How much waste is your fault?

Americans create and toss out an alarming amount of waste each year. According to the Clean Air Council…

• Each day we fill up around 63,000 garbage trucks which means in a year we toss so much trash that if we piled it all up in garbage trucks it would form a line of trucks that will stretch from the earth, halfway to the moon.
• A huge amount of waste generated in the U.S. is packaging (one-third).
• We throw away 570 diapers per second. That’s insane.
• Each hour we toss (not recycle) 2.5 million plastic bottles.
• We make enough plastic film to shrink-wrap the state of Texas. Which is a funny thought to picture a shrink-wrapped state, but not so hilarious to the planet.
• If we kept all the aluminum cans that we actually toss out we could rebuild our commercial air fleet every three months.
• Throwing away one aluminum can wastes as much energy as if that can were 1/2 full of gasoline.
• Four million tons of extra wrapping paper and shopping bag waste is created during each holiday season.
• Americans receive almost 4 million tons of junk mail every year. Most of it winds up in landfills.
• We trash enough office paper annually to build a 12-foot wall from Los Angeles to New York City.
• The paper & plastic cups, forks and spoons we throw away every year could circle the equator 300 times.
• The average American office worker goes through around 500 disposable cups every year.
• We’ve got so much hazardous waste being generated that in just one year we could take that waste and fill the New Orleans Superdome 1,500 times over.
• Forty-three thousand tons of food is thrown out each day.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. We create so much waste that it’s a surprise to me that we still fit on the darn planet. Paper products alone are so used and abused that it’s been noted that the average American kills 7 trees a year due to paper product use. 7!

What to do – it’s not that hard to keep things a little cleaner. In fact you can boil it down to three easy points.

1. Buy less junk.
2. Recycle.
3. Use reusable products over disposables.

Even if you do just one of the above you’ll make a huge dent in your own trash impact and if you do all three it’s even more awesome. It’s not so hard to make a difference and you sure don’t want to be part of the above equations.

[image via stock.xchng]