The fun facts below have been collected from various books, magazines, newsletters and websites.

General waste and recycling facts

• Texans generate an average of one ton of municipal solid waste per person per year. This means together we throw away enough garbage to fill the Astrodome in Houston every two weeks.

• The 19.2 million tons of municipal solid waste generated annually in Texas could fill two lanes of Interstate 10 from Beaumont to El Paso 10 feet high.

• Americans' total yearly waste would fill a convoy of garbage trucks long enough to wrap around the earth six times or to reach half-way to the moon.

• Americans throw away enough disposable plates and cups to give the world a picnic 6 times a year.

• Every year, we make enough plastic film to shrink-wrap the state of Texas.

• Americans dump the equivalent of more than 21 million shopping bags full of food into landfills every year.

• Every year , Americans produce enough Styrofoam cups to circle the earth 436 times.

• Recycling waste materials supports about six times as many waste-related jobs as there would be if the same materials were treated as trash.

• The oil equivalent of 35 Exxon Valdez tankers is dumped into our nation’s rivers, lakes , and streams every year! And used motor oil is far more deadly than crude oil ...

• Texans use enough glass bottles and jars to fill the Astrodome every 4-1/2 months.

• The energy saved from recycling one glass bottle will keep a light bulb burning for 4 hours.

• Leaves can account for 75% of the solid waste in the fall.

Aluminum facts

• If you throw away an aluminum can, it wastes as much energy as if you filled that can half full of gasoline and poured it on the ground.

• In 1989, Americans threw away enough aluminum cans to build 6,000 DC-10 airplanes.

• Recycling one aluminum can saves enough electricity to power a TV or a 100-watt light bulb for three hours.

• An aluminum can will litter the Earth for 500 years.

• Making a can from recycled aluminum uses 90% less energy than making a can from scratch and cuts related air pollution by 95%.

Plastic Facts

• Americans throw away 2 million plastic bottles an hour.

• PET (polyethylene terephthalate, recycling code #1)soda bottles are the most recycled plastic containers.

• Five recycled 2-liter PET bottles make enough fiberfill to stuff an adult ski jacket. Thirty-five recycled PET bottles make enough fiberfill for a sleeping bag.

• About a third of all the carpeting made in the U.S. has recycled PET bottles in it.

• Recycled HDPE (high density polyethylene, recycling code #2) used in juice bottles and milk jugs can be turned into items like flowerpots, trash cans, traffic barrier cones and curbside recycling bins.

• The HDPE is estimated to be worth about $300-$400 a ton. We throw away about 868 million pounds of it annually (about 75% of what’s produced). That’s an estimated $130 million worth of plastic.

• It takes 1,050 recycled milk jugs to make a six-foot plastic park bench.

Paper facts

• Americans throw away enough office and writing paper annually to build a wall 12 feet high stretching from Los Angeles to New York City.

• Using recycled instead of virgin paper for one print run of the Sunday edition of The New York Time would save 75,000 trees.

• 100 million trees are cut down every year to make the paper for “junk mail”. One-half of junk mail is thrown away unopened and unread.

• Recycling half the world’s paper would free 20 million acres of forestland.

• Every Sunday 500,000 trees could be saved if everyone recycled their newspapers.

• You would make only 700 paper bags out of a 15-year old tree. In a big supermarket they could be used in less than an hour!

• If you stacked up all the paper an average American uses in a year, the pile would be as tall as a two-story house!

• Every day American businesses generate enough paper to circle the earth 20 times.

• Recycling a 4 foot stack of newspaper saves a 40 foot pine tree .

• The production of a ton of paper requires 17 trees, 7,000 gallons of water and more energy per ton than glass or steel. It's enough energy to heat a home for 6 months.

• One mature tree absorbs about 50 lb of CO2 each year.

Air pollution

• 90% of the cancer-causing chemicals are air pollution.

• In Houston , more people are likely to die this year from breathing our air than from accidents on our streets and highways.

• Running in our polluted air for half an hour is equivalent to inhaling the carbon monoxide in a pack of cigarettes.

• Harris County detains the sad record of being one of the dirtiest county in the U.S. with 5.1 million pounds of cancer-causing chemicals legally released into our air and waterways.

