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New Brunswick Environmental Trust Fund
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 Cool Facts
- One tonne of recycled paper saves 17 trees.
- Recycling one glass bottle saves enough energy to turn on a 100-watt lightbulb for four hours.
- It takes one million years for one disposable plastic pen to decompose in a landfill.
- The average person in North America uses 250 kg of paper every year. Just over four and a half average sized trees would be saved every year if that person recycled the paper. Over a lifetime of 70 years that's 325 trees per person. At that rate, a city the size of Vancouver could save more than 812-million trees just by recycling paper.
- Recycling paper to make new paper products uses 65% less water, causes 75% less air pollution and 35% less water pollution.
- Making new things out of recycled glass uses 25% less energy.
- Making new things out recycled iron uses 74% less energy.
- Making new things out of recycled copper uses 90% less energy.
- Making new things out of recycled aluminium uses 95% less energy.
- You can reduce carbon dioxide emissions (a greenhouse gas) by 1,870 kg a year when you recycle all the waste newsprint, cardboard, glass, and metal from your house.
- On average, each and everyone one of us makes about 9.5 kg of waste a day.
- When you recycle one aluminium pop can you save enough energy to run your TV for three hours.
- One tree can filter up to 132 kg of pollutants from the air every year.
- Disposable diapers take 500 years to decompose.
- Glass can be recycled forever because it never wears out.
- One gallon (4.546 litres) of used motor oil can contaminate one million gallons (4,546,000 litres) of water.
- Almost four million computer disks are thrown away everyday. That's more than a half-billion every year. It takes almost 500 years for a disk to break down.
- There are more than 1,000 plastic milk jugs and other bottles in a recycled plastic park bench.
- A one-metre high stack of recycled newspapers saves a 10-metre high pine tree.
- Paper takes up almost 35 per cent of all landfill space
- The average aluminium can contains more than 50% recycled aluminium.
- A recycled aluminium can can be back on the shelf at your corner store in about 90 days.
- Making pop cans from recycled aluminium reduces air pollution in the process by almost 95%.
- Five recycled two-litre pop bottles can make one extra large T-shirt.
- Twenty-five recycled two-litre pop bottles can make a sweater.
- Thirty-five recycled two-litre pop bottles make enough fiberfill (the insulation that keeps you warm) for one sleeping bag.
- Since 1950, we have used up as much stuff (especially natural resources) as every person who ever lived on the planet before that year.
- Companies make five kg of waste to make one kg of the things they sell.
- Almost 40,000 trees are cut down every day to make the paper for Canada's daily newspapers.
- Plastic can take up to 400 years to break down in a landfill.
- Recycling glass instead of making it from scratch with virgin sand reduces mining waste by 80%, water use by 50%, and air pollution by 20%.
- By the age of six months, a Canadian baby has used up as much resources as the average person in a developing country uses in her whole life.
- Canadians create more than one million tonnes of garbage every year. That more than one-tonne per household.
- Recycling one tonne of paper saves three-cubic metres of landfill space, 4,000 kilowatt-hours of energy, 29,000 litres of water, and 30 kg of air pollution.
- Recycled glass is called cullet.
- Recycled glass can be used for sandblasting, ceramic tiles, and costume jewellery.
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