Benefits
By recycling, we are reducing energy and water usage, lowering pollution, improving air and water quality, strengthening the economy, helping to preserve landfill space, and saving natural resources for future generations.
Trash Facts
For every $11 Americans spend on food, $1 is for packaging.
Recycling a four-foot stack of newspaper produces as much paper pulp as a 40-foot pine tree.
Manufacturing recycled paper produces 55% less air and water pollution than manufacturing paper from virgin wood.
Recycling your daily newspaper for one year would provide the pulp equivalent of 2/3 acre of commercial forest.
Recycling one ton of newspaper saves 17 pine trees. About 600 pines trees are saved each day by Austin’s recycling efforts.
Every day American businesses generate enough paper to circle the Earth 20 times.
Recycling just one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a TV for 3 hours.
Manufacturing cans from recycled aluminum produces 96% less air & water pollution than manufacturing cans from raw material (bauxite).
If you stacked all the steel cans that were recycled each year, they would reach from here to the moon and back again more than three times.
You could power 18 million American homes with the energy saved by recycling steel each year.
Motor oil does not wear out. It simply gets dirty. It can be re-refined and used again and again.
When used motor oil is poured into the ground, it can seep into the groundwater & contaminate drinking water supplies. A single quart of motor oil can pollute 250,000 gallons of water in our rivers and lakes.
There is a gigantic area in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, as far away from land as you can get, that’s filling with plastic trash. It’s the size of Texas. There are five spots like this on the world’s oceans. For more, check out Captain Moore’s website.
Recycle, not burn, wheat
Wheat board is a rigid building panel produced from straw and or a similar fibrous raw material. The panels have proved themselves in a wide variety of applications and market conditions all round the world. These rigid building panels are designed to replace labor intensive 2×4 stud and drywall construction for interior partition walls. The environmental friendly, economical, and recyclable solid panels are made of all natural fibrous raw materials and feature thermal and acoustic insulation as well as fire and termite resistance Although it has been used in over 20 countries for more than 50 years, strawboard panels have only been introduced to the U.S. in the past few years.
Why is this important? Sixty million acres of wheat are grown each year in the U.S. After harvesting the wheat grain the byproduct straw is an environmental disposal problem (140 million tons per year). Currently being disposed by open air burning, severe seasonal air quality problems have occurred across the country. Strawboard panels reduce and could eliminate this problem. According to a manufacturer it takes about 18 acres of wheat straw (replaceable every year) to build a 1,760 sq. ft. house. It takes the equivalent of one acre of clear cut forest (replaceable every thirty years) to build the same house.
Please call or email if you are interested in building with wheat panels.
Computer Recycling
Austin residents can make a phone call and for $10 recycle their used computers.The city’s solid waste department schedules a curbside pickup, and Goodwill representatives will come and collect the equipment.
The program makes recycling easy and cheap, lowering the chances that used computers will end up in a landfill. As it does with its existing computer recycling program, Goodwill will refurbish and sell the computers. It uses the profits to help people with disabilities find jobs.
The three partners say the curbside pickup service is one of just a handful of similar programs nationwide. They hope it will become a model of a low-cost, public-private partnership that could be replicated elsewhere.
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