How much recycled material is thrown away

BYU-Idaho values suggestions and ideas that can improve the university. Use our Feedback Form to let us know what you think. Recycling a single run of the Sunday New York Times would save 75, trees. If every American recycled just one-tenth of their newspapers, we would save about 25,, trees a year. In some rural communities, where city budgets are tight and transportation costs high, the shift in market forces has been too much to bear.

Once, they could make money selling recycling. Now they have to pay people to take it off their hands. As a result, the county is now landfilling all of its plastic waste, even opening a new section in its landfill to handle more. Nearby Nogales, Arizona, is not having much luck either. He said he had tried to find another local contractor to take the recycling but had received an exorbitant quote.

Monterey County and the city of El Cerrito, both in California, have stopped accepting mixed plastics, local officials said. In Boulder, Colorado, the local not-for-profit recycling organization is stockpiling the roughly 16 tons of mixed plastics it receives each month, in hopes that some kind of domestic market will return.

The recycler for Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota, Eureka Recycling, has never taken most mixed plastics, because it saw no market. Even so, it has seen a major revenue drop and had to lay off workers because of the China crisis. The town of Sierra Vista, Arizona, is ending curbside recycling altogether.

For them it was very distant, until it hit home. County officials in Honolulu are pushing to burn recyclables in a local incinerator, arguing it is too expensive to pay to ship them somewhere. So far, local environmentalists have resisted the idea. Despite the challenges, a handful of wealthy cities with sophisticated technology said they had been able to find foreign markets for mixed plastic. Santa Monica bills itself as a green city, with over miles of bikeways and a plan to become carbon neutral by Yet even here, environmentalism is hitting a wall.

The Santa Monica community recycling center, the only one on the west side of Los Angeles, was in many ways a recycling success story. This story was first published on July 19, and updated on December 20, with the news of the Royal Statistical Society's recognition.

National Geographic is committed to reducing plastics pollution. Learn more about our non-profit activities at natgeo. This story is part of Planet or Plastic? Learn what you can do to reduce your own single-use plastics , and take your pledge.

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Animals Wild Cities Morocco has 3 million stray dogs. These clothes, towels, bedding and other material can be donated to needy charities, converted into other uses or returned into fibers for other projects if recycled. Americans generate more than 64 million gallons of leftover house-paint each year, enough to fill Olympic-sized swimming pools.

To determine how much paint you really need, use this calculator: Multiply the length times the height of each wall to determine total square feet to cover. Then, multiply then total square feet times the number of walls to cover.

Americans generate approximately 40 million tons of food waste each year, about 95 percent of that is discarded. Approximately 50 million tons of e-waste is generated around the world. However, about 70 percent of the materials inside those electronics can be collected through recycling and repurposed into other goods or raw materials. To manufacture, distribute and retail one computer and monitor, it takes approximately pounds of fuel, nearly 50 pounds of chemicals and more than one ton of water.

For every one million cell phones recycled, we recover more than 35, pounds of copper, pounds of silver and 75 pounds of gold. The average construction of a 2,square-foot home generates about 2 tons of unused scrap material. A roof replacement generates pounds of shingle waste per square foot.

If those damaged shingles are recycled, the average-sized roof can help pave about feet of road. Arrow Left Arrow Right.