Kelly Allison

Recycling is such a huge part of conserving our world’s natural resources.  It gives us an opportunity to re-use materials instead of constantly going back into the environment and stripping the earth more and more of its materials.  Also, it conserves a lot more energy in manufacturing materials is they are already recycled instead of raw.  In the United States, aluminum from recycled materials saves 95 percent of the energy, steel from recycled steel saves 60 percent of the energy, newspapers from recycled paper save 40 percent of the energy, plastics from recycled plastic save 70 percent of the energy, and glass from recycled glass saves 40 percent of the energy.  The usage of recycling prevents the buildup of trash as well as so much landfill waste.  Every year, over 35 billion cans are thrown away.  This is a huge amount, and people do not realize that every person’s individual contribution to the effort can result in amazing ways.  In 2000, 7 million tons of trash was kept out of landfills due to a high contribution to recycling, and this is twice as much as in 1990.  This is great evidence to the idea that recycling on every individual’s part can save so much waste.  The recycling of aluminum is extremely important because producing cars from recycled aluminum reduced air pollution by 95 percent and my project is not focused on air pollution, but this shows how one act of recycling can lead to saving the Earth in completely different ways.  Also, producing recycled paper produces 74 percent less air pollution, 35 percent less water pollution, and uses 64 percent less energy than making paper from logs.  These statistics alone show that there is a chain effect in the conservation on natural resources.

People can truly make a better effort to contribute to recycling.  Roughly 1 million tons of plastic bottles were recycled in 2006, which is only 24 percent of the amount Americans dispose of annually. Every ton of plastic bottles recycled saves about 3.8 barrels of oil.  Also, Americans contribute 82 million tons of trash to recycling centers each year, but this is only 32.5 percent of what we throw out.  The good news is that there has been about a 100% increase in the total recycling in the United States during the past decade.  This shows hope that our country as well as our world is very capable of coming together and making a huge effort in recycling.  Just, people have become very relaxed about the imperativeness of recycling.  In the U.S., 53.4 percent of all paper products are being recycled.  This is a good amount, but it could be much higher.  Per day, each person produces 4.6 lbs. of trash, and about 32 percent is recycled.  Recycling differs tremendously by country, also, because the U.S. produced 800 kilograms of trash per person in the year 2005, whereas in Western Europe, only 577 kilograms of trash per person was produced. 

Paper recycling has been shown to contribute tremendously to the efforts of conservation.  A ton of paper made from recycled paper saves 17 trees.  In the U.S., if all of the new papers read in the morning were recycled, 41,000 trees a day could be saved.  If all of this paper was recycled, 6 million tons of landfill waste could be prevented each year.  Also, for every 50,000 people who stop their junk mail, 75,000 trees could be saved.

Benefits-of-Recycling: Recycling Statistics. 12 October 2009 <http://www.benefits-of-recycling.com/index.html>.

Love To Know: Green Living. 11 April 2009. 12 October 2009 <http://greenliving.lovetoknow.com/Recycling_Statistics>.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 12th, 2009 at 9:10 pm and is filed under Week 07: Research Stats. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.