Trash Stats

Have you ever wondered WHY we recycle? There are actually a couple of different reasons.

The first reason is simply dollars-and-cents (or whatever your currency is!). For some things, it is cheaper to collect and reuse material than it is to produce new stuff. Recycling of aluminum is an example of this. The cost of making cans out of recycled aluminum is just 5% of the cost of making cans from new aluminum metal produced from ore. In other words, for every $100 a manufacturer would have to spend to use new aluminum, he or she would only spend $5 to use recycled metal. That's a pretty big savings!

A second reason is that recycling sometimes uses less energy and pollution than producing new materials. This is true of paper recycling, although it's hard to get a firm estimate of the savings. Sometimes, recycled materials are more expensive than new. Regular copier paper is not usually recycled into new copier paper because it just costs too much. Rather, the paper is recycled into lower qualities of paper, or into cardboard.

Another reason to recycle is to decrease the amount of trash that goes into landfills, has to be burned, or is disposed of in some other way. We throw away an awful lot of stuff, and it has to go somewhere! In 2009, Americans generated about 240 million tons (480,000,000,000 pounds). This works out to roughly 2000 pounds of trash per person in the U.S. per year. We won't be filling up our disposal sites as fast if we can figure out how to reuse at least some of this junk!

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has a website that will give you more information about recycling.