The largest component of trash in landfills is newspapers (14% by volume).

Enough energy is saved by recycling one aluminum can to run a TV set for three hours or to light one 100 watt bulb for 20 hours.

Making cans from recycled aluminum cuts related air pollution (for example, sulfur dioxides, which create acid rain) by 95%.

The energy saved from recycling a glass bottle will light a 100-watt bulb for four hours.

Most bottles and jars contain at least 25% recycled glass.

To produce one trillion pages of paper takes 8.5 million acres of trees, representing an area larger than the country of Belgium or the state of Maryland.

According to Clean Ocean Action, recycling a 36-inch tall stack of newspaper saves the equivalent of about 14% of the average household electric bill.

The average American throws out about 61 lbs. of tin cans every month.

It takes 390 gallons of oil to produce a ton of paper.

One tree can filter up to 60 pounds of pollutants from the air each year.

If you recycled the New York Times every day for a year, you would prevent 15 pounds of air pollution. If everyone who subscribes to the New York Times recycled, we'd keep over 6,000 tons of pollution out of the air.

Americans comprise about five percent of the world's population, and annually produce 27 percent of the world's garbage.

In prehistoric times, 60% of the earth's surface was covered by forests - today that amount has been reduced by 30% and is still shrinking.

Newspaper pulp starts out as 99% water and 1% fiber.

Americans throw away the equivalent of more than 30 million trees in newsprint each year.

The average person generates 8 pounds of newspaper in a month.

The average college student produces 640 pounds of solid waste each year, including 500 disposable cups and 320 pounds of paper.

That ton of paper, when disposed of, takes up nearly 8 cubic feet of public landfill space.

It takes a 15-year-old tree to produce 700 grocery bags.

It takes 17 pulpwood market-sized trees to make a ton of paper, or one tree makes about 11,500 pages of 8.5 X 11, 20 pound paper.

We save over a ton of resources for every ton of glass recycled - 1,330 pounds of sand, 433 pounds of soda ash, 433 pounds of limestone, and 151 pounds of feldspar.

A ton of paper made from 100% wastepaper, instead of virgin fiber, saves 17 trees, 7,000 gallons of water, 60 pounds of air-polluting effluents, 4100kwh of energy, and 3 cubic yards of landfill space.

Glass never wears out -- it can be recycled forever.

That public landfill is approximately 36% waste paper products.

Each one million of pages of paper not printed saves 85 pulp trees.

One person uses two pine trees worth of paper products each year.

Every day Americans use steel and tin cans equivalent to make a steel pipe running from Los Angeles to New York and back.

Five recycled plastic bottles make enough fiberfill to stuff a ski jacket.

In a lifetime, the average American will throw away 600 times his or her adult weight in garbage. This means that each adult will leave a legacy of 90,000 lbs. of trash for his or her children.

Americans throw away enough aluminum every three months to rebuild our entire commercial air fleet.

Today, 62 million newspapers will be printed in the U.S. and 44 million will be thrown away. That means the equivalent of about 500,000 trees will be dumped into landfills this week.

Americans discard 4 million tons of office paper every year - enough to build a 12 foot high wall of paper from New York to California.

Recycling one ton of paper saves about 17 trees.

Throwing away an aluminum beverage container wastes as much energy as pouring out a soda can half-filled with gasoline.