Environmental Facts about Paper Recycling

  • Recycling a four-foot stack of newspapers saves the equivalent of one 40-foot fir tree, that tree can filter up to 60 pounds of pollutants from the air each year.
  • One ton of recycled paper saves 3,700 pounds of lumber (17 trees!), 24,000 gallons of water and saves enough energy to power a television for 31 hours.
  • Making paper from recycled material uses 60% less energy than making virgin paper.
  • If every household in the U.S. reused a paper bag for one shopping trip, about 60,000 trees would be saved.
  • Recycling one ton of cardboard saves over nine cubic yards of landfill space, 9% of the average garbage dump consists of cardboard boxes (that's 100 cubic yards of waste just from cardboard).
  • Recycling corrugated cardboard cuts the emissions of sulfur dioxide in half and uses about 25% less energy than making cardboard from virgin pulp.
  • If all morning newspapers read in this country were recycled, 41,000 trees would be saved daily and 6 million tons of waste would never end up in landfills.
  • Recycling 1 ton of paper uses 7,000 fewer gallons of water, saves 35% of the water pollution and 70% of the air pollution produced in making new paper, uses 4100 KWH less energy, and saves 390 gallons of oil.
  • North America has 8% of the world's population, consumes 1/3 of the world's resources and produces almost half of the world's non-organic garbage.
  • 70% of landfilled waste could be either reused or recycled.
  • One liter of oil can contaminate a million liters of ground water.
  • In North America , approximately 20% of our paper, plastic, glass and metal goods are currently made from recycled material- experts believe that 50% could be easily achieved.