JOINT BASE SAN ANTONIO-LACKLAND, Texas –
As the nation celebrates the 45th annual Earth Day this Wednesday, the Air Force is re-emphasizing its standing commitment to environmental stewardship and encouraging its military and civilian workforce to promote recycling both at home and on the job, and asking them to leverage available opportunities to "Conserve Today - Secure Tomorrow."
Installations across the enterprise are taking action to meet the Department of Defense's strategic sustainability performance plan goal of diverting 55 percent of non-hazardous solid waste and 100 percent of electronics waste, this fiscal year and beyond.
Meeting these goals requires diligence and participation from everyone, from the recycling center manager looking for new ways to expand services, to office workers taking advantage of all available opportunities to recycle and not throwing out items like paper, plastic, aluminum cans and cardboard.
This year, the Air Force is once again asking Airmen and their families to logon to the "Blue Acts of Green" Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/blueactsofgreen to share recycling and other environmentally-friendly practices they commit to perform everyday as well as learn what other families are doing across the country to protect one of Earth's most precious natural resources.
For more information on the Air Force's Earth Day efforts, visit
http://www.afcec.af.mil/news/earthday.
Earth Day 2015 Recycling Facts
· Recycling just 48 cans is the energy equivalent of conserving one gallon of gas.
· Since 1990, the paper recovered through U.S. recycling efforts would fill 200 football stadiums to a height of 100 feet.
· The most recycled consumer product in America is the automobile, with 26 cars being recycled every minute.
· Every ton of recycled paper saves 17 trees and 462 gallons of oil.
· One pound of newspaper can be recycled into 6 cereal boxes or egg cartons.
· In the U.S., we toss more than 100 million cell phones in the trash every year.
· EPA reports that more than 112,000 computers are discarded every single day, in the U.S. alone. That's 41.1 million desktops and laptop computers per year.
· Only 30 percent of electronic waste is disposed of and recycled properly.
· Recycling just one aluminum beverage can saves enough energy to run a 100-watt bulb for 20 hours, a computer for 3 hours or a TV for 2 hours.
· Recycling 125 aluminum cans saves enough energy to power one home for a day
· Recycling one ton of cardboard:
· Saves 390 kWh of energy
· Saves 1.1 barrels (46 gallons) of oil
· Saves 6.6 million BTUs of energy.
· If everyone in the U.S. was able to reduce their 10.8 pieces of junk mail received each week, we could save nearly 100 million trees each year.
· If every household in the U.S. replaced one roll of non-recycled paper towels with a roll of 100 percent recycled paper towels, we would save 864,000 trees and 3.4 million cubic feet of landfill space.
· If 10,000 people switched from zero to 100 percent post-consumer recycled office paper for a year, the collective annual impact is equivalent to taking 230 cars off the road for a year.
· A typical disposable lunch, with items like single-serve yogurt, Ziploc bags and juice boxes creates 4 to 8 oz. of garbage every day. In a year, this could generate up to 67 pounds of waste.
· Between Thanksgiving and New Year's, Americans throw away one million extra tons of garbage every week.
· The average U.S. citizen uses 200 pounds of plastic per year and only percent is recycled. Glass makes up 6 percent of all the items in a landfill and it takes over 1 million years to decompose.
· An average of 220 tons of computers and other e-waste is dumped annually.