benefits of recycling

Where Does All Our Paper Go?
Recent customer surveys informed us that a large majority of customers are interested in the environmental and economic benefits of their recycling. Depending on the amount of material your facility generates and the type of service you require, your individual recycling program may be a revenue generating program, or simply a cost diversion and a way to avoid disposal costs.
Regardless of your situation, in recycling there are significant benefits that you and your fellow employees are providing for the community, environment, and economy. Before reviewing the many examples, we would first like to thank you for your patronage and inform you of how proud you and your fellow co-workers should be of your actions. We look forward to continuing to serve you, and hope to help you expand your current recycling program to positively increase your bottom line while simultaneously improving our environment, economy, and communities.

Recycling 1 ton of paper saves:
17 trees
6,953 gallons of water
463 gallons of oil
3.06 cubic feet of land fill space
4,077 kilowatt hours of energy
provides 5 times the jobs versus using virgin wood pulp
prevents 587 pounds of air pollution
This means 74% less air pollution, 35% less water pollution, 63% less water consumption
Incinerating 10,000 tons of waste creates: 1 job
Land filling 10,000 tons of waste creates: 6 jobs
Recycling 10,000 tons of waste creates: 36 jobs
Every day Americans throw away 44 million newspapers. That's equivalent to dumping 500,000 trees into landfills each week
Recyclable Paper Products make up approximately 40% of trash in America.
Americans throw out about 85% of the office paper used. That's enough office and writing paper annually to build a wall twelve feet high, stretching from New York City of Los Angeles.
Annually, 27 million acres of tropical rainforest are destroyed (that's an area the size of Ohio). That translates to 74,000 acres per day, 3,000 acres per hour, and 50 acres per minute.

Quick Facts
Percent of the world's annual wood harvest used for the production of paper products - 37%
Yearly amount of trees cut down to provide raw material for American paper pulp mills - 900 million
Amount of trees taken to product the Sunday edition of the New York Times - 75,000
Recycling a stack of newspapers only 3 foot high - saved one tree. One tree alone can filter 60 pounds of pollutants from the air.

Commingle Scoop GLASS
Recycling 1 ton of glass saves 9 gallons of fuel oil.
1 glass bottle recycled saved enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for 4 hours.
Recycling glass reduced air pollution by 14-20% and saves 25-32% more energy than making glass from virgin materials.
Recycled glass containers are used for new glass containers, fiberglass insulation, road bead (aggregate), concrete block, and glassphalt (asphalt).
Glass is a product that never wears out. IT CAN BE RECYCLED FOREVER! STEEL
Annually, enough energy is saved by recycling steel to supply Los Angeles with electricity for almost 10 years.
A steel mill using recycled scrap reduces related water pollution, air pollution, and mining waste by 70%. COPPER
Manufacturing copper using copper scraps saves an estimated 85% in energy costs. ALUMINUM
Recycling 1 aluminum can saves enough energy to light one 100-watt bulb for 20 hours.
Trashing 1 aluminum can is equal to the waste of pouring out half the cans volume of gasoline.
Energy savings from aluminum can recycling in 1993 alone were enough to light a city the size of Pittsburgh for 6 years.
Every 3 months, Americans alone throw away enough aluminum to rebuild our entire commercial air fleet.
You can make 20 cans from recycled material with the same amount of energy it takes to make 1 new can.
If the average aluminum which contains 50% post consumer recycled aluminum were recycled today, it would be back on the grocer's shelf in about 90 days. PLASTICS
95% of all plastic bottles manufactured are from PET (soda bottles) or HDPE (milk jugs & detergent bottles), 48% and 47% respectively.
HDPE and PET bottles showed the highest recycling rates of any plastic bottle types, at 23.8% and 22.8%.
Americans use 4 MILLION bottles per year, yet only 1 out of 4 bottles are recycled.
Plastics accounted for 9.9% of municipal solid waste generation by weight in 1997.
5 recycled PET plastic soda bottles make enough fiber to fill 1 ski jacket, make 1 extra large tee shirt, or 1 square foot of carpet.
The most common use for recycled PET is textiles. 56% goes into the manufacturing of fiber for things such as carpet and clothing.
HALF of all polyester carpet made in the USA is made from recycled PET.
HDPE (milk/detergent bottles) have many uses including plastic pipe manufacturing, plastic lumber (see www.everlastlumber.com), flower pots, trash cans, and new bottles for non-food applications.
A Joint Effort.
Again, we thank you for your patronage over the past year. We want you to know that providing the best customer service possible is our number one priority. We urge you to contact us at any time without hesitation if you have any problems, questions, or concerns. As a company, we take these concerns seriously and will do everything in our power to address them quickly. We hope that you not only found these facts interesting, but that they also displayed the drastic impact your company is making by recycling and buying recycled products.
Together, in 2003 Alone, CRI and our Customers Have Saved: Paper Product Recycling:
We saved 1,000,000 trees
379,151,118 gallons of water
26,446,278 gallons of oil
33,529,082 pounds of air pollution
174,785 cubic feet of land fill space
232,875,753 kilowatts of energy (enough kilowatts of energy to heat almost 28,000 homes for 1 full year). Aluminum Can Recycling:
We saved 2,554,090 gallons of gasoline
Saved enough energy to power one hundred 100-watt bulbs for 124 years Tin Can Recycling:
We saved 2,500 ton of iron ore
1,000 tons of coal Plastics Recycling:
We recycled enough PET to make 4,591,944 square feet of carpet, t-shirts, or filling for ski jackets
We recycled enough HDPE to produce 1,299,953 linear feet of plastic lumber (this amount could cover 9,000 average decks with decking boards) Glass Recycling:
We recycled enough glass to save 33,401 gallons of oil
We also prevented the mining of 2,468 tons of sand, 803 tons of soda ash, 803 tons of limestone, and 280 tons of feldspar. Just to recap, the most important values in recycling:
Recycling conserves our precious natural resources.
Recycling promotes clear air and clear water.
Recycling saves money and creates jobs.
Recycling saves energy.
Recycling saves land fill space.
You, ALONE can make a difference by recycling just 1 bottle, aluminum can or stack of paper.