The Price of Quenching Our Thirst

In 2002, the United States drank over 189 BILLION bottles, cans, or boxes of juice and sadly less than half of these bottles were not recycled. That means more than 94.5 billion bottles of garbage was either burned, littered on the streets or ended up in the wastelands. Being littered is bad enough but when we see that more than 94.5 billion are scattered on our soil, we may not feel much but when we see what these garbage can do…we may feel guilty.

Many countries are using these bottles to create energy and other productive uses. Hopefully, after you read this you will think not to litter but rather recycle for the sake of our planet.

Here are some facts about the topic of bottles.

1. People in the U.S. consume more packaged drinks per capita than in any other country-about 350 aluminum cans per person per year, compared to 103 in Sweden, 88 in the United Kingdom, and 14 in France.
2. In 2001, 285 million Americans failed to recycle some 51 billion cans-enough to encircle the Earth 153 times if laid end-to-end. (That same year, 451 million residents of 18 European nations wasted only 8.9 billion cans.)
3. Making 1 million tons of aluminum cans from virgin materials requires 5 million tons of bauxite ore and the energy equivalent of 32 million barrels of crude oil. Recycling the cans, in comparison, saves all of the bauxite and more than 75 percent of the energy, and avoids about 75 percent of the pollutants.
4. Recycling just one aluminum can saves enough electricity to run a laptop computer for 4 hours.
5. Making 1 million tons of plastic bottles from virgin materials (petroleum and other fossil fuels) generates an estimated 732,000 tons of climate-altering greenhouse gases.
6. Plastic bottles made from PET (polyethylene terephthalate) can be recycled into many products, including beverage bottles, plastic strapping, fleece jackets, sleeping bags, and carpets. Yet in 2002, less than a fifth of all plastic beverage bottles in the U.S. were recycled.
7. Recycling glass yields a 10 percent energy savings and preserves the life of the glass furnace. Yet currently, less than a third of glass bottles sold in the United States are recycled.

Please, next time you got an empty Coke can or an empty water bottle, find a garbage can and throw it in there NOT on the road. It may look queer but in the long run, if we continued our bad habits mankind will think again saying recycling is “queer.”