Did you know?

Fun Facts About Recycling

  • To create just one kilogram of consumer goods, manufacturers create 5 kilograms of waste

  • Canadians take home more than 55 million plastic bags each week

  • About 40,000 trees are cut down each day just to produce the newsprint for Canada's daily newspapers

  • Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a television for 3 hours

  • Aluminum is the most valuable recycling product, when they have been re-melted, they can be used in any aluminum made product, and there is no limit to how many times an aluminum can can be recycled

  • When recovered steel is used instead of iron ore to make new steel, water consumption is reduced by 50% and saves between 60-74% of the energy used to produce them from raw materials

  • PET (#1) plastic bottles are recycled into carpeting, fibrefill for pillows, fleece, sleeping bags, ski jackets, t-shirts, automotive parts, luggage and floor tiles.

  • HDPE (#2) plastic bottles are recycled into toys, traffic cones, new bottles, flower pots, trash cans, recycling bins and drainage pipes.

  • Over 90% of paper-made packaging is made from recycled fibre or sawmill residue

  • Canada is the worlds largest recovered paper and paperboard importer and it is also a leading exporter of recycled-content paper and paperboard

  • 10 soft drink bottles are needed to make the fibrefill for one ski jacket

  • 40 plastic bottles make one square metre of carpeting

  • For each tonne of recycled paper, 17 trees are saved, 380 gallons of oil and 7000 gallons of water are conserved

  • It takes 95% less energy to produce an aluminum pop can from recycled aluminum pop cans than it does to make a new aluminum pop can from raw materials

  • Throwing away an aluminum pop can is like pouring out a half-filled can of gasoline

  • Every tonne of steel cans recycled saves 1.36 tonnes of iron ore and 3.6 barrels of oil

  • - The glass you put in your Blue Bag, in Thunder Bay, gets crushed down to small granular-sized pieces, is mixed with gravel and is turned into the roads at the landfill. In many larger cities glass is turned into glassphalt and used on their streets like asphalt

  • The international recycling sign (the 3 arrows forming a triangle) is called the mobius loop, when it's dark on a light background it means the item can be recycled where facilities exist, and when it's light on a dark background it means it's been made out of recycled materials

  • In 2006, 93% of Canadian households had access to recycling programs for at least one of glass, paper, plastics and metal

  • Prince Edward Island is the only province to put a ban on non-refillable containers for soft-drinks and beer like plastic bottles and aluminum cans.

  • In 1999, recycling and composting activities prevented about 64 million tons of material from ending up in landfills and incinerators.

  • Ford Motor Company indicates that 75% of every vehicle is recyclable

  • More than 20,000,000 Hershey's Kisses are wrapped each day, that's using 133 square miles of aluminum foil, which is all recyclable

  • Motor oil never runs out, it just gets dirty. Oil can be recycled, re-refined and used again, reducing our reliance on imported oil

  • Incinerating 10,000 tonnes of waste creates one job, landfilling 10,000 tonnes of waste creates six jobs, recycling 10,000 tonnes of waste created 36 jobs

  • Recycling 35 percent of our trash reduces global warming emissions equivalent to taking 36 million cars off the road

  • You can make 20 aluminum pop cans out of recycled material with the same amount of energy it takes to make one new aluminum pop can

  • The energy saved from recycling one pound of steel can power a 60-watt light bulb for over a day

  • By recycling one glass bottle a 100-watt light bulb could run for 4 hours off the energy

  • The energy from recycling one plastic bottle can run a computer for 25 minutes

  • Thunder Bay has been able to Blue Bag recycle since 1998.

    • Making one tonne of recycled paper uses only about 60% of the energy needed to make a tonne of brand new (virgin) paper.

  • Recycling steel and tin cans saves 74% of the energy used to produce them.

  • The 36 billion aluminum cans sent to the landfill last year had a scrap value of more than $600 million. (Some day we'll be mining our landfills for the resources we've buried.)

  • Glass never wears out -- it can be recycled forever.

  • We save over a ton of resources for every ton of glass recycled -- 1,330 pounds of sand, 433 pounds of soda ash, 433 pounds of limestone, and 151 pounds of feldspar.