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Recycling: By the Numbers
- 544,000: Trees saved if every household in the United States replaced just one roll of virgin fiber paper towels (70 sheets) with 100 percent recycled ones.
- 20 million: Tons of electronic waste thrown away each year. One ton of scrap from discarded computers contains more gold than can be produced from 17 tons of gold ore.
- 9 cubic yards: Amount of landfill space saved by recycling one ton of cardboard.
- $160 billion: Value of the global recycling industry that employs over 1.5 million people.
- 79 million tons: Amount of waste material diverted away from disposal in 2005 through recycling and composting.
- 5 percent: Fraction of the energy it takes to recycle aluminum versus mining and refining new aluminum.
- 315 kg: Amount of carbon dioxide not released into the atmosphere each time a metric ton of glass is used to create new glass products.
- 98 percent: Percentage of glass bottles in Denmark that are refillable. 98 percent of those are returned by consumers for reuse.
- 51.5 percent: Percentage of the paper consumed in the U.S. that was recovered for recycling in 2005.
Sources: EPA, Wikipedia's aluminum recycling entry, Wikipedia's glass recycling entry
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