Recycling is Important

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• Recycling and reuse businesses now employ about as many people as the auto industry
  
  
• Without recycling, given current virgin raw material supplies, we could not print the daily newspaper, build a car, or ship a product in a cardboard box
  
  
• Aluminum can recycling has dropped steadily, from a 1992 high of 65 percent of cans to 45 percent by 2004
  
  
• Plastic bottles fare worse: While nearly 40 percent of PET plastic bottles were recycled in 1995, only about half that many—21.6 percent—were recycled in 2004
  
  
• Twenty-four percent of our garbage is still recyclable paper
  
  
• Mandatory recycling is folly, contends the Weekly Standard. “To say we will someday run out of trees is the same as saying we will someday run out of corn,” the magazine opined, adding that the motivation behind recycling is “we get a warm and fuzzy feeling.”
  
  
• Recycling one aluminum can conserves 300 watt-hours, enough to run a 100-watt bulb for three hours. It takes five percent of the energy to make a new aluminum can out of an old can compared to making a new can out of raw materials.

Taken from How to Recycle Practically Anything, in E / The Environmental Magazine.