• Mowing the lawn for half an hour can produce as much smog as driving a new car 172 miles.

• The average car pumps its own weight in CO2 into the atmosphere every year.

Pesticides

• As many as 38% of imported blackberries are contaminated with pesticide banned in the U.S.

• Use of pesticides has doubled in the last 30 years.

• 60 million birds are killed annually by legal pesticide use in the U.S.

• Every day, approximately 1 million American children age 5 and under are exposed to levels of neurotoxic pesticides in food that exceed EPA safety standards.

• Pesticides that EPA has judged too dangerous for domestic use, as well as pesticides never evaluated by EPA, are routinely shipped from U.S. ports to other countries.

• American farmers use 1.5 billion pounds of pesticides each year - about five pounds for every man, woman, and child. These pesticides end up in about half the food we eat.

• Only about 1 percent of all food shipments are tested for pesticides. Indeed, standard government laboratory tests aren’t even able to detect more than half of the 500 or so pesticides currently in agricultural use.

• 66 pesticides sprayed on food crops contain cancer causing agents. Of the 560 million pounds of herbicides used by American farmers annually, 375 million pounds probably or possibly cause cancer.

• Only 10 percent of the 35,000 pesticides introduced since 1945 have been tested for their effects on people.

• Even worse, some 40 percent of pesticides are used to make food look good.

• As many as 75% of imported pineapples are contaminated with pesticides banned in the U.S.

• The amount of pesticides sprayed on a typical acre of a golf course in a year is seven or eight times the amount applied to a typical acre of agricultural land.

• Farmer who apply little or no chemicals to crops are usually as productive as those who use pesticides and synthetic fertilizers.

Meat

• Between 20,000 and 30,000 animal drugs are used in U.S. farming, including antibiotics, hormonal drugs, and other pharmaceuticals designed to create bigger, fatter, and faster-growing livestock . Residues of some of these drugs end up in milk, eggs, and meat.

• There are currently 1.28 billion cattle on earth , taking up 24% of the land mass of the planet and consuming enough grain to feed hundreds of millions of people.

• Since 1960, more than 25 % of the forests of Central America have been cleared to create pasture land for grazing cattle. Each imported hamburger requires the clearing of five square meters of jungle for pasture.

• Cattle emit methane, a potent greenhouse gas that is responsible for 18 % of the current global warming trend.

• Nearly half the water consumed in the U.S. goes to grow feed for cattle and other livestock. To produce one pound of grain-fed steak requires hundreds of gallons of water. The water that goes into a 1,000-pound steer would float a destroyer.

• Each pound of feed lot steak costs about 35 pounds of eroded topsoil.

• Cattle produce nearly 1 billion tons of organic waste each year. The nitrogen from the cattle waste is converted into ammonia and nitrates and leaks into ground and surface water, where it pollutes wells, rivers, and streams, contamining drinking water and killing marine life.

• Beef has the highest concentrations of herbicides of any food sold in America and represents nearly 11% of the total cancer risk to consumers from pesticides of all foods on the market today.

Other Environmental Facts

• Even though Americans comprise only five percent of the world's population, we use nearly a third of its resources and produce almost half of its hazardous waste.

• The refrigerators Americans buy in a week would make a tower more than 80 miles high.

• 100,000 marine mammals die each year from eating or becoming entangled in plastic debris.

• Rainforest are destroyed at the rate of about 100 acres per minute, enough to fill 50 football fields.

• U.S. polluters legally dumped more than 175 million pounds of cancer-causing chemicals into our air and water in 1996 alone -- more than a cup of cancer-causing chemical for every man, woman, and child in America.

• In the last 50 years, more than 75,000 chemicals have been developed and introduced into the environment.

• The states that do most to protect their natural resources also wind up with the strongest economies and best jobs. The choice is really not jobs versus the environment.

• New McDonald’s restaurants in Sweden are built mostly out of recycled material and serve organic milk and beef (meaning that it comes from organic grain fed cattle non treated with antibiotics or hormonal grow drugs)

• If an area the size of Manhattan Island was covered with photovoltaic solar panels, the entire energy consumption of the United State could be solar generated.

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