How much do you know about recycling?

Earth Day is Wednesday, April 22. How will you celebrate? To help get you into the spirit of planetary stewardship, we’d like to share some fun facts about recycling you may not know:

1. That aluminum can you throw away today will still be an aluminum can hundreds of years from now, unless it’s recycled. Recycle it and it can be part of a new can within six weeks! It requires 95% less energy and water to recycle a can than it does to create a can from raw materials.

2. Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a television for three homes. The average person has the opportunity to recycle more than 25,000 cans in a lifetime!

3. The average American uses seven trees a year in paper, wood and other products made from trees. Americans also throw away enough office paper each year to build a 12 foot high wall from Seattle to New York. The average household throws away 13,000 separate pieces of paper each year.

4. Recycling a stack of newspaper just 3 feet high saves one tree. Making paper from recycled paper reduces the amount of air pollution related to paper production by 95%.

5. Americans throw away 25 million plastic beverage bottles every hour. Recycling just five plastic bottles provides enough fiber to create one square foot of carpet or enough fiber to fill one ski jacket.

6. A glass bottle can take about 4,000 years to decompose.

7. You can walk one mile along an average U.S. highway and see about 1,500 pieces of garbage. We can all do our part in disposing of it properly.

8. Glass can be recycled and re-manufactured an infinite amount of times and never wear out. Recycling just one glass jar saves enough electricity to light an 11-watt CFL bulb for 20 hours.

9. Not many people realize that tin foil can be recycled. Like other recyclables, though, it has to be clean to be recycled.

10. Over 90% of all products shipped in the US are shipped in corrugated boxes, which totals more than 400 billion square feet of cardboard. Nearly 80% of all retailers and grocers recycle their cardboard.