The environment is a resource which is decreasing daily due to our own personal excesses. It has now become commonplace to find boredom in the numerous lectures that the average receives about the environment and conserving it, however, we still do not give as much gravity to the issue as should be given. The people of Maldives face rehabilitation in a foreign land due to global warming reclaiming many of their islands. The world’s coastlines are going to disappear rapidly. It is high time that we sat up and took notice.
In an effort to keep things on the lighter side, here are a few facts about the environment that you may not be privy to:
- A single recycled aluminium can, can save sufficient energy to power a television for three hours.
- By the time you are finished reading this sentence, over fifty thousand 12 ounce aluminium cans will be manufactured.
- Over eighty trillion aluminium cans are used in a year.
- The tallest tree in the world is a coast redwood in California. It is almost 110 meters long. That’s roughly 360 feet!
- The oldest trees in the world can be in the US. They are bristlecone pines and they are more than 4,600 years old.
- Americans make enough paper in a day to circumvent the earth over twenty times.
- 25 trillion Styrofoam cups are thrown everyday by Americans.
- Off all the blue that is available on an globe, only 1% of the entire quantity of water in the world can be used. 1%!
- The man that voiced Bugs Bunny, Mel Blanc, was allergic to carrots. A little irrelevant, but interesting nevertheless..
- If a single run of the Sunday New York Times was recycled, over 75,000 trees could be saved. This holds true for most other Sunday papers as well.
- An average supermarket uses over 60,500,000 paper bags per year.
- Automatic dishwashers use less water than washing those same dishes by hand. The savings add to over two thousand gallons a year.
- The amount of waste wood and paper that is discarded every year is sufficient to heat over fifty million homes for twenty years.
- Each time you open the door of your fridge, thirty percent of the cold air escapes.
- Americans use more than two and a half million plastic bottles an hour. Almost all of these are thrown as waste.
- Plastic waste dumped into water bodies kills more than a million sea animals and creatures every year.
- Modern glass bottles take over four thousand years to decompose.
- One third of the constituents of an average landfill is made of packaging materials.
- The US produces the most amount of waste every year. Each person in the US generates over 1,600 pounds of waste a year. Over two billion razors, close to two billion tons of paper towels and twelve billion disposable diapers are thrown away each year.
- There are more than twenty million Hershey’s Kisses wrapped each day using over 130 square miles of recyclable tinfoil.
- Rainforests are declining at the rate of a hundred acres a minute.
- An average mile along an average highway has over 1,500 pieces of garbage.
- Consumer reports have stated that disposable mops cost more than a hundred and fifteen dollars more per year than traditional mops with replacement heads.
- You burn less calories watching TV than you do sleeping. So get off your couch and go to bed. You’ll be healthier that way.
There are now a host of different environmentally intelligent and health related products that are available in the market. For example, water ionizers are now out and they claim to enhance various properties of water. Visit https://www.facebook.com/bawellwater for more information on water ionizers and what they have to offer. There are also solar power related improvements which drastically decrease electricity bills and the load on the environment and fossil fuels that modern technology imposes. As consumers of the new world, it is our job to be considerate about the environment and to steady a rapidly sinking ship.
