I’m reminded of just how wasteful we are as I’m at a local mall noticing what’s in the full garbage bin.  Lots of plastic bottles, aluminum cans, cardboard – all recyclable, but carelessly tossed and headed to the landfill.  People discard things in the garbage without any consideration or respect for the environment.  How wasteful are we?  Let me count the ways with 10 alarming facts about how we impact waste:

1. Americans throw away 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour.  They take 400 to 1000 years to degrade.
2. About 80% of what Americans throw away is recyclable, yet the recycling rate is just 33%.
3. $1 out of every $10 spent on food goes into packaging and in the US, over 400 billion plastic bags are tossed into the garbage.  Plastic bags can take 1000 years to degrade.
4. The average student lunch accounts for 67 pounds of packaging and waste per year (that’s 4.6 trillion pounds in the US alone)
5. 5 billion drink boxes are thrown away each year in North America
6. 2/3 of our household waste can be composted
7. 8 out of 10 water bottles end up in a landfill
8. The state of Texas could be shrink-wrapped with the amount of plastic film that Americans throw out
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