Paper Recycling Facts
- To produce each week’s Sunday newspapers, 500,000 trees must be cut down.
- Recycling a single run of the Sunday New York Times would save 75,000 trees.
- If all our newspaper was recycled, we could save about 250,000,000 trees each year!
- If every American recycled just one-tenth of their newspapers, we would save about 25,000,000 trees a year.
- If you had a 15-year-old tree and made it into paper grocery bags, you’d get about 700 of them. A busy supermarket could use all of them in under an hour! This means in one year, one supermarket can go through over 6 million paper bags! Imagine how many supermarkets there are just in the United States!!!
- The average American uses seven trees a year in paper, wood, and other products made from trees. This amounts to about 2,000,000,000 trees per year!
- The amount of wood and paper we throw away each year is enough to heat 50,000,000 homes for 20 years.
- Approximately 1 billion trees worth of paper are thrown away every year in the U.S.
- Americans use 85,000,000 tons of paper a year; about 680 pounds per person.
- The average household throws away 13,000 separate pieces of paper each year. Most is packaging and junk mail.
- In 1993, U.S. paper recovery saved more than 90,000,000 cubic yards of landfill space.
- Each ton (2000 pounds) of recycled paper can save 17 trees, 380 gallons of oil, three cubic yards of landfill space, 4000 kilowatts of energy, and 7000 gallons of water. This represents a 64% energy savings, a 58% water savings, and 60 pounds less of air pollution!
- The 17 trees saved (above) can absorb a total of 250 pounds of carbon dioxide from the air each year. Burning that same ton of paper would create 1500 pounds of carbon dioxide.
- The construction costs of a paper mill designed to use waste paper is 50 to 80% less than the cost of a mill using new pulp.
Why ‘100% Orange Juice’ Is Still Artificial
File this one under “things we always sort of knew, but wish we didn’t.” All that “100% orange juice, not from concentrate” stuff you’ve been drinking? Technically, it’s “not from concentrate,” but it’s not really 100% orange juice either, a report at Civil Eats details.
The process is rather depressing. Gizmodo explains part of the process:
Once the juice is squeezed and stored in gigantic vats, they start removing oxygen. Why? Because removing oxygen from the juice allows the liquid to keep for up to a year without spoiling. But! Removing that oxygen also removes the natural flavors of oranges. Yeah, it’s all backwards. So in order to have OJ actually taste like oranges, drink companies hire flavor and fragrance companies, the same ones that make perfumes for Dior, to create these “flavor packs” to make juice taste like, well, juice again.
Any taste difference in say Minute Maid versus Tropicana is therefore due to the specific flavor pack the company uses. Since these flavor packs are made from orange byproducts, they don’t have to be considered an ingredient, and therefore are not required to appear on food labels. This is despite the fact they are chemically altered.
Perhaps its time to take the juicer out of that dusty corner in the garage. || Read more »
Solar-Powered Touring Bus Comes Complete With Detachable Bicycles
This clever Bike Guide Concept is a bus powered by solar panels that features integrated bicycles that detach when the bus stops at landmarks around town. Tourists are given the freedom to zip away from the central vehicle on their personal wheels and tour the spot. After a quick ride, everyone returns to the central meeting place, hooks their bikes back up and they move on to the next point of interest.
The concept was designed by Kukil Han, Daehyun Kim, Bojoong Kim, and Jihwan Yun as a new way to experience the city. We’ve all seen those double decker monstrosities touring our favorite cities on the planet with a gaggle of tourists sitting atop them with their cameras out, snapping photos. This entirely solar and human-powered mode of city-touring would offer a nice respite from that burry photographed mess. || Read more »
