12 Facts That Will Shock You

1. The average American generates 4.6 pounds of trash every day (57 tons in a lifetime). This means that 5% of the world’s people generate 40% of the world’s waste.

2. Colorado residents produce more than 9 pounds of trash each day.

3. Americans throw away: 43,000 tons of food each day, 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour, 4 million tons of junk mail every year, 20,000 cars a day, 270 million tires every year, 65 billion aluminum soda cans per year, 1.6 billion pens every year and 25 billion styrofoam cups per year.

4. Every year we make enough plastic film to shrink-wrap Texas.

5. We throw away enough aluminum cans to rebuild our commercial air fleet every three months.

6. Every day we discard enough iron and steel to supply all of the nation’s automakers.

7. We generate an additional five million tons of waste during the holidays. Four million tons of this is wrapping paper and shopping bags.

8. The average American uses 680 pounds of paper a year. One billion trees worth of paper are thrown away every year in the United States.

9. Each year, we throw away enough office paper to build a 12-foot wall from Los Angeles to New York City.

10. We toss out enough paper & plastic cups, forks and spoons to circle the equator 300 times. The average American office worker goes through around 500 disposable cups every year.

11. Americans make nearly 400 billion photocopies a year — about 750,000 copies every minute of every day.

12. U.S. businesses use 21 million tons of paper. That’s about 175 pounds of paper for every American.

Sources: National Recycling Coalition; U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; U.S. Department of Energy; Center for Sustainable Systems, University of Michigan.