GreeniacsArticles
Waste
SEARCH GREENIACS.COM
Latest News
- Gregory Jaczko to Resign as N.R.C. Chairman After Stormy Tenure
- Green Blog: On the Horizon, a Northern Lights Extravaganza
- Indonesia forest moratorium won't meet climate pledge - Norway
- Kakha Bendukidze Holds Fate of Gene-Engineered Salmon
- Climate models indicate likely El Nino return: Australia
- Pollution-hunting robot fish take to the sea
Green Facts
-
Turning off the tap when brushing your teeth can save as much as 10 gallons a day per person.
-
A tree that provides a home with shade from the sun can reduce the energy required to run the air conditioner and save an additional 200 to 2,000 pounds of carbon over its lifetime.
-
You will save 100 pounds of carbon for each incandescent bulb that you replace with a compact fluorescent bulb (CFL), over the life of the bulb.
-
If every U.S. household turned the thermostat down by 10 degrees for seven hours each night during the cold months, and seven hours each weekday, it would prevent nearly gas emissions.
-
Americans use 100 million tin and steel cans every day.
-
It takes 6,000,000 trees to make 1 year's worth of tissues for the world.
-
In the United States, automobiles produce over 20 percent of total carbon emissions. Walk or bike and you'll save one pound of carbon for every mile you travel.
-
Less than 1% of electricity in the United States is generated from solar power.
-
Plastic bags and other plastic garbage thrown into the ocean kill as many as 1,000,000 sea creatures every year.
-
The World Health Organization estimates that 2 million people die prematurely worldwide every year due to air pollution.
-
Recycling 100 million cell phones can save enough energy to power 18,500 homes in the U.S. for a year.
-
In California homes, about 10% of energy usage is related to TVs, DVRs, cable and satellite boxes, and DVD players.
-
Every week about 20 species of plants and animals become extinct.
-
Recycling 1 million laptop computers can save the amount of energy used by 3,657 homes in the U.S. over the course of a year.
-
A laptop consumes five times less electricity than a desktop computer.
-
A steel mill using recycled scrap reduces related water pollution, air pollution, and mining wastes by about 70%.
-
A single quart of motor oil, if disposed of improperly, can contaminate up to 2,000,000 gallons of fresh water.
-
An aluminum can that is thrown away instead of recycled will still be a can 500 years from now!
-
One recycled aluminum can will save enough energy to run a 100-watt bulb for 20 hours, a computer for 3 hours, or a TV for 2 hours.
-
Nudge your thermostat up two degrees in the summer and down two degrees in the winter to prevent 2,000 pounds of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere.
-
Americans throw away enough aluminum to rebuild our entire commercial fleet of airplanes every 3 months
-
American workers spend an average of 47 hours per year commuting through rush hour traffic. This adds up to 23 billion gallons of gas wasted in traffic each year.
-
States with bottle deposit laws have 35-40% less litter by volume.
-
Rainforests are being cut down at the rate of 100 acres per minute.
-
You will save 300 pounds of carbon dioxide for every 10,000 miles you drive if you always keep your car’s tires fully inflated.
-
Bamboo absorbs 35% more carbon dioxide than equivalent stands of trees.
-
Refrigerators built in 1975 used 4 times more energy than current models.
-
Current sea ice levels are at least 47% lower than they were in 1979.
-
Recycling aluminum saves 95% of the energy used to make the material from scratch.
-
Glass can be recycled over and over again without ever wearing down.
-
Washing your clothes in cold or warm instead of hot water saves 500 pounds of carbon dioxide a year, and drying your clothes on a clothesline six months out of the year would save another 700 pounds.
-
For every 38,000 bills consumers pay online instead of by mail, 5,058 pounds of greenhouse gases are avoided and two tons of trees are preserved.
-
77% of people who commute to work by car drive alone.
-
Americans throw away more than 120 million cell phones each year, which contribute 60,000 tons of waste to landfills annually.
-
Due to tiger poaching, habitat destruction, and other human-tiger conflicts, tigers now number around 3,200—a decrease in population by about 70% from 100 years ago.
-
82 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. come from burning fossil fuels.
-
Recycling for one year at Stanford University saved the equivalent of 33,913 trees and the need for 636 tons of iron ore, coal, and limestone.
