Fun Recycling Facts for Knoxville

These fun recycling facts for Knoxville, Tennessee were used to help write an article on why recycling is important to Knoxville. They were taken from sources on the web, including the Environmental Protection Agency and industry associations for the various materials discussed.

If you find yourself reading this short info-article and thinking, “these facts aren’t fun,” just remember: they’re more fun when you recall them and think about the good you're doing for your community while recycling your industrial or personal waste materials!

So if you aren’t recycling, you’re missing out on a variety of pleasure you didn’t even know existed. Keep this article in mind, and get with it.

Fun Recycling Facts for News Paper

• By recycling one ton (2,000 lbs.) of news paper, we save: 17 trees; 6,953 gallons of water; 463 gallons of oil; 587 pounds of air pollution; 3.06 cubic yards of landfill space and 4,077 Kilowatt hours of energy.
• The Knoxville News Sentinel reaches more than 245,000 readers per day, and the average newspaper is over 1 pound, so let’s say conservatively: that’s 44,712 tons of newspaper used per year – at a minimum – not counting Metro Pulse, or any of the other local papers.
• If we recycled just half of the annual production of Knoxville News Sentinel papers, that would equal saving 380,000 trees; 155 million gallons of fresh water; 10 million gallons of oil; 13 million pounds of air pollution; 68,000 cubic yards of Knoxville’s landfill space and 91 million Kilowatt hours of electricity.

Fun Recycling Facts for Plastic and Glass

• Americans go through 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour.
• Recycled plastic is made into carpet, plastic lumber, clothing, flower pots, insulation for sleeping bags & ski jackets, car bumpers and more.
• Many recyclable plastics that are not recycled do not biodegrade in landfills, which means our landfills fill up faster, which means more land will have to be used to dispose of our garbage.
• Recycling one glass bottle saves enough energy to keep a 100-watt light bulb burning for 4 hours.

Fun Recycling Facts for Aluminum

• We use about 392 cans per person per year – or over 70 million cans in the metro Knoxville area.
• Nationally, over 60% of aluminum cans are recycled. Not so in Knoxville, where less than 10% of the population utilize the recycling pick up.
• Recycling aluminum saves about 95% of the energy it would take to produce aluminum from its original source, bauxite.
• Recycling one aluminum can saves enough electricity to run a TV for three hours – or about the average amount watched per person per day.
• If Knoxville recycled aluminum at just the national average, we could save the equivalent energy of over 200 million hours of TV!
• Aluminum recycling is so efficient that it can take as few as 60 days for a can to be collected, melted down and made into a new can sitting on a grocery store shelf.

Fun Recycling Facts for Steel

• The average American uses 142 steel cans annually.
• The steel packaging recycled in 2000 yielded enough steel to build 185,000 steel framed homes - the equivalent number of homes in Wyoming.
• Recycling just one car saves 2,500 pounds of iron ore, 1,400 pounds of coal and 120 pounds of limestone.
• Through recycling each year, the steel industry saves enough energy to power 18 million homes - one-fifth of the households in the US.

Attention business leaders: if you aren’t recycling, you could be losing money. That’s right; for some businesses, recycling actually pays. You won’t know until you check out the services offered in Knoxville if this could be true for you or not.I encourage you to take advantage of our fair City’s recycling services.

They’re convenient, less than $10 a month for curb-side residential service, and you can contact Waste Connections of Tennessee, the company that provides this service, as follows.

Waste Connections of Tennessee
WasteConnectionsTN.com
2400 Chipman Street
Knoxville, TN 37912
(865) 522-0078

Do you know fun recycling facts that should be included here? Please send us your recycling ideas!