To produce each week's Sunday newspapers, 500,000 trees must be cut down.

*Recycling a single run of the Sunday New York Times would save 75,000 trees.

* If all our newspaper was recycled, we could save about 250,000,000 trees each year!

* During World War II when raw materials were scarce, 33% of all paper was recycled. After the war, this number decreased sharply.

* If you had a 15-year-old tree and made it into paper grocery bags, you'd get about 700 of them. A supermarket could use all of them in under an hour! This means in one year, one supermarket goes through 60,500,000 paper bags! Imagine how many supermarkets there are in the U.S.!!!

* The amount of wood and paper we throw away each year is enough to heat 50,000,000 homes for 20 years.

* When you smell a dump, what you're actually smelling is the paper in the dump!

* The average household throws away 13,000 separate pieces of paper each year. Most is packaging and junk mail.

* Each ton (2000 pounds) of recycled paper can save 17 trees, 380 gallons of oil, three cubic yards of landfill space, 4000 kilowatts of energy, and 7000 gallons of water. This represents a 64% energy savings, a 58% water savings, and 60 pounds less of air pollution!

* The 17 trees saved (above) can absorb a total of 250 pounds of carbon dioxide from the air each year. Burning that same ton of paper would create 1500 pounds of carbon dioxide.

* The construction costs of a paper mill designed to use waste paper is 50 to 80% less than the cost of a mill using new pulp.

	Paper - On average one tree can produce 80500 sheets of paper. Last term alone the school used 3.5 trees worth of paper and wasted 14 kg of paper
	Plant a tree - 65 cans will earn enough money in recycling to plant a tree.
	Sarawak Agonizes over plan to clear rainforest - Borneo Bulletin, Saturday 18th February 2006. related news article
	Mongabay News reports - China funds massive palm oil plantation in rainforest of Borneo World Wildlife Fund release, August 12, 2005 related news article
	WWF for a Living Planet - this website includes details of the Heart of Borneo The Heart of Borneo
	WWF Expeditions in Conservation - this website includes details of the Heart of Borneo Expeditions in Borneo
	Borneo's Palm Oil Politics -Growing demand for palm for oil is destroying the environment.
	Borneo's Palm Oil
	Metal Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a TV for three hours -- or the equivalent of a half a gallon of gasoline. * 350,000 aluminum cans are produced every minute! * More aluminum goes into beverage cans than any other product . * Once an aluminum can is recycled, it can be part of a new can within six weeks. * During the time it takes you to read this sentence, 50,000 12-ounce aluminum cans are made. * An aluminum can that is thrown away will still be a can 500 years from now! * There is no limit to the amount of times an aluminum can can be recycled. * Aluminum can manufacturers have been making cans lighter -- in 1972 each pound of aluminum produced 22 cans; today it yields 29 cans. * We use over 80,000,000,000 aluminum pop cans every year. * At one time, aluminum was more valuable than gold! * A 60-watt light bulb can be run for over a day on the amount of energy saved by recycling 1 pound of steel. In one year in the United States, the recycling of steel saves enough energy to heat and light 18,000,000 homes! * Every ton of recycled steel saves 2,500 pounds of iron ore, 1,000 of coal, and 40 pounds of limestone.
	Paper

Plastic

· Recycled soda bottles can be spun to make fiber filling for pillows, quilts and jackets.

· HDPE (detergent bottles, milk jugs, plastic yogurt containers) can be recycled into plastic pipes, plastic lumber, flowerpots, trashcans, or bottles used for non-food applications (for example, soaps).

· Five recycled soft drink bottles make enough fiberfill for a man's ski jacket. Thirty-six recycled bottles can make one square yard of carpet.

· Plastic bags and other plastic garbage thrown into the ocean kill as many as 1,000,000 sea creatures every year!

· Recycling plastic saves twice as much energy as burning it in an incinerator.

Glass

Every month, we throw out enough glass bottles and jars to fill up a giant skyscraper. All of these jars are recyclable!

* The energy saved from recycling one glass bottle can run a 100-watt light bulb for four hours. It also causes 20% less air pollution and 50% less water pollution than when a new bottle is made from raw materials.

* A modern glass bottle would take 4000 years or more to decompose -- and even longer if it's in the landfill.

* Mining and transporting raw materials for glass produces about 385 pounds of waste for every ton of glass that is made. If recycled glass is substituted for half of the raw materials, the waste is cut by more than 80%.

Trash

* The first real recycling program was introduced in New York City in the 1890s. The city's first recycling plant was built in 1898.

* About one-third of an average dump is made up of packaging material!

* The highest point in Ohio is "Mount Rumpke," which is actually a mountain of trash at the Rumpke sanitary landfill!

* Between 5 and 15% of what we throw away contains hazardous substances.

Miscellaneous * Every week about 20 species of plants and animals become extinct! * Rainforests are being cut down at the rate of 100 acres per minute! * One-third of the water used in most homes is flushed down the toilet. * A single quart of motor oil, if disposed of improperly, can contaminate up to 2,000,000 gallons of fresh water.