Did You Know?

Global Warming

  • The 14 warmest years on record have all occurred since 1980. (1998 was the warmest year ever measured globally)
  • Almost half of the greenhouse gases emitted from the average home comes from driving our family vehicles. One very easy way to lessen the impact is not to let your vehicle idle. If you are going to be stopped for more than 10 seconds, turn off your engine, except in traffic. Idling your vehicle for more than 10 seconds uses more fuel than it would take to restart your engine. On cold mornings, excessive idling is not necessary as a vehicle engine only requires 20 seconds of running time in order to circulate the engine oil. So remember, turning off your engine saves gas AND the environment!


  • Americans throw away 10 times their own weight in garbage every year.
  • Americans throw away enough writing and office paper annually to build a wall 12 feet high, stretching from New York City to Los Angeles.


  • Recycling is more popular than democracy. A recent survey showed that more people recycled than voted during the 1996 presidential election.
  • You can return plastic bags, such as newspaper delivery and grocery bags to drop-off sites at your local supermarket for recycling.
  • One ton of paper from recycled pulp saves 17 trees, 3 cubic yards of landfill space, 7,999 gallons of water, 4.200 kilowatt hours (enough to heat your home for half a year), 390 gallons of oil, and prevents 60 pounds of air pollutants.
  • Producing a soda can from aluminum uses 95% less energy than manufacturing a can from ore and produces 95% less air pollution and 97% less water pollution.
  • Recycling just one aluminum can save enough energy to power a television for three hours
  • By recycling one ton of glass, we save the equivalent of nine gallons of fuel


  • It takes 75,000 trees to print a Sunday Edition of the New York Times
  • Every year, Americans drink more than 100 billion cups of coffee. Of those, 14.4 billion are served in disposable paper cups. enough to wrap the earth 55 times if placed end-to-end! Those paper cups contain a plastic lining made from a petrochemical that would produce enough energy to heat 8,300 homes. That's a town the size of Newtown, Connecticut.

While you were out you might have missed knowing that:

  • 140 billion gallons of gasoline a year are consumed by Americans according to the US Energy Department (2006).
  • Americans are expected to use 161 billion gallons of gasoline by the year 2017 without any changes to our existing energy policy.
  • In order to produce 35 billion gallons of alternative fuel, the United States would have to increase its amount of corn based ethanol seven (7) times its production level of 2006.
  • In 2006, the U.S. manufacturers sold 100.6 billion aluminum beverage cans (ABC), but recycled an estimated 51.9 billion.  The remaining 48 billion cans were landfilled, littered or burned in garbage incinerators.  To comprehend such large numbers, consider this: dividing those 48 billion wasted cans by the 31,536,000 seconds in a year shows Americans discard an average of 1,500 ABC's every second.  One pound of aluminum yields 34, 12 ounce ABCs, so the 1,500 trashed cans equate to 44 pounds of aluminum discarded per second.  That works out to 1.3 billion pounds (650,000 tons) of wasted aluminum per year, an amount equal to the annual output of two aluminum smelters.  One year's worth of America's trashed ABCs would provide enough aluminum to make more than 8,000 747s, each comprised of 147,000 pounds of aluminum, according to Boeing.
  • Did you know that artificial turf playing fields provide a good, green alternative to grass as it does not require fertilizer or pesticide-intensive upkeep.