Living in the City

And how are the Americans doing about this thing called recycling ? Here are some of the possible answers: 1. 650 pounds of paper are used annually. If successfully recycled, 100 million tons of wood would b e saved every year. 2. 80% of what’s thrown away in American households are recyclable. 3. 2.5 MILLION plastic bottles are used every hour and not recycled. 4. enormous numbers of glass bottles and jars are thrown every day enough to fill a building like Sears Towers in Chicago . Think - all these jars are recyclable. 5. over 1,000,000 sea creatures are lost yearly due to plastic bags and other plastic garbage thrown into the ocean. Think Great Pacific Garbage Patch . It's twice the size of Texas and is floating somewhere between San Francisco and Hawaii . It's also 80 percent plastic, and weighs 3.5 million tons. Whoa! 6. recycling one ton or about 2,000 pounds of paper can save 17 trees, 2 barrels of oil which is enough to run the average car for 1,26

Protect Mother Earth through recycling. Here's what they are doing in some parts of the world. 1. In the Bay Area of San Francisco a concept called 'waste-to-energy' is in place in which garbage and other non-recyclable materials are burned in especially designed incinerators while the heat produced runs the steam turbine in an electric power plant. Is the city doing it right? Read their story here . 2. In Ontario Canada residents are recycling 38% of their waste considered far from its 2008 target of 60%. What they have is the landfill system. In Toronto and Hamilton and regions like York and Durham , they have curbside pickup programs. In Nova Scotia , the province “put deposits on virtually every beverage container; required businesses and industry to follow the same recycling rules as residents, offered cash incentives to municipalities to increase recycling – and banned organics from landfills.” Soon, they say “a ban on organic waste in landfills”