Tuesday, January 12, 2010

10 Eye Opening Facts


1. If every American gave up one paper napkin a day we'd save a billion pounds of paper from going to landfills each year.

2. If you turn the water off while brushing your teeth, you’d save about 5 gallons each day, or 1825 gallons each year.

3. At beach cleanups, cigarette butts are the most common form of trash found, usually one in every five items collected is a cigarette butt.

4. If everyone in the US went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would save 100 billion gallons of water, 70 million gallons of gas and 3 million acres of land. We would also eliminate greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 1.2 million tons of CO2.

5. The US discards 60 million water bottles a day, most are not recycled.

6. One of the largest collections of garbage is in the Pacific Ocean - the Eastern Garbage Patch floats between Hawaii and California and scientists estimate its size as two times bigger than Texas.

7. Human development and expansion is causing species to become extinct at 1,000 times the natural rate.

8. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, 75 percent of the electric power consumed in the average home comes from appliances like VCRs, televisions, stereos, computers, and kitchen appliances when they are turned off but plugged into the wall.

9. Babies are born with more than 200 man-made industrial chemicals in their blood.

10. Currently our planet uses well over 500,000,000,000 (that's 500 billion) plastic bags annually, or almost 1 million per minute.

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