At our Bowne Civic Association general meeting yesterday evening, Mr. Nicholas Circharo, Community Affairs Liaison at the NYC Department of Sanitation presented eye-opening information about sanitation. For example, it costs taxpayers $300 million to export waste. For more details, click HERE.
Cost is one of the reasons to recycle. Another is saving our environment. Mr. Circharo recommends that our community participate in the recycling program to save our money and the environment.
Some statistics:
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.
As an example, a school with 100 teachers would use 250,000 piece of paper annually. With that, a school like this would spend approximately $7,500 per year on printing on this paper and paper itself costs $25,000, not to mention costs of copy toner and service agreements.
Every year, Americans use more than 90 million tons of paper and paperboard. That’s an average of 700 pounds of paper products per person each year. Every year in America, more than 2 billion books, 350 million magazines, and 24 billion newspapers are published.
In the U.S. industry moves, mines, extracts, shovels, burns, wastes, pumps and disposes of 4 million pounds of material in order to provide one average middle-class American family’s needs for one year. In sum, Americans waste or cause to be wasted nearly 1 million pounds of materials per person every year.
Even when it’s in landfills, plastic is at risk of blowing away and ending up in rivers or oceans. Even more of a risk is plastic litter. … Holidaymakers visiting beaches and leaving behind their bottles, food packaging and cigarette butts on the sand directly contribute to plastic getting into the ocean. Not only does this affect our lands, it kills animals. For more details click HERE.
Recycling saves costs on consumer and office goods. For more details click HERE.
The following information was handed out at our meeting. We also received a free gift of a cool reusable bag.
For more information about the Zero Waste Pledge, click HERE.
You can take New York’s Pledge for Zero Waste and receive a free gift HERE.