The Trash Problem

• The average American tosses over 3 pounds of trash every day, adding up to enough to fill 63,000 garbage trucks.
  
  
• How much trash is this in a year? Imagine digging a hole the size of a football field. To bury all this trash, the hole would need to 100 miles deep!
  
  
• 2.5 million plastic bottles are thrown away every hour
  
  
• In two weeks, enough bottles and jars are thrown away to build a 1,300 foot tower.
  
  
• We throw away over 200 million tires every year (one for every person in the U.S.)
  
  
• With the aluminum we throw away, in three months the U.S. could rebuild its entire commercial air fleet.
  
  
• With the office paper we throw away in a year, we could build a 12 foot wall clear across the United States.
  
  
• Enough iron and steel is discarded to provide a constant supply for the United State's automakers
  
  
• About 44 million newspapers are tossed every week. This equals about 500,000 trees every single week.
  
  
• Some products, such as aluminum and cloth, take between 100 to 400 years to decompose in a landfill
  
  
• About 25 billion styrofoam cups are thrown away every year. Each styrofoam cup can take up to 500 years to disintegrate
  
  
• About 100 billion plastic bags are thrown away every year. The time it takes them to decompose has been estimated at ranging from 20 to 1000 years. These plastic bags can become serial killers, eaten by an animal, which then dies. The consumed bag still does not decompose and can then be eaten by another animal.

 

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