• A modern glass bottle would take 4000 years or more to decompose and even longer if it's in the landfill.

• The amount of glass bottles Americans throw away every two weeks would have filled both World Trade Center towers.

• We save over a ton of resources for every ton of glass recycled 1,330 pounds of sand, 433 pounds of soda ash, 433 pounds of limestone, and 151 pounds of feldspar.

• Recycling one glass bottle saves enough electricity to light a 100-watt bulb for four hours.

• Most bottles and jars contain at least 25% recycled glass.

• The average American uses 650 pounds of paper a year. • Each year, Americans trash enough office paper to build a 12-foot wall from Los Angeles to New York City.

• One ton of paper from recycled pulp saves 17 trees, 3 cubic yards of landfill space, 7,000 gallons of water, 4,200 kilowatt hours (enough to heat your home for half year), 390 gallons of oil, and prevents 60 pounds of air pollutants.

• The 17 trees saved (above) can absorb a total of 250 pounds of carbon dioxide from the air each year. Burning that same ton of paper instead of recycling it would create 1500 pounds of carbon dioxide.

• Producing recycled white paper creates 74% less air pollutants, 35% less water pollutants, and 75% less process energy than producing paper from virgin fibers.

• One ton of paper requires the use of 98 tons of various resources.

• Plastic bottles take 700 years before they begin to decompose in a landfill.

•Americans use 4 million plastic bottles every hour! — Yet only 1 bottle out of 4 is recycled.

• Americans produce 10 pounds of plastic bags per year for every person on earth.

•Americans throw away 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour.

• It takes 5 PET (#1) bottles to make 1 square foot of polyester carpet, an XL t-shirt or filling for a ski jacket.

• It takes 1,000 milk jugs/bottles to make a recycled plastic park bench.

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

• Recycling an aluminum soda can saves 96% of the energy used to make a new can from ore, and produces 95% less air pollution and 97% less water pollution. 20 recycled cans can be made with the same amount of energy it takes to make 1 can from virgin materials.

• Americans throw away enough aluminum cans to rebuild our commercial air fleet every three months and enough iron and steel to supply all our nation's automakers every day.

• Recycling just one aluminum can saves enough energy to keep a 100-watt bulb burning for almost four hours or your TV for three hours while saving enough energy as if that can were half full of gasoline.

• Over 2/3 of the aluminum produced is still in use today due to its durability and sustainability.

• 120,000 cans are recycled nationwide every minute with the aluminum can being recycled at more than double the rate of any other beverage container.

•Americans wasted more than twice as many cans in the year 2001 as in 1981, and eight times more than in 1972.

•Recycling cans into cans takes one third as much energy as making them from bauxite.

•The Aluminum Association, a Washington trade organization representing the aluminum industry, misleads the public by regularly inflating the U.S. aluminum can recycling rate by 6-8 percentage points by including imported scrap cans in their calculations: cans that were not originally purchased by U.S. consumers.

•In Michigan, where the per container deposit is 10¢, the aluminum can recycling rate is 95%, compared to the national rate of only 49.2%.

• Replacing one wasted can requires about 0.5 kWh of electricity: enough to light a 100-watt bulb for 5 hours, or to power an average laptop computer for 11 hours.

• For every six-pack of beer or soda not recycled, the energy equivalent of one beverage can full of gasoline is squandered.

• More than two million tons of coal were burned to generate the thermal and electric energy required to replace just half of the cans wasted in the United States last year.

• For each ton of cans wasted, 4.08 tons of greenhouse gasses are generated through replacement production, along with about 140 pounds of sulfur oxides (SOx), 30-50 lbs of nitrogen oxides (NOx), 40-70 lbs of airborne particulates, 2.7 lbs of total fluorides, and 1.3 lbs of volatile organic compounds (VOC's).

• Sixty percent of the world's lead supply comes from recycled batteries.