Recycling
By: Cyrell Estrada
I will show some important things about Recycling.
Each year we dump cell phones containing worth over $60 million in gold and silver. Recycling glass is important because, if you recycle 1 glass bottle that is enough to keep your T.V. going for 15 mins. The amount of wood and paper that are thrown away every year is enough to heat 50,000,000 homes for 20 years.
Every 1 million cell phones that are recycled, 35,274 lbs of copper, 772 lbs of silver, 75 lbs of gold, and 33 lbs of palladium can be taken back. Recycling 1 million laptops saves the energy same to the electricity used by 3,657 homes in a year. It takes 530 lbs of fossil fuel, 48 lbs of chemicals, and 1.5 tons of water to manufacture one computer and monitor.
All of the electronics take up about 2% of waste land and a overall of 70% of toxic waste. Every year when people dump their phones America gets more than 60 million dollars. Every year there is more than 660 million pounds of technology that is throw away each year.There is about 20 to 50 million metric tons of electronics are disposed world wide every year.
In the world there is only 12.5% of technology that gets recycled. In 2008, there was 3.16 million tons of e-Waste in the U.S. Of this amount, only 430,000 tons or 13.6% was recycled, according to the EPA. That 3.16 million tons that haven't been recycled is a lot. There was a report from ABI thinks that the market for taking and recycling used electronics will reach $14.7 billion by 2015, nearly tripling in size.
There were 300 million computers and 1 billion cell phones are made each year. This is expected to continue growing 8% per year, indefinitely. An average amount for a American household has at least 24 electronic products. Keeping electronics out of landfills, can reduce energy demands from mining and manufacturing.
Each American uses around 680 pounds of paper each year, and most people throw it away instead of recycling it for further use. If we recycled all newspapers, we could save more than 250 million trees every year. 2000 pounds of recycled paper can actually help to save 17 trees, 350 gallons of oil, and landfill space. That also means less air pollution.
Around 14,000,000 mobile phones make it the nation’s landfills each year, releasing an astounding 80,000 lbs of highly toxic lead.
Recycling one glass bottle is enough to run a TV set for more than 15 minutes. The average amount of waste produced by a human in a day is about 4 pounds and in a year this is estimated to about 1 to 1.5 ton. This amount can be reduced significantly if we properly recycle.