck into tanks in the restaurant, instead of shipping the syrup in cardboard boxes.
- If all the world’s 1 billion PC’s were powered down for just one night – it would save enough energy to light up New York City’s Empire State Building – inside and out – for more than 30 years.
Resources:
environmentalserviceprovider.com