-
Shaving 10 miles off of your weekly driving pattern can eliminate about 500 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions a year.
-
You’ll save two pounds of carbon for every 20 glass bottles that you recycle.


Have you ever eaten at your local restaurant or coffee shop and seen those green bins labeled “compost only”? Well if you are like me and stand there with your cup, fork, spoon, and plate in hand wondering which bin to put each thing, you have come to the right place...

Once you've poured that last drop of juice or spooned out a final taste of yogurt, you (hopefully) throw that plastic container into a big blue recycling bin. You (hopefully) encourage your friends to do the same. You feel good about recycling because you know that your juice jug won't contribute to the 3.5 million tons of trash in the Great Pacific...
There are many types of pollution in our environment: water pollution, air pollution, noise pollution, and more. But one of these – space pollution – is in a category all by itself. Space pollution refers to the gathering debris in orbit around the Earth, made up of discarded rocket boosters, broken satellites, and more. And just like the other...
In today’s world and economy, plastic is one of the most important materials we use in our products—from our toothbrushes to our cars. Plastic is everywhere, and for a good reason. It is so versatile, strong, flexible, light, and cheap. So why is plastic bad? For one thing, it is derived from petroleum, a resource that is not infinite and whose...
It’s a basic biological truth that we sometimes forget: we all create waste. The rich tend to produce more than the poor, but all of us, whether politician or pauper, leave something behind. The advanced waste disposal systems in industrialized nations help us to ignore the waste we produce, but the world’s poor don’t have this luxury, and...
Every year, our world produces thousands of tons of garbage. The United States alone generates over 230 million tons of trash, equally about 4.6 pounds per person in a single day. Only a small percentage of that garbage is recycled and the rest of it is incinerated or piled into landfills. But as landfills across the world are closing...
In May of 2009, Dell Computers announced a new policy that it would not export E-waste (electronic waste) to developing countries. In February of 2010, Hewlett Packard announced a similar policy. These announcements brought a degree of attention to the practice of shipping electronic waste from developed countries to developing ones...
What is the Future of Recycling? Over the past 40 years, recycling programs across the United States have made significant progress. Currently, there are over 8,000 curbside recycling programs in operation in the U.S., a significant jump from 1973 when Berkeley, CA gave birth to the first program. Additionally, in the past 15 years, the U.S. has...
As recycling programs across the country continue to expand and provide more options, the question as to what can and cannot be recycled may become more and more confusing. Some typical questions may be: can I recycle this pizza box with my other paper; should I recycle this broken bottle; do I need to wash out my plastic shampoo bottle...
A social movement called dumpstering is one of the most repulsive and fascinating environmental movements, and has regained popularity over the last few years. Also known as dumpster diving, urban foraging, and freeganism, dumpstering is basically the act of looking through dumpsters to find food, furniture, and household items to use. Dumpster...
Living in San Francisco, this conjures up many images, so how does composting fit in? The city of San Francisco has a long history of being eco-forward, allowing residents and city officials to take a lot of pride in their environmentally friendly way of life. This past year, the city took their eco-minded practices to the next level: San...
Batteries are commonplace in most households. Americans purchase nearly 3 billion dry-cell batteries every year to power radios, toys, cellular phones, watches, laptop computers, and portable power tools. Most of these batteries are single use, or dry-cell, and the average person in the U.S. discards 8 of these per year. Many states consider...
My husband and I score high on compatibility quizzes. Our ideal vacation is a beach, a book, and peering up from the page only long enough to discuss our next meal. We relish silly British sitcoms and ballroom dancing. We disagree on one thing, though: I’m a Tosser and he’s a Keeper. I would recycle anything not nailed down—even important...
It is no secret that human beings have advanced to become a throw-away society. As wealth increases, the need to skimp and save materials decreases. Packaging is ignored as a relatively small price to pay for the convenience of single-serving sized items. Once in the garbage can, society tends to forget about the gargantuan landfill that this...
Most of us connect water pollution with oil spills and littering, and maybe even some of us remember the acid rain lessons from grade school. However, a new threat is facing our national water supplies: pharmaceutical products. Nationwide studies of watersheds and drinking water supplies have confirmed traces of many different chemicals...