Recycling is processing used materials or waste into new products or material to prevent waste of potentially useful materials. Recycling is a key component of modern waste reduction and is the third component of the “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” waste hierarchy.

  1. Recycling one tonne of paper saves 17 trees, 317 liters of oil, 4,100 kilowatts of energy, 2.4 cubic meter of landfill space and 27 kilograms of air pollution.
  2. Recycling a ton of glass saves the equivalent to 34 liters of oil.
  3. Increasing steel recycling by 50% would save the energy equivalent to 7 nuclear power plants. Every ton of recycled steel saves 1133.98 Kgs of iron ore, 453.59 Kgs of coal, and 18.14 Kgs of limestone.
  4. Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a TV for three hours. During the time it takes you to read this sentence 141,747.840 Kgs of aluminum cans are made. Aluminum can be recycled ad infinitum (forever!).
  5. A glass bottle will take 40,000 years to decompose if it’s not recycled. Recycling a single glass bottle will save enough energy to power a light bulb for four hours.
  6. Plastic take 450 years just to begin decomposing. It takes another 50 to 80 years to be completely decomposed. This also means that every single piece of plastic even made has not even started to decompose.
  7. Paper bags are not really better than plastic bags. Approximately 14 million trees are cut down each year for paper bags. Remember to use your cloth bags!
  8. Thanks to the tremendous amount of reckless waste disposal, we have a garbage island floating in our ocean, mostly comprised of plastics – the size of India, Europe and Mexico combined!
  9. If all our newspaper was recycled, we could save about 250 million trees each year!
  10. The amount of wood and paper we throw away each year is enough to heat 50 million homes for 20 years.