Recently the Northern area of the Big Island of Hawaii, in the North Kohala District, people got together for the annual Trash Fashion and Trash Art Work Bash, as well as a recycling workshop. Events like this remind us to be kind to the Earth and fun was had by all who attended the get together.
It isn't always easy to take the time to do the proper things with our trash so Linda Damas hosted a recycling workshop which was free for all who registered for the event. Linda Damas has been active in Recycle Hawaii since its grassroots days in the l980’s. She has represented Recycle Hawaii at local events and given many recycling presentations to schools and civic groups. In 2005-2008, she became one of Hawaii County’s first Recycling Specialists to help implement the State HI5 program on the Big Island. She recently assisted with Recycle Hawaii’s Zero Waste study, which has been adopted by the County’s Department of Environmental Management.
Participant are told to bring a floorplan of their house if they have one and come learn how to set up efficient and user friendly home and recycling with Linda Damas from Recycle Hawaii.
The State of Hawaii's HI5 program is a great sucsess when ever you buy something in a bottle or can that is easily recycled you pay a deposit on the item which you get most of all of the money back if you take your items to the recycle centers near where you live, or the recyclables my be dropped of at a large number of donation points and the recycle credit goes to help community organasations.
There are currently over a dozen states with the deposit program. My question is; why don't we have a recycle deposit program in all 50 states.
Did You Know?
•An aluminum can that is thrown away will still be a can 500 years from now
•Used aluminum beverage cans are the most recycled item in the U.S., but other types of aluminum, such as siding, gutters, car components, storm window frames, and lawn furniture can also be recycled.
•Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a TV for three hours — or the equivalent of a half a gallon of gasoline.
•We use over 80,000,000,000 aluminum soda cans every year.
•To produce each week’s Sunday newspapers, 500,000 trees must be cut down.
•If all our newspaper was recycled, we could save about 250,000,000 trees each year!
•If every American recycled just one-tenth of their newspapers, we would save about 25,000,000 trees a year.
•The amount of wood and paper we throw away each year is enough to heat 50,000,000 homes for 20 years.
•The average household throws away 13,000 separate pieces of paper each year. Most is packaging and junk mail. Approximately 1 billion trees worth of paper are thrown away every year in the U.S.
•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!
•Plastic bags and other plastic garbage thrown into the ocean kill as many as 1,000,000 sea creatures every year!
•Recycling plastic saves twice as much energy as burning it in an incinerator.
•A modern glass bottle would take 4000 years or more to decompose — and even longer if it’s in the landfill.
•Mining and transporting raw materials for glass produces about 385 pounds of waste for every ton of glass that is made. If recycled glass is substituted for half of the raw materials, the waste is cut by more than 80%.
•About one-third of an average dump is made up of packaging material!
•Every year, each American throws out about 1,200 pounds of organic garbage that can be composted.
•On average, it costs $30 per ton to recycle trash, $50 to send it to the landfill, and $65 to $75 to incinerate it.
•A single quart of motor oil, if disposed of improperly, can contaminate up to 2,000,000 gallons of fresh water.
•On average, each one of us produces 4.4 pounds of solid waste each day. This adds up to almost a ton of trash per person, per year.
•A typical family consumes 182 gallons of soda, 29 gallons of juice, 104 gallons of milk, and 26 gallons of bottled water a year. That’s a lot of containers — make sure they’re recycled!
For more information go to: http://www.yourenew.com/ and
http://www.recycling-revolution.com/recycling-facts.html
These recycling facts have been compiled from various sources including the National Recycling Coalition, the Environmental Protection Agency, and Earth911.org.
