These next two weeks will be dedicated to overconsumption. How much do we, as a global community, consume, and how can we fix our overindulgence?
In this spirit, here are some interesting facts about our wastefulness from the Clean Air Council:
-The average American office worker uses about 500 disposable cups every year.
-Every year, Americans throw away enough paper and plastic cups, forks, and spoons to circle the equator 300 times.
-Seattle, Washington, Portland, Oregon, Westchester NY, Berkeley, and Malibu California have all banned Styrofoam foodware. Laguna Beach and Santa Monica have banned all polystyrene (#6) foodware.
-During 2009’s International Coastal Cleanup, the Ocean Conservancy found that plastic bags were the second-most common kind of waste found, at 1 out of ten items picked up and tallied.
-Over 7 billion pounds of PVC are thrown away in the U.S. each year. Only 18 million pounds of that, about one quarter of 1 percent, is recycled.
-Chlorine production for PVC uses almost as much energy as the annual output of eight medium-sized nuclear power plants each year.
-After Ireland created a 15-cent charge per plastic bag in 2002, bag consumption dropped by 90 percent. In 2008, the average person in Ireland used 27 plastic bags, while the average person in Britain used 220. The program has raised millions of euros in revenue.
-The state of California spends about 25 million dollars sending plastic bags to landfill each year, and another 8.5 million dollars to remove littered bags from streets.
-Every year, Americans use approximately 1 billion shopping bags, creating 300,000 tons of landfill waste.
-Plastic bags do not biodegrade. Light breaks them down into smaller and smaller particles that contaminate the soil and water and are expensive and difficult to remove.
-Less than 1 percent of plastic bags are recycled each year. Recycling one ton of plastic bags costs $4,000. The recycled product can be sold for $32.
