If you’re going to ask people to change their lifestyle and create new habits, then you better be willing to back up the reasons with solid facts.

If we could all go even just a little beyond the blue bin, by reducing and resusing, it could make an enormous difference on the planet’s waste. The following is a short list of astonsihing recycling facts that are sure to nudge you in the direction of going green. It can’t be stressed enough how even the smallest efforts can make a huge difference, as you’ll see with some of the examples below.

METAL:

• If it takes you 45 seconds to read this recycling fact, then by the time you are done, there will have been over a quarter of a million aluminum cans produced before you were done.

• If you drink a can of beer after work and then tossed it in the recycling bin, that one (aluminum) can saves enough energy to watch television for 3 hours after dinner! Of course, you’d save even more energy if you went out for a walk or read a good (used!) book after dinner.

• There are over 80 billion soda cans used each year. Yes, that’s billion. Yes, that’s just soda! can you see the importance of recycling aluminum?

• The good thing about recycling aluminum is that it can be recycled an unlimited amount of times, and a recycled can, even 200 years from now, can still be a can. Yes, it can!

PAPER:

• If everyone read just their Sunday paper online for now on and there was no paper versions, 500,000 trees would be saved per week!

• If every single newspaper was recycled after we read them, we would be able to save 25 million trees per year!

• If you were to add up the amount of separate pieces of paper trash that each American throws away per year, it would be approximately 13,000 pieces of paper. A large percentage of this is packaging and junk mail.

• If we were to save all the wood and paper that we toss into the trash each year, the combined amount would be enough to heat 50 million homes for up to 20 years.

• If we were to lay out all the paper that American businesses generate in just one day, that paper would be enough to circle the Earth about 20 times.

PLASTIC AND STYROFOAM:

• The soda cans mentioned above were a pretty high number, right? Well, just in the USA alone, over 25 million beverage bottles made of plastic are thrown away every hour!

• Styrofoam coffee cups are being thrown away at an unbelievable amount of 25 billion per year. That number is the statistic for USA only.

• Plastic material being dumped into the ocean is responsible for killing u to a million sea creatures yearly.

GLASS:

• Using a similar example as the single aluminum can above, did you know that recycling just one glass bottle can run one of your 100 watt light bulbs for 3-4 hours.

• When a glass bottle is recycled, it is considerably cutting back on the air and water pollution that happens when creating the bottle from raw materials.

• If we were to wait for a glass bottle to decompose after throwing it away today, we would have to wait approximately 4000 years.

• There are approximately 41 billion glass containers manufactured every year.

• Like aluminum, glass can be reused an unlimted amount of times.