Recycle Cans and Bottles

Aluminum Cans
More than 50% of a new aluminum can is made from recycled aluminum.

The 36 billion aluminum cans landfilled last year had a scrap value of more than $600 million. (Some day we'll be mining our landfills for the resources we've buried.)

GLASS
Americans throw away enough glass bottles and jars every two weeks to fill the 1.350-foot towers of the former World Trade Center.

Most bottles and jars contain at least 25% recycled glass.

Glass never wears out -- it can be recycled forever. We save over a ton of resources for every ton of glass recycled -- 1,330 pounds of sand, 433 pounds of soda ash, 433 pounds of limestone, and 151 pounds of feldspar.

States with bottle deposit laws have 35-40% less litter by volume. *If all the glass bottles and jars collected through recycling in the U.S. in 94 were laid end to end, they'd reach the moon and half way back to earth.

PLASTIC
Every year we make enough plastic film to shrink-wrap Texas.

Americans go through 2.5 million plastic bottles every year.

26 recycled PET bottles equals a polyester suit. 5 recycled PET bottles make enough fiberfill to stuff a ski jacket.

In 1988 we used 2 billion pounds of HDPE just to make bottles for household products. That’s about the weight of 90,000 Honda Civics.

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.


Links
http://www.oberlin.edu/recycle/facts.